In contrast to Max Arthur's similar book on the Great War, Forgotten Voices of the Second World War chafes somewhat against the limitations of the oral history format. Whereas the Great War experience was relatively linear – trench warfare with some occasional forays into air combat or Jutland or Gallipoli – and therefore allowed for greater intensity in the recollected experiences, Arthur's Second World War book must necessarily be more sprawling. There's more to cover – on land, sea and air, and in Europe, the Atlantic, the Pacific and Russia.

Consequently, this Forgotten Voices book strains under the effort of trying to contain all of the second war's multitudes. To do so, it relies on a conventional understanding of the war, which threatens to make the book stale, and discusses with excessive brevity many important events of the war, giving crib histories and, in some cases, only one eyewitness to an event. In Arthur's Great War book, you could soak into the mud of the relentless trench warfare and get to grips with its horror; here, much of the intensity of events is diluted.

Where the book does make its mark is later on, in the 1944-45 accounts. It may just be me, but it feels that, Arnhem aside, the second half of the war tends to feature much less in the British historical memory (and Arthur's book is definitely focused on the British and Commonwealth experience), so Forgotten Voices' emphasis on this period felt much fresher. The advance into Germany and the doodlebugs over London both get interesting coverage, as do (aptly enough, for a book titled Forgotten Voices) the efforts of the 'Forgotten Army' who fought the bloody Burma campaign in places like Kohima. (That said, the book in general seems to treat the war against Japan almost as an addendum to the Germany war.)

The book becomes much more engrossing in its final acts, with the oral history angle coming more into its own when the events covered are those less well-known. I was particularly struck at how British servicemen liberated in 1945 from German PoW camps – where they had been since 1940 – didn't recognise the approaching British uniforms and didn't know if they were friend or foe (pg. 415), and that some in a Japanese camp thought Eisenhower was "a bloody German" (pg. 450). Devoting time, at the end of the book, to the plight of the PoWs under Japanese barbarism was an honourable decision on the author's part, and the dissonant note struck in the final pages works very well. The accounts of those people who struggled to adjust to the outbreak of peace, and in some cases began to miss the purpose and togetherness war had brought, emphasise just how much harder it has been, in our culture, to process the Second World War compared to the First – something the book also wrestles with throughout and, in the end, surmounts. ( )