Roy Burgin voluntarily enlisted into the Grenadier Guards Regiment in the British Army in January 1940. His introduction to war-time service started on British soil before he was moved to North Africa late in 1943 where the Italian troops were in retreat. Roy was launched into the real horrors of World War II when he was sent to Italy to take part in the Anzio Landing where he was shot and taken prisoner.

From his Company of 90 men Roy estimates that he and five others were the sole survivors of a suicidal assault they were ordered to make on entrenched German machine gun positions. He spent eighteen months in a German Prisoner of War work camp where he was forced to work in a lead mine. Roy's memoir is written with great sincerity, compassion and humour in what were some of the darkest hours of World War II.