Battles of a Gunner Officer: Tunisia, Sicily, Normandy, and the Long Road to Germany

By John Philip Jones and Peter Pettit

What was it like to serve as an artillery officer during the Second World War? How did he view the battlefield and experience combat? And how did his work with the guns combine with that of the other arms - the infantry, the tanks? Peter Pettit's diary, covering his entire wartime career in the Royal Artillery, edited and with an extensive introduction by John Philip Jones, offers a rare insight into the day-to-day existence of a gunner at war, and it is a valuable record of the role played by the Royal Artillery during the conflict. 

Since Peter Pettit served as a field officer in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy and during the Allied advance across France and Belgium into Germany, his account shows the wide range of challenges that confronted the artillery in different conditions at each stage of the war. Although the landscapes and battlefields changed, the practical problems and acute dangers he faced remained much the same, and he recorded them in the same open and forthright way. 

His authentic record, combined with John Philip Jones's meticulous description of the planning and progress of each campaign, provide a rounded view the nature of the artillery war and the men who fought it.

General Sir Richard Barrons, Commander, Joint Forces Command: 

'Professor John Philip Jones breaks new ground as he brings into the light for the first time the private record of one rather special participant. Peter Pettit's personal and contemporaneous notes detail his journey from the first encounters with a determined enemy in Tunisia, through the difficult invasion of Sicily, and finally on to the outstanding events of Normandy in 1944 . . .

. . . This story is made much more interesting and accessible for the general reader by the accompanying succinct historical overview of the events. . .

. . . For anyone looking for a rare insight into the hard business of field soldiering in the crucible of war, these diaries paint a very colourful, accurate and illuminating picture.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473835023

John Philip Jones

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JOHN PHILIP JONES He was born in Great Britain and has dual citizenship: American and British. He graduated from Cambridge University with the Economics Tripos (BA with honours and MA). After graduating, he began a long career in international advertising at J. Walter Thompson, at the time the world’s largest advertising organization. He worked in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia and had responsibility for the advertising for many major international brands. In 1981, he joined the faculty of Syracuse University, New York. He taught graduate and undergraduate students and also spent much time researching the effects of advertising. This is a difficult field of study because of the problem of isolating the contribution of advertising from the effects of a large number of other influences on sales. With the cooperation of a leading market research organization, AC Nielsen, he developed a robust method of measuring the immediate effect of advertising. (This effect varies greatly, and only about one-third of advertising campaigns actually generate sales.) This work was of great interest to marketing companies all over the world and also to academics involved in marketing and advertising education. He became a full professor with academic tenure and was awarded the University Chancellor’s Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement. He became emeritus in 2007. While actively engaged at Syracuse, he was also a visiting professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. For many years, he ran seminars in these universities every summer. He also addressed many international conferences and carried out consulting assignments for more than one hundred commercial clients and professional organizations. These were in forty different countries. He has published seventeen books on advertising, marketing, market research, and economics (available on amazon.com). His books have been translated into ten foreign languages. He has also published more than seventy articles in journals all over the world. In the United States, some of his work has appeared in the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review. He has always had an interest in military history. He has been a member of the Honourable Artillery Company, London, for sixty-five years. During his early years, he was an active officer in the Territorial Army. He is a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, London, and five years ago, he started a military history group for members, which is thriving.