The Magic Army

Leslie Thomas

Eph 2011 · Random House

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The war, they said, would be over by Christmas. That was in 1939, and it is now January 1944. An exhausted Britain faces another year of conflict.

Meanwhile, small coastal villages in Devon are facing an invasion from an army just as foreign as that of the Germans. The Americans are smart, well-fed and well-equipped, and they have swept the bewildered citizens of South Devon from their homes in deadly earnest rehearsal for D-Day.

As the beaches echo to the sound of bullets and the local church to the strains of Glenn Miller, Americans and English are thrown together with sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful and puzzling results.

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Leslie Thomas was born in Newport, Wales on March 22, 1931. Both of his parents died around 1943 and he was sent to an orphanage. He flunked out of bricklaying school but did better in a journalism course. At the age of 17, he found a newspaper job in north London, first folding newspapers and then reporting. In 1949, he was drafted and sent to Singapore as a member of the Royal Army Pay Corps. After serving a year, he found work with a news agency, then with The Evening News as a feature writer. He covered the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. His first book, This Time Next Week: The Autobiography of a Happy Orphan, was published in 1964. His first novel, The Virgin Soldiers, was published in 1966 and was adapted into a movie in 1969. He wrote more than 30 books during his lifetime including Onward Virgin Soldiers and Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, which was also adapted into a movie in 1977. In 2004, he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature. He died on May 6, 2014 at the age of 83.