Wolverhampton Literature Festival: Al Murray's unique discussion of a war time catastrophe from the perspective of those who lives through it

What a lot of people may not know about Al Murray is his deep passion for World War Two history, having co-hosted a popular Second World War history podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk with fellow bestselling military author James Holland.

Al is also the author of many successful books including Watching War Films with My Dad and Command and he is making his first appearance at the Wolverhampton Literature Festival to talk about his new book "Arnhem: Black Tuesday", which is his first history book about a single campaign, which happened in September 1944.

Tuesday, September 19, 1944 was the day which became known as Black Tuesday where from just after 12am while plans were being made to seize the initiative and optimism reigned, to the following midnight, when Arnhem was burning and the Allied fortunes looked very different, this twenty-four hours changed the course of the war.

Al returns to the city whose university gave him an honorary doctorate in social sciences as part of a double-header which will see him appear at the festival on Friday at 1pm, then at the Halls Wolverhampton at 7.30pm as the Pub Landlord.

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He said that while a number of people might be surprised to learn of his deep interest in war history, he said the podcast had really opened people's eyes to his interest about it.

He said: "I think there's a growing number of people who realise from the podcast that I have the interest I do in this and we do a brisk trade in downloads, so I think a lot of people are cottoning on to this.

"What I love is how surprised some people are when they find out, like when I did the One Show to promote the book in September and Alex Jones said it was a very weird niche that I had, which it isn't as it's something I really have a lot of interest in.

"One of the things about the Pub Landlord, strangely, is that it's in character and not like me, so it's given me the freedom to do things like this and it feels fresh to people as a result."

Al said he had been to university at Oxford and got a degree in history, but said it felt that it was so long that it didn't really apply to his current interest, which had began to increase as he did a show called Road to Berlin for the Discovery Channel.

He said: "We went from Normandy to Berlin, with me driving a jeep, and we went to all the places where stuff happened, including Arnhem, where I parachuted into it, and all of that sort of got me going again with finding out more.

"A lot of the history is very heavy and I do sometimes think that I should just put it down and read a novel or play some music, but I gave in entirely when I started doing the podcast and reading about it and it's all been about trying to learn more about it."

Al's book and event at the Literature Festival looks at the story of the most catastrophic 24-hours the British military faced in World War II, which lead to disastrous consequences for the Allied Forces and is told for the first time from the perspective of the men on the ground, as events unfolded.

The Battle of Arnhem is one of the best-known stories in British military history: a daring but doomed attempt to secure a vital bridgehead across the Rhine in order to end the war before Christmas 1944 and has always been written about as being destined to fail, but the men who fought there, men of military legend, didn't know that that was to be their fate.

By focusing on the events of one day as they happened through the eyes of the participants and without bringing any knowledge of what would happen tomorrow to bear, Al Murray offers a very different perspective on a familiar narrative.

He said that he found that some things went right and many more went wrong, but recounting them in this way allows the reader to understand for the first time why certain decisions were taken in the moment and how opportunities were squandered.

He said: "I wanted the book to to end with what would happen tomorrow, because they didn't know on the day what was going to happen, which no one is going to put into a story and that's what I've done differently.

"I personally have no experience of combat and no experience of the sleep deprivation they would have gone through, so they're staggering around making life and death decisions every second after having not slept for three days, so what I tried to do was talk about the problem at the time, the geography and the scale of the task.

"While a lot of it is bleak, there was also some humour in it and they used humour as a defence mechanism, such as sending the carrier pigeons off and finding they were flying the wrong way, or someone riding a jeep which stops and they somersault over the bonnet, leaving both the British and the Germans in hysterics."

Al said he hoped the book could help people to learn more about grandad's experiences, as he said that while there were 10,000 men, that would mean at least 40,000 grandchildren who didn't know about the battle and might learn something from it or educate him about it.

He said: "That means there's a whole load of people who are connected to the battle in one way or another and they're starting to come out of the woodwork, so someone might come to me with a diary that contradicts parts of the book, which is great.

"I want to know and I want to learn and I want people to be able to draw their own conclusions and and learn about the history of it, based on new evidence."

Al Murray: Arnhem Black Tuesday takes place at Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Friday at 1pm. Tickets have sold out, but people can still put themselves on the waiting list on the Wolverhampton Literature Festival website.