The British Zone: The Story of BAOR, the RAF and Everyday Military Life in Germany from the Cold War to the Present Day - Paperback

From the rubble of the Second World War to massive drawdown, hundreds of thousands of British men, women and children called Germany home - and this is their story.

For nearly forty years, the British Army of the Rhine and the Royal Air Force stood as NATO's bulwark against the Warsaw Pact, a vast undertaking that at its peak placed almost 60,000 troops across four armoured and mechanised divisions on the front line of the Cold War. Generations of regulars, national servicemen and territorials served alongside one another, forging bonds with a country that had so recently been the enemy.

But this is not a book about strategy or order of battle. Nathan Morley tells a different and far richer story - of the ordinary and extraordinary lives lived behind the garrison gates. Of the institutions that bound a community together: BFBS, the NAAFI, JHQ, CESSAC, Sixth Sense and the RASC. Of the slow, remarkable transformation from occupiers to allies, and of the friendships, marriages and memories that grew from it. Of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia becoming as familiar to British families as the towns they had left behind.

Drawing on extensive research and the first-hand testimony of ex-servicemen, dependants and those who grew up in the garrisons and on the RAF stations, Morley uncovers the controversies, the scandals, the love affairs and the losses that defined life on foreign soil. Murders and medals. Austerity and achievement. Pomp, politics and the particular loneliness of the long posting abroad.

All human life is here - and it happened in Germany.