Where the Hell Are the Guns? rounds out George Blackburn’s trilogy of Second World War memoirs, which began with the bestselling The Guns of Normandy in 1995 and moved on through The Guns of Victory in 1996. Chronologically, the last goes first: in this third book, Blackburn, a journalist and former federal bureaucrat as well as an erstwhile soldier, recounts the early days of his war, from his enlistment of what would become the 4th Field Regiment, an artillery outfit, through to the eve of the battles of which the two previous books told.

The best thing there is to say about Where the Hell Are the Guns? is that it’s solidly journalistic: full of statistics and dates, newspaper clippings, official quotations, and background materials. There’s no questioning Blackburn’s research: it’s clear that he’s left few pages unbrowsed when it came to poring over the 4th’s regimental war diaries as well as contemporary newspapers and histories of the wider world conflict.

The trouble – one of the troubles – is that it’s not always clear why we’re getting the statistics and the clippings we’re getting – as witness the chapter that flows without pause from a warming story of a regimental Christmas into a chart detailing British civilian casualties during the first seven months of the Blitz.

The trouble is – and here we’re at the central trouble – there’s only so much room in a memoir for the wide-viewing, planetarium-grade scopes that take in the full breadth of history. The view we want from a memoir is the view from the eyes, the blinking, first-person reality of the moment, the immediacy – to pluck war-born examples from either end of the century – of Robert Graves’ First World War testament, Goodbye to All That, or In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff’s Vietnam memoir. The view doesn’t have to be bloody from combat – among the most harrowing of Wolff’s pages are some in which he describes a helicopter landing – but it needs to be personal.

Maybe it’s best to consider Where the Hell Are the Guns? as an admirable regimental memento for surviving soldiers of the 4th: plenty, to be sure, are the names Blackburn recites, and there’s no shortage of jocular, remember-when? anecdotes. Of course, that’s no help to those of us who weren’t there on the troopship out of Halifax or in camp near Aldershot. Blackburn may have moved among these men and situations, but to those of us who weren’t there, they’re so many sketches.

In Where the Hell Are the Guns?, Blackburn is, at best, a tantalizing absence. For some reason – a memory of some unbreakable newsroom commandment? – he steadfastly denies himself the first-person, preferring on an irregular, interruptive basis the always awkward second-person. “Just as you’re sitting down to lunch,” Blackburn writes at one point, “dispatch rider Cy Reader delivers the long-awaited cable: EIGHT POUND DAUGHTER BORN CHRISTMAS DAY FEEL WONDERFUL HOW ABOUT YOU DARLING ALL MY LOVE.” How about you is right – but that’s where the chapter ends, with another narrative desertion. Elsewhere, recalling an army chaplain, Blackburn wonders: “Can words capture a smile, a hearty laugh, the warmth of a handshake?” Typically, the question is all the capture he attempts. As for an answer, it’s yes, words can – it’s just that they’re not included in Where the Hell Are the Guns?