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THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE:
The Photographers Who Captured History from D-Day to Berlin
by Mark Barnes
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 Photo-journalism is a powerful medium, and as Harold Evans observed in his excellent book, Pictures on a Page, it is the single images that remain in the memory, and far more so than the film or television footage that flickers across our screens. This collection of photographs The Liberation of Europe: The Photographers Who Captured History from D-Day to Berlin, proves the point: good photographs that tell a story can be assimilated quickly and are far less likely to be forgotten.
The book covers the period from the Battle of Normandy through to the final defeat of Germany and the capture of Berlin in the spring of 1945. The author Mark Barnes, a librarian at The Times has brought together some 400 photographs that have mostly never before been published. This, in itself, is remarkable, since these are superb images representing just a small fraction of the photographs taken during the war by the photographers of The Times and Kemsley Newspapers, owners of The Sunday Times. They were a small group of remarkable men, news photographers who had covered many varied stories in peacetime and were now at war and often in the front line.
The Guards Armoured Division is well-featured in this book, with a good number of photographs taken in the closing months of the war during the advance into Germany. Each photograph carries a detailed caption, and the author has done a remarkable job gathering together these images. An excellent book in which the pictures tell the story.
The Editor
The Liberation of Europe: The Photographers Who Captured History from D-Day to Berlin, by Mark Barnes. Published by Casemate.
Leading elements of the Guards Armoured Division arriving in Brussels in early September 1944. Here, a Cromwell tank of A Squadron, 2nd Armoured Recce Battalion Welsh Guards is greeted by the locals on the outskirts of the city. Herbert W Warhurst. The Times
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Bill Tetlow, one of the Kemsley photographers, taking a photograph during the Nuremberg trials in late 1945. Kemsley |
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