James Aldridge
| James Aldridge | |
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James Aldridge (1987, Berlin)
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| Born | Harold Edward James Aldridge 10 July 1918 White Hills, Victoria |
| Died | 23 February 2015 (aged 96) London, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Writer and journalist |
| Language | English |
| Genre | fiction and non-fiction |
| Subject | war and adventure novels |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards |
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Harold Edward James Aldridge (10 July 1918 – 23 February 2015) was an Australian-British writer and journalist. His World War II despatches were published worldwide and he was the author of over 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction works, including war and adventure novels and books for children.
Aldridge was born in White Hills, a suburb of Bendigo, Victoria. By the mid-1920s the Aldridge family had moved to Swan Hill, and many of his Australian stories are based on his life growing up there. Aldridge moved to London in 1938 and lived there until his death in 2015.
During the Second World War, Aldridge served in the Middle-East as a war correspondent, reporting on the Axis invasions of Greece and Crete. Based on his experiences, he wrote his first novel Signed with Their Honour and the book was published in both Britain and the United States in 1942, becoming an immediate best-seller. The novel centred on a fictional young British Royal Air Force pilot named John Quayle who flies obsolete Gladiator biplanes for the true-life 80 Squadron against the larger and more powerful Axis air-forces over Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940-41. The novel received considerable praise from reviewers including the Miami News which said "...so graphic are the descriptive passages that the reader tastes the dust and feels the insect stings in the Egyptian heat". American critic Herbert Faulkner West stated that the book "showed real promise" and ranked it the best of his wartime novels. The book proved to be one of Aldridge's most successful, remaining in print until 1988. An attempt in 1943 to make a film based on the novel was abandoned when two Gloster Gladiator biplanes were destroyed in a mid-air collision during filming at an RAF base at Shropshire in the UK.
His second novel The Sea Eagle (1944), which centred on Australian soldiers during and after the fall of Crete in 1941, was also successful but received less favourable reviews than his first book. American critic N. L. Rothman, however, writing in the Saturday Review, praised the novel for its "timeless-ness" and the high quality of its prose. Aldridge's early novels were heavily influenced by the literary mannerisms of US author Ernest Hemingway. For The Sea Eagle, Aldridge won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
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