Includes bibliographical references.

What was it like to be a field gunner in the Great War? Thunder in the Skies details the daily life of Canadian artillerymen fighting in WWI, in a way no other book has before. Posted just behind the front lines, field gunners spent grueling months supporting the infantry in the trenches. Theirs was a very different war, as dangerous or more at times as the one on the front lines. Drawing on the unpublished letters and diary of field gunner Lt. Bert Sargent and his fellow soldiers, Thunder in the Skies takes the reader from enlistment in late 1914, through training camp, to the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, the Hundred Days Offensive, and home again with peace. An ordinary Canadian writing home to ordinary people, Sargent gives a wrenching, insightful account of his tight-knit band of soldiers swept up in some of the most important battles of the war that shaped the twentieth century.