Paul Oldfield

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Biography: In a military career spanning 36 years, Paul served in most of the usual hotspots, including three years in Ulster, plus the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. Other appointments including running the MOD’s Africa team for three years and commanding a mountain and arctic warfare unit. He has also served with the Gurkhas. Paul was educated in Sheffield and at Victoria College in Jersey, where he became interested in the German fortifications. Being of the post-war generation he had plenty of relatives with military experience, which, combined with those excellent war films of the 1940-60s, provided the initial spark of interest in all things military. He ran his first tour in 1983 on the Somme and has dabbled in WW1 and WW2 tours ever since. Paul is a member of the Western Front Association, the Gallipoli Association and the Victoria Cross Society. He joined the Guild in April 2008 and was presented with Badge 51 on 20 November 2010. Paul lives in Wiltshire and is married with three grown–up children. In 1988 he co-authored ‘Sheffield City Battalion’ in the Pals series. ‘Cockleshell Raid’ and ‘Bruneval’ in Pen & Sword’s Battleground Europe series were published in 2013. The first in a series of nine books on Western Front VCs,‘Victoria Crosses on the Western Front, August 1914 – April 1915, Mons to Hill 60’ was published in July 2014. The remaining eight books in the series will be published biannually until mid-2018. Retirement from the Army in March 2011 gave him more time to devote to battlefield studies and he is always looking for new challenges and opportunities. With his military experience he is able to bring a soldier's insight to battlefields past.