Edward Ardizzone 1900 - 1979 Edward Ardizzone was born in 1900, at Haiphong, Tonking, Indo-China, of Italian and Scottish parents.  He came to England when he was five. While working as a clerk with the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, he attended evening classes at Westminster School of Art. His first one-man exhibition was at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1928.

Edward Ardizzone sitting for Henry Carr

In 1940, Ardizzone was serving as a 2nd Lieutenant in an anti-aircraft battery in London when was appointed as a full-time official War Artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee, under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Clark. His first commission was to follow the British Expeditionary Force to France on 30 March 1940 and record their activities. He was later caught up in the mass retreat of the B.E.F. through Belgium, and had to leave all his equipment and later drawings in France. On his return to Britain, he was immediately re-commissioned, and was kept in full employment by the WAAC until the end of the war.

He was working as official war artist in North Africa when he heard that the invasion of Europe was imminent "I asked to be present at the landing and was told by Public Relations that I could only be put on shore 23 days after the event. Then I met some friends from the 50th division and they at once said, 'Come along with us!' - so I landed on a Sicilian beach with the Division on D-Day." That was in July 1943. Ardizzone stayed with the British Army in Sicily while it completed the arduous conquest of the island, then crossed to Italy in January 1944. Apart from a brief return to Egypt and Algiers and a week in Normandy just after the landings, he remained in Italy until April 1945, when he flew to Germany for the last days of fighting around Hamburg and Bremen.

This, his first diary, allows a glimpse into the day-to-day events of his life in the period covering his arrival in Sicily up until just before the Battle of Anzio.

In 1978, Ardizzone was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum's Sound Archive.