John Jarmain

British poet John Jermain was educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge University, and he taught mathematics before the war. While serving in the British Army in World War II, he wrote some of his most famous poems, including “El Alamein” and “Sand.” He fought in Northern Africa and in Sicily before he was killed in Normandy, France, in June 1944.

Jermain was the author of a novel Priddy Barrows (1944), and his poems were published posthumously. He is the subject of James Crowden’s study Flowers In The Minefields: El Alamein To St Honorine (2012).