Lyn Macdonald,[1] (31 May 1929 – 1 March 2021)[2] was a British military historian, one of relatively few women in the field.
[3] Macdonald was best known for a series of books on the First World War that draw on first hand accounts of surviving veterans.
Macdonald lived near Cambridge, England, and worked as a BBC radio producer until 1973, when she began working on a documentary with the Old Comrades Association of the 13th (Service) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, who were visiting the battlefields of the Western Front.
[4][5] The first of her influential books took its title, They Called It Passchendaele, from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon.
[6] In 1988, she led a party of veterans to the Western Front, accompanied by Sebastian Faulks, who was inspired by the experience to write his novel Birdsong.