What happened to British soldiers between Dunkirk and D-Day?

by Limp_Beat7834

I hope this is the right place to post this, I'm fairly new to reddit so not sure. I am writing about the time period and want to get my details as accurate as possible. I was wondering if there were any resources you could recommend to learn about WW2? I'm specifically interested in what life would have been like for a British soldier during this time. I know that many people were conscripted as soon as 1939 but I can't find any first hand accounts or details on what that process would have been like for someone living at the time.

In addition, following the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 it looks like Britain was largely immobile in any military action in Europe until D-day (although I may have that wrong.) What would have happened to those soldiers who may have been conscripted and evacuated at Dunkirk? Did they return home and return to civilian life until preparations for D-Day? I know there were military campaigns in North Africa, Greece, and further afield, but would those have been different divisions?

Basically, I want to understand the war from individual soldiers' perspectives rather than the British army as a whole. Sorry if these questions are dumb, any resources or info would be greatly appreciated!!

The British Army went through several internal revolutions over the course of WW2, expanding from a small, modern, professional army in 1938 to a mass army in 1940. Low-level leadership was considerably overhauled as a result of the campaigns in North Africa, laying the foundation of how officers and NCOs are selected and developed today. After 1942, the distribution of soldiers into specific jobs was revised to get the most out of existing civilian skills. All this is in the context of several waves of conscription, with the age threshold increasing every time. If you want to read an overview of what it was like to be a soldier at the time, Alan Allport's Browned Off and Bloody-Minded (2015) is the best recent survey. If you want to understand what soldiers thought about it at the time, Jonathan Fennell's Fighting the People's War (2020) is based on period surveys and morale reports (it also gives an overview of individual campaigns, which you might find helpful).

So what is the British (and Commonwealth) army doing between Dunkirk and D-Day?

a 3-year campaign in North Africa, first against the Italians, later the Germans as well. Fought by a mostly regular and imperial force to start with, this expands vastly from 1941. The fighting rages from Egypt to Algeria and back several times before a joint US/British/Free French landing in the West (Operation TORCH) cuts off the Axis retreat and ends the campaign.
Britain and the Commonwealth are committed elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East in this period, fighting the Italians in East Africa and Vichy in Syria and Madagascar, as well as resisting an Axis-backed coup in Iraq.
While this is going on, Britain is also trying to prevent the Axis conquest of Greece. This is a disaster, ending in the bloody Battle of Crete.
An ongoing campaign in Malaya and Burma against the Japanese, from December '41. Initially a disaster, as British and Commonwealth troops surrender en masse at Singapore. The fightback would pick up momentum in '43.
As soon as the North African campaign was a sure thing, the Allies launched an invasion of Sicily (Operation HUSKY) and then Italy, which knocked Italy out the war (the subsequent Italian campaign was against the occupying Germans, who kept Mussolini around as a puppet leader of the "Italian Social Republic" despite the rest of Italy having nominally joined the Allies at the end of '43).

There are, of course, many books on what particular units or individuals did in those campaigns. There are many general histories of Britain at war, too - what to recommend depends a lot on what level of detail you are interested in.