Unconditional Surrender was finally written, and published in 1961. Twenty years, six novels, two travel books, and a biography separate this novel from the raw experiences it was based on. The impacted biographical substrata of a third of Waugh's life and more than a third of his total literary output provide the foundations for his last novel. Let us take the layers chronologically, one by one.

1941–43

After the fall of Crete, Waugh, like Guy, returned on a troopship looping its way around half the world from Egypt to England via Cape Town and Iceland. Always a happy sailor, he was cheered to find a complete set of his novels in the ship's library, most of which he re-read with unmixed pleasure. Meeting those forgotten, familiar faces fuelled Put Out More Flags, which Waugh began and finished by the time he docked in Liverpool, 20,000 miles and seven weeks later. In September 1941 he returned to barracks for routine training, and continued to write up his military experiences – publicly and patriotically, in the up-beat ‘Commando Raid on Bardia’, and a belligerent polemic in Horizon arguing against Cyril Connolly's proposal for special, soft conditions for writers. Waugh's anonymous riposte was ostentatiously signed ‘Combatant’. Privately, in his personal Diaries and against military regulations, he copied his detailed notes on training for the Commandos, the failed Dakar and Bardia raids, and the flight from Crete. His Memorandum on LAYFORCE: July 1940–July 1941 later became a first-hand resource for Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen.

In the retrospect which opens Unconditional Surrender Waugh dismissed the period after his and Guy's return (1941–3) as ‘two dead years’. He cut the phrase from Sword of Honour, but it accurately conveys a long period of pointless re-training, frustrated attempts to get back into active service, cheerful drunkenness, and desolation. ‘I wish I could recapture some of that adventurous spirit with which I joined at Chatham,’ he had written to Laura, soon after his return to England, plaintively adding: ‘There is no one here with any sense of humour but they never stop laughing’ (L 157).