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Film Review: Lebanon

Lebanon is a powerful vision of men at war, made real and intense by the fact that we never once move outside the tank, and only see the outside world from the interior.…

The Path of Peace: walking the Western Front Way

REVIEW by TOBY CLARK During the First World War, a young soldier called Douglas Gillespie used a letter home from the trenches to expound on an idea for remembering the dead after the fighting was over. Gillespie proposed a path from the English Channel to Switzerland, following the route of…

Austria-Hungary’s Viribus Unitis-class battleships

Although the Austrian navy had won a remarkable victory against the Italians at the Battle of Lissa in the Adriatic on 20 July 1866, economic problems following the creation of the Dual Monarchy the following year meant that the new Austro-Hungarian navy had to struggle for funding against the competing…

Dictionary of Fortifications

REVIEW by DAVID FLINTHAM Until relatively recently, there were more terms relating to fortifications than to probably any other area of military history. Confusion is easy, especially since many of the words and phrases come directly from languages other than English. Jean-Denis Lepage has set himself the challenge of identifying…

Demetrius: sacker of cities

REVIEW by MARC DeSANTIS The death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC left the empire he had conquered without blood heirs ready to take up the heavy burden of governance. Thus, in the days following his passing, that task was left to a small group of Macedonian…

War Classics – The Guns of August

Tuchman aims to explore how a series of political and military decisions, often based on personal factors, faulty intelligence, or naïve assumptions, gradually escalated tensions to the outbreak of war.’…

Mercy: humanity in war

REVIEW: CALUM HENDERSON The new German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which arrived on Netflix last autumn, pulls no punches in its depiction of the savage violence of World War I. In the film, helpless young men are cut to pieces by machine-guns, buried…

War of words – ‘Panzer’

Panzer is a German word meaning ‘mail’ or ‘coat of mail’, with mail being body armour composed of interlocking metal rings. In the early 20th century, the word was applied to the tank, and thereafter entered English as a term for German tanks and armoured units. Germany’s first Panzer was…

Military History Matters 132

• Clash in the Pacific: the fight for Guadalcanal
• Ignorance in war: from Balaclava to Vietnam
• The pirate menace: the dark side of privateering
• The Spanish Civil War: a country divided
• ‘For battle it was none’: the murder of Evesham, 1265…

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