Second World War

German Aircraft Weaponry

German Aircraft Weaponry

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the Luftwaffe was almost as heavily dependent on rifle-calibre machine-guns as the Imperial German Air Service had been in 1918. The Battle of Britain demonstrated the limitations of such weapons. By…

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House of Secrets opens to the public

A new museum, Trent Park House of Secrets, opened in north London this summer. The former stately home in Enfield witnessed some of the most important events of the 20th century. In the 1920s, Trent Park was the home of…

War Classics – Inherit the truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz

When Anita Lasker came to Britain in March 1946, 80 years ago, having survived Auschwitz and having been liberated at death’s door from Belsen, she found that no one wanted to hear about her terrible experiences in the camps. Britons wanted to move on from the horrors of the past and look to the promise of the future.

SAS Great Escapes 5 jacket

SAS: Great Escapes 5

War correspondent, film producer, and writer: many MHM readers will already know Damien Lewis’s work. In his latest book about British Special Forces, he presents five more hair-raising accounts of WWII escapes. ‘Escapes’, that is, in the broader sense, since…

Flying high: Exploring wartime archaeology at RAF East Fortune

Currently home to the National Museum of Flight, RAF East Fortune near Edinburgh is one of the UK’s best-preserved Second World War airfields. Re-examination of finds from previous excavations, on the site, as well as new evidence from recent field observations, has shed light on its long military history, as Dr Matteo Randazzo and Olivia Jones report.

War Classics – With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

With the Old Breed is a harrowing, visceral account of a US Marine’s combat experience fighting the Japanese in Peleliu and Okinawa in 1945. Together with Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, it provided the material for HBO’s acclaimed 2010 television series The Pacific. Excellent though the latter was, the book offers much more.

Wolfpack: inside Hitler’s U-boat war

As Roger Moorhouse suggests in the introduction to Wolfpack, it was natural that post-war English language books about the Battle of the Atlantic would largely ignore the German perspective on the conflict. After the horrors of war, a kind of…

Tunisgrad: victory in Africa

It is something of a cliché in the history of the Second World War to claim that Stalingrad, the graveyard of Germany’s Sixth Army in Russia, was the decisive turning point of the conflict: the moment when Hitler’s hopes of…

Excavations at former concentration camp

During World War II, a number of German armament factories were relocated underground as a result of Allied air raids. In August 1944, a work detail of the Buchenwald concentration camp was established near the village of Walbeck, in the…

B-17 bomber found in the Baltic Sea

A B-17 Flying Fortress bomber that crashed into the Baltic Sea in 1943 has been located by marine archaeologists more than 80 years after it was lost. The project was led by Dr Piotr Bojakowski from Texas A&M University, in…

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From World War to Cold War

In the first part of our series examining the transition from World War to Cold War, Taylor Downing looks at how the end of the fighting in 1945 sowed the seeds of the conflict to come; while in the second part he explains how the defeat of the Nazis brought new division to the Austrian capital.