Military History Matters 129 – Letters
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
Second World War
Case Blue: the Eastern Front between Barbarossa and Stalingrad
Eighty years on, David Porter analyses Germany’s plan to launch another great offensive in the summer of 1942.
Victory at Sea: naval power and the transformation of the global order in World War II
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD The Second World War at sea has been the subject of several outstanding overviews in recent years. Phillips Payson O’Brien’s innovative How the War was Won (2015) argued for the critical importance of sea (and air)…
War on film – Enemy at the Gates
As the Russian army commits appalling atrocities in Ukraine, it might not feel like the best time to recall the heroism of the Red Army in the Second World War. But this year marks the 80th anniversary of the titanic…
New gallery explores the Queen’s relationship with the armed forces
It draws on the museum’s extensive image archive to chart the monarch’s experiences of war, from growing up in the early 1940s to her continuing official duties as Head of the British Armed Forces.
![The assault ration pack dating from the Second World War [right]. X ray scans [far RIGHT] revealed its contents, including meat blocks, biscuits, and latrine paper.](https://i0.wp.com/the-past.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/post-1_image0-7.jpg?fit=561%2C421&ssl=1)
Last surviving D-Day ration pack discovered
Originally found in 2006, the sealed ration pack was mistakenly identified as an artefact from the 1950s.
Roland Penrose, ‘camouflage evangelist’
‘The tendency in warfare up to very recent times,’ wrote Roland Penrose in his 1941 book The Home Guard Manual of Camouflage, ‘has been to rely on sheer strength and even ostentation rather than concealment.’ Be it the shining armour…
The BBC at war
This year marks the centenary of the birth of the BBC. To celebrate, Taylor Downing looks at how the Corporation came of age during the Second World War.
Berlin: life and loss in the city that shaped the century
Covering the period from the end of the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, this is a well-researched and very detailed book from a well-known author, whose previous similar book…
War of words – ‘Bazooka’
A signature piece of kit for American GIs in World War II, the bazooka was a tubular, shoulder-fired, 2.36-inch rocket launcher. It fired a projectile bearing a shaped-charge warhead, which contained a hollow cavity lined with metal. On contact with…
Military History Matters 128
• Against the odds: how Hitler’s airborne elite took Crete
• What became of the prisoners of 1798?
• The Battle of Sluys: a forgotten medieval naval clash
• Conflict and consequences: the myth of decisive battle
• Black soldiers in the American West
MHM128 Letters
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
MHM 128 Competition and Crossword
Put your military history knowledge to the test with our competition and crossword
MHM BOOK AWARDS 2022
The winners of this years MHM Book Awards...
Military History events, exhibitions, and galleries in summer 2022
A round-up of some of the best military history events and exhibitions to check out in 2022, including a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.
Women War Photographers
Calum Henderson explores the lives and works of war photographers Gerda Taro, Endre Friedmann, Françoise Demulder, Anja Niedringhaus, Lee Miller, and Catherine Leroy.
Back to the Drawing Board: the Cruiser Tank Mark V ‘Covenanter’ (A13 Mk III)
DAVID PORTER ON MILITARY HISTORY’S DOOMED INVENTIONS.
This week: Crete 1941
The daring German capture of Crete in May-June 1941 is not often mentioned alongside more celebrated military upsets. But still, there were many levels on which Operation Merkur (Mercury) – as it was codenamed – was a victory against the odds.
Campaign launched to commemorate biggest loss of female army life in British history
Nearly 80 years on, the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association is working to ensure that the names of the victims are included in war memorials across the country.
Hitler’s Airborne Elite and the Battle for Crete
Neil Faulkner introduces an elite Nazi strike-force and sets the scene for the epic Battle of Crete in May 1941.
The Battle for Crete: 20 May-1 June 1941
Neil Faulkner analyses one of the Second World War’s most curiously asymmetrical battles.
Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-45
REVIEW BY DAVID PORTER. This is a highly detailed (936 pages!) study of resistance across Europe during the Second World War, from its tentative beginnings in 1939 to the large-scale partisan warfare of 1944-1945. Indeed, the author’s coverage of the…
WAR ON FILM – Operation Mincemeat
The newly released, star-studded British movie Operation Mincemeat is, on one level, about the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. On another, more profound level, it is about how people deceive one another. In its opening commentary, the film announces…
REVIEW: Bentley Priory Museum
REVIEWING THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EXHIBITIONS
WITH Graham Goodlad.
![LEFT Belhus Park from above. The photograph from April 1944 [TOP] shows a military camp located on the parkland. This housed troops preparing for the D Day invasion. By May 1946 [BOTTOM], a larger camp with regimented rows of tents is visible.](https://i0.wp.com/the-past.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/post-1_image0-24.jpg?fit=768%2C577&ssl=1)
Aerial photography reveals wartime role of Belhus Park
Visible in the photograph are more than 300 small circular bell tents, most likely soldiers’ accommodation.
German civilians gather around a British tank, Hamburg station, May 1945
This photograph, showing soldiers lounging on their tank and citizens going about their daily business, was taken outside Hamburg railway station in May 1945.
1945: Victory in the west
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD. Over the past decade, Peter Caddick-Adams has established himself as a leading historian of land warfare in the second half of World War II. 1945: Victory in the West completes a trilogy in which the author…
CA Letters May 2022
Your views on the latest issues in Current Archaeology.
New exhibition honours veterans of WWII airborne division
Formed in April 1943, the 6th Airborne Division took part in the Normandy Landings the following year, remaining in the line until the breakout to the Seine in late August 1944. During this time, casualties amounted to one in five men.
A landscape through time
Last year, Historic England archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to confirm the remains of Tudor and Jacobean formal gardens at Belhus Park in Thurrock, Essex, the site of a manor built in the medieval period and rebuilt in the 16th century.…
Happy campers? Investigating the experiences of prisoners of war near Oswestry
What was life like for German prisoners of war who were interned in England during the Second World War? Wessex Archaeology’s recent excavation of a camp outside Oswestry in Shropshire suggests that its inmates saw out the conflict in relative comfort, with a packed programme of activities – but hints of tensions brewing between inmates and guards were also unearthed. Carly Hilts reports.
This week: 1942
It was an unprecedented moment in the House of Commons, as MPs and peers packed tight into the chamber on 8 March to hear a video address from Volodymyr Zelensky – the first ever given by a foreign leader. Dressed in army fatigues, the Ukrainian president cut a heroic figure as he gave a stirring update on Russia's invasion of his homeland – earning not one but two standing ovations, and invoking Britain's own proud wartime spirit...
Churchill’s darkest hour: the Fall of Singapore and the military disasters of 1942
The bleakest moment for Britain's wartime prime minister came not in 1940 – when his popularity soared and he was convinced a German invasion was impossible – but in 1942, as Taylor Downing explains.
1942 Quiz
The arrival of which 42,900-ton German battleship in Norwegian waters posed a grave threat to Allied shipping convoys in January 1942?
Remains of ‘comfortable’ British POW camp uncovered by archaeologists
Around 2,000 German prisoners were housed at this camp, research suggests.
Brothers in Arms: one legendary tank regiment’s bloody war from D-Day to VE-Day
Those with an interest in the British Army in the Second World War have had their appetites whetted recently by the paperback release of An Englishman at War: the wartime diaries of Stanley Christopherson, DSO, MC, TD, 1939-45 (reviewed in…