In the autumn of 1939, after they signed a pact agreeing to carve up Poland, Hitler and Stalin were depicted in a cartoon as a newly wed couple walking down the aisle. Hand in hand, with Stalin the bride and…
The letter is dated 6 October of that year, just weeks before the battle that marked a turnaround in Allied fortunes in the war.
Nigel Jones explored the vexed relationship between President Lincoln and General McClellan in the first year of the American Civil War last issue. This time, he takes a look at Prime Minister Churchill’s relationship with the British generals in WWII.
Heinrich Severloh was a good soldier. On 6 June 1944, the 20-year-old Wehrmacht private manned a machine-gun overlooking Omaha Beach. He did his job without complaint: mowing down American soldiers as they disembarked on to the shore more than 500…
Talk of the war in North Africa and most Brits will think of Tobruk or El Alamein, while most Americans will think of Operation Torch, the Kasserine Pass, and Tunisia. The victory at El Alamein was presented in a powerful…
Graham Goodlad describes the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the Third Reich’s most sinister figures, and its bloody aftermath.
The most highly decorated combat unit in the history of the United States Army is the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, with its distinctive motto ‘Go for Broke’ – a reference to a term in gambling meaning that one stakes all…
Built in the Northern Irish capital in the mid-1930s, the nine-deck Town-class light cruiser played a major role in the Second World War, initially as part of the British naval blockade against Germany.
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.
Sebastian Yurtseven discovered the objects in July while clearing out his aunt’s house following torrential rain and flooding in the region.
The discovery was made as part of a joint research project between maritime archaeologists at Bournemouth University and scientists at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences.
Around 168 victims were exhumed shortly after the war, but it was long known that many other graves remained uncovered.
New research has uncovered evidence of the first large-scale atrocity committed in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Around 30-35,000 people were murdered in the country’s Pomeranian province in the first months of the conflict. One area saw so…
La Glacerie in Cherbourg, Normandy, is the first WWII prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers in France to be excavated and studied. How does living memory measure up to archaeological research? Robert Early compares the hard evidence with the witness accounts.
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
The defeated German soldiers who returned from the Second World War were so broken by the conflict that a specific term for them emerged. Heimkehrer were, according to Harald Jähner, battered survivors who returned to a society which they no…
Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – initiated a campaign of epic proportions. While the format of recounting a campaign through the recollections of individual participants is well established, the author does an exceptionally good…
It was designed by the Soviet Union during the Second World War to take on the German Tigers and Panthers.
Reviewing the best military history exhibitions, with Calum Henderson.
David Porter on Military History's doomed inventions.
Few events in military history have been picked over as much as Operation Market Garden, now notorious only because it resulted in a German victory when it was believed that, halfway through 1944, German victories were a thing of the…
Lightly armoured amphibious landing craft, Buffalo LVTs (Landing Vehicles Tracked), were used by the Allies in the crossing of the Rhine and Elbe rivers in March 1945.
The story of the Holocaust will be told through 2,000 photos, books, artworks, and letters, as well as personal objects from toys to jewellery.
Patrick Mercer recalls a grim battle between two military elites, British Guards and Waffen SS, on the heavily fortified Gothic Line in northern Italy.
The battle scenes are, in the main, well made, especially in showing what it was like for men hiding in dugouts and wadis in the desert under intense artillery-fire.
When Stanley Christopherson wrote in his diary in late November 1945, he proclaimed, ‘So many outstanding things were done during this war, which so thoroughly deserved an award, but were never witnessed.’ The truism is appropriate. Recalling the battle conducted…
• Barbarossa: biggest invasion in history
• Braddock at Monongahela, 1755
• Butterfly Effect at war
• Crusader strategy
• French invasion of Britain: Fishguard, February 1797
At which conference in 1943 did the ‘big three’ of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agree to a cross-channel invasion of France the following year?
Although primarily closed because of the pandemic, Belfast has undergone significant restoration in that time. Work
Which was more important, D-Day or Operation Bagration? Chris Bambery argues that it was on the Eastern Front that the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed.
Early this year, a team set out to survey long-overlooked fortifications on the island of Kolombangara. Their work is shedding new light on preparations to repel an anticipated Allied invasion, as Nikolaus Hochstein Cox reveals.
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
Frantic redesign efforts were made, but in 1942 the aircraft finally entered production still plagued with the same engine problems.
Elite units played an essential if often obscure role during the Second World War. In this new illustrated book, with more than 120 colour and black-and-white images, Michael E Haskew charts units from across the globe, regardless of nation or…
The direct experience of the gunners has long been a neglected aspect of World War II history. We have had plenty on life in a tank unit, or a fighter squadron, but there is a sense in which the role…
Eighty years ago next month, on 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler unleashed the largest military invasion force in history, when he ordered almost 3,700,000 Axis troops with 3,000 tanks, 7,000 guns and 2,300 aircraft to advance into the Soviet Union along a front that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Less than six months later, following startling early successes, leading German units would reach almost to the gates of Moscow, before plummeting temperatures and the onset of the Russian winter finally brought their advance to a halt.