REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND Strategic history may seem dry or even daunting to some, but Robin Prior has broken new ground here. Not only has he tackled a huge subject in a different way, but he has presented his material…
Graham Goodlad assesses the career of Britain’s best-known and most controversial general of the Second World War.
Graham Goodlad analyses Montgomery’s epic clash with Rommel’s forces, which signalled the end for Nazi Germany’s ambitions in the Middle East.
A besieged city, a hostile army enveloping on all sides, and a ruthless commander refusing to surrender – this was not 1942, but 1919, when the city in southern Russia then known as Tsaritsyn was on the verge of being…
REVIEW BY SIMON BAKER Anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of the SAS may well be familiar with the regiment’s genesis myth: in 1941, a tall Commando called David Stirling, in hospital after a nasty parachute…
Taylor Downing reviews a new documentary.
DAVID PORTER ON MILITARY HISTORY’S DOOMED INVENTIONS.
REVIEW BY TOBY CLARK. Sailing into Hong Kong in late August 1945, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Anson symbolised the Japanese defeat. Within a week of her arrival, the Anson hosted 500 recently freed ex-Prisoners of War (POWs) for afternoon…
After the war, the fort briefly served as a peacetime garrison until the mid-1950s.
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
Eighty years on, David Porter analyses Germany’s plan to launch another great offensive in the summer of 1942.
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…
‘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…
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.
A round of some of the latest archaeological news stories from the UK.
The layers of tunnels under Naples preserve traces of Greek life and death in ancient Italy. Dalu Jones heads beneath the surface to visit ongoing restoration work that is making an ancient tomb and its rare surviving Greek paintings accessible to the public.
Put your military history knowledge to the test with our competition and crossword
DAVID PORTER ON MILITARY HISTORY’S DOOMED INVENTIONS.
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.
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.
Neil Faulkner introduces an elite Nazi strike-force and sets the scene for the epic Battle of Crete in May 1941.
Neil Faulkner analyses one of the Second World War’s most curiously asymmetrical battles.
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…
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…
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)
Visible in the photograph are more than 300 small circular bell tents, most likely soldiers’ accommodation.
This photograph, showing soldiers lounging on their tank and citizens going about their daily business, was taken outside Hamburg railway station in May 1945.
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…
Your views on the latest issues in Current Archaeology.
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.…
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.
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...
The arrival of which 42,900-ton German battleship in Norwegian waters posed a grave threat to Allied shipping convoys in January 1942?
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…
The Freedom Portrait, by Frank Owen Salisbury, has joined an existing exhibition at the Churchill War Rooms in London.
No other sailors from HMAS Sydney were ever recovered, even after the ship’s wreckage was located in 2008.