REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING Helen Fry has specialised in fascinating and revealing histories of wartime intelligence and espionage, especially of the role of women in these activities. Women in Intelligence, The Walls Have Ears, and Spymaster are a few of…
The American-born writer and academic Phillips Payson O’Brien on an admirable dictator, and his fascination with failure.
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REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND It is a mistake to approach this book simply as a ‘German perspective’ on the history of the First World War. It is actually much more, in that Holger Afflerbach brings great breadth to his work,…
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD This is not the first joint biography of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel, arguably the three outstanding battlefield commanders of World War II. Terry Brighton led the way in 2009 with his acclaimed study…
REVIEW BY DAVID PORTER This is a hefty (913 pages!) study, which is not restricted to ‘modern’ Germany but extends to cover the military history of Switzerland and the Holy Roman/Austrian/Austro-Hungarian empires. (The author makes the point that national identity…
REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING Ben Macintyre is well known for his books on spies and espionage, like Agent Zigzag, Double Cross, and Philby. Earlier this year, one of his other works, Operation Mincemeat, was adapted into a hugely successful movie…
REVIEW BY TOBY CLARK Anyone who enjoyed the HBO television series The Pacific or Eugene Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed will want to read Saul David’s new book, Devil Dogs: first in, last out – King Company from Guadalcanal…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON. William Vicarage was just 20 years old when he sustained severe cordite burns aboard HMS Malaya during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. As well as extensive wounds to his hands and upper body, the able…
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…
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…
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…
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…
One of the most tragic consequences of the First World War was the idea and the reality of ‘the missing’. All earlier wars had victims of which no trace was ever found, but the world’s first global industrialised conflict created…
The superficial justification for Operation Chariot – the daring British commando raid on the French port of St Nazaire in March 1942 – was that it would deny Tirpitz a crucial repair dock. The destruction of the fearsome German battleship…
An old German proverb has it that ‘a great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.’ General Field Marshal ‘Bloody Ferdinand’ Schörner, commander of Army Group…
This well-written book tells the remarkable story of an extraordinary team of aviators and their support personnel, from a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities, who – to quote from the book’s sub-title – turned the tide of the RAF’s…
This book convincingly argues that Stalin’s war began long before the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, and can really be said to have begun in the late 1920s. Initially, this was a war of suppression at home, combined…
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 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…
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…
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…
This is the first of a planned three-part history of the First World War organised by theatre. The second volume will deal with the Eastern Front (including Italy and the Balkans), the third with the wider war (mainly the Middle…
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…
Broken Seas, Broken Ships is Ian Friel’s latest book on the history of ships and shipwrecks in Britain, and is the ‘sequel’ to Britain and the Open Road (2020), which covered British maritime history starting in the medieval period and…
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…
Despite depictions of the Battle of Britain as a campaign waged by grown-up men and women, the average age of an RAF fighter pilot at the height of the Second World War was just 20 – with those involved in…
This is a fine, deeply researched book, with Frank Whittle’s story beginning with a lad of humble origin who, aged just 16, entered the RAF as an apprentice fitter, already with strong views about the viability of gas-turbine aero engines…
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of 80 years ago not only brought the United States into a war, but provoked a wave of hostility to Japanese immigrants and their children across America. Daniel James Brown here explores the lives…