Phil's bookshelf: military-history
I picked up this book having heard Julie McDowell's excellent presentation at the Chalk Valley Book Festival. I have not been disappointed.
Up until the time that the Iron Curtain lifted in the early 1990s, the population of the United ...
A fascinating contrast of two battles fought on the same ground, over a century apart. In both instances the operational objective was the taking and holding Moscow. For both Napoleon's Grand Army (1812) and Hitler's Wehrmacht (1941), th...
In the age of multi-dimension warfare where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly dominate the traditional battlefield and where cyber-attacks play an ever critical role it is, perhaps, time to reappraise how important a part geog...
In many respects history has not been kind to those who served with Bomber command during the Second World War. Unlike those who fought in other theatres, the men and women who fought under the leadership of Air Chief Marshall Arthur 'Bu...
Sadly, the veterans of the First World War are no longer with us and as time goes by, it sometimes seems that they will be forever remembered as hapless victims of a pointless war. Sure, there is a rich legacy of creative output pertaini...
It is a reality that warfare and conflict are part of the human condition. In her thought-provoking book 'War: How Conflict Shaped Us' Margaret MacMillan made the point that if we want to understand our own history then we must think abo...
It is seemingly impossible to satisfy the demand for books, articles and documentaries about Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift. One might be forgiven for thinking that every aspect of these two actions has been examined a hundred times over, ...
The Glider Pilot Regiment was relatively short-lived - formed in 1941 and stood down just sixteen years later. However, during the final phases of the Second World War it accumulated an impressive list of battle honours. In this book, Ro...
The myth of the Kindermord is writ large in the history of the First World War German Cemetery at Langemark, near Ypres in Belgium. The much-visited cemetery was originally established after the First Battle of Langemark in 1914 when Ger...
A headline in the Times newspaper today reads 'Putin in Tehran to create new anti-West alliance'. One might be forgiven in thinking that this is a modern-day extension to the 'Great Game' which played out in the 19th Century. Whilst the ...
For my generation the Falklands War marked a turning point in British history. The prevailing narrative seemed to be that Britain was destined to become a second-tier player on the world stage and that the country no longer had the abili...
It is often said that the typical experience of war is one of long periods of relative inactivity punctuated by frantic bursts of adrenalin charged action. Whilst this characterisation is not universally true, it would certainly have res...
What more is there to say about Winston Churchill? Given the vast number of books written about the man, and his own prolific output it’s a fair question. And yet the publication of this latest biography might be well-timed given the ong...
Many military historians were hopeful that the centenary of the First World War would encourage a more balanced public debate about this phenomenally important period of European history. However, despite a few notable exceptions, the tr...
Fewer than 2,000 Tiger tanks were produced during the Second World War and yet both the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. E. and its successor the Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B, the Königstiger, acquired an iconic status during the confli...
Over recent years there has been a spate of books purporting to be the memoirs of German infantrymen. Indeed, there seems to be an insatiable appetite for first-hand accounts of the fighting on the Eastern Front. Such books, which are of...
Two days ago, in the city of Exeter, a 1,000kg German bomb was destroyed in a controlled explosion which left a crater the size of a double decker bus and scattered debris over nearby properties, severely damaging a few in the process. T...
Aside from the much-admired film A Bridge Too Far there is a plethora of books about the Battle of Arnhem and more recently the debate has found a new audience via social media channels such as the popular We Have Ways podcast. Aside fro...
The cold blooded killing of 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and various other places is now known to have been perpetrated by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (th...
The Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaklava has left an enduring legacy in the collective memory. If the term 'lions led by donkeys' has any utility at all, it surely must apply in this case, where two senior commander...
Over the course of the past few decades the First World War battlefields of Belgium and Northern France have become popular destinations for a British public hungry to know more about a conflict that defined a generation. With the passin...
Virtually every military historian would agree that the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers was critical to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Churchill's decision to embrace Soviet Russia following the launch of Ba...
Last year I fulfilled one of my ambitions and walked the full length of the Cavendish Road at Monte Cassino. It’s not, of course, a road in the true sense of the word, though when it was built by men of the 4th Indian Division and the Ne...
The dramatic story of The Battle of Stalingrad has been told and retold countless times. It would seem that there is an insatiable appetite to read about what most military historians would consider to be a major turning point in the 194...
To some observers the 1945 attack on Japan by the Soviet Union seemed to be something of an afterthought - with the Second World War all but over, it was surely an opportunity to regain territory lost to Japan during the Russo-Japanese w...
The 1941-1945 struggle between The Soviet Union and Germany is often described as a series of epic tank battles - and with some justification. By 1945 both sides had made exponential improvements in the design of their armoured fighting ...
The entirely predictable and brutal Soviet response to Nazi horrors perpetrated in Eastern Europe was perhaps most keenly felt in East Prussia where, in the final few months of the Second World War, the Red Army stormed into the Reich hu...
On a sunny day in 1965 my parents took my sister and I on a day trip to Skegness. A few hours on the beach was clearly the intention but my father spotted that a film called Zulu was playing at the Parade Cinema. Clearly excited, he took...
It is difficult to understand why this excellent memoir didn’t excite the interest of publishers whilst the author, ‘Wimpy’ Wellington, was still alive. Perhaps it is yet another manifestation of the post war reluctance to acknowledge th...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Orkney Islands played a major role in the defence of Great Britain. The deep water sheltered moorings in Scapa Flow offered an ideal base for the Royal Navy, with easy access to the North Sea an...
The Soviet Bagration offensive in in the summer of 1944 was conducted on a scale that is almost unimaginable – over two million combatants and tens of thousands of square kilometres of territory. The under-resourced and unimaginatively l...
One of the first things that strikes visitors to Wales is the preponderance of medieval castles. Hilltops, estuaries, harbours and towns are often graced with the picturesque ruins of towers, gateways, walls and buildings - benign now, b...
Ostensibly a memoir from Fritz Sauer, a seemingly typical Wehrmacht soldier who served on the Eastern Front from 1942 to 1945, this book is actually a blend of recalled memories and historical context, the latter written with the benefit...
The Battle of Stalingrad was a truly epic struggle between two ideologically opposed dictatorships – totemic of a brutal conflict that cost in excess of 50 million East European lives. In the summer of 1942, despite the failures of the p...
The horrors visited on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe by the Second World War are almost beyond human comprehension. Even in this context, Warsaw stands out as a city that suffered appallingly. A pre-war population of 1.3 mi...
The various air battles fought over Western Europe during the Second World War have been the subject of a vast amount of interest over the intervening years. The Battle of Britain, The Ruhr Dams, The V-Weapons and the various general bom...
From June 1941 to November 1944 Adolf Hitler prosecuted his war against the Soviet Union from a vast complex of bunkers and shelters in the Masurian woods of northern Poland - formally East Prussia. Known as the Wolfsschanze or Wolf's La...
Nowadays the visitor to Kaliningrad Oblast in Russia might be surprised to see vestiges of German culture scattered throughout the territory. Half ruined churches used as animal shelters, red brick factory building adorned with old Germa...
During the final year of the Second World War the Red Army swept across Eastern Europe liberating -or reconquering, depending on your perspective - territories which had been occupied by German forces since 1941. At this stage in the war...
Nowadays Halbe is a typical well-to-do provincial German town. Modest post war houses abut quiet streets and, apart from a series of carefully paced interpretive sign boards, there is little to indicate that during the closing weeks of t...
The nine-hundred-day long Siege of Leningrad was a human tragedy of epic proportions. Three quarters of a million civilians died of starvation – almost a third of the city’s population. During the winter of 1941 /42 the Soviet authoritie...
The plethora of two-hundred-year-old defensive structures around the coast of southern England speak to a time when France posed a real threat to the United Kingdom. At the end of the eighteenth century the French Revolution ignited a po...
It is remarkable that the Chinese Communist Party has successfully perpetuated the idea of national humiliation in the modern age. This was the prevalent historical narrative in early twentieth century China, borne out of the idea that t...
The sheer number of differently styled badges worn by infantrymen on the Western Front during the First World War is, for many, quite surprising. Regimental cap badges and shoulder titles were specified in Dress Regulations and, similarl...
Few men were as close to Douglas Haig during the First World War, as John Charteris. In his capacity of ADC to GOC 1 Corps, 1914 and his subsequent appointments as GSO2 (intelligence), 1 Corps, 1914- 16 and BGGS (Intelligence), GHQ, 1916...
Earlier this month an independent inquiry commissioned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) found that as many as 350,000 Black and Asian service personnel who died fighting for the British Empire may have been denied a prope...
Despite Soviet protestations, Albert Speer, the foremost of Hitler's protégés, was given twenty years life imprisonment rather than a death sentence at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials in 1946. During the trial this highly articulate, wel...
Is it a contradiction in terms to refer to anyone as a 'good Nazi'? That is the key question which is addressed in this latest biography of Konrad Morgen, an SS judge who was active in investigating 'crimes' committed by concentration-ca...
The founder of the modern-day Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, once said “it’s not the winning but the taking part that counts”. The subject of this book, Admiral Albert Hastings Markham, was a truly remarkable man who participa...
A few years ago, I stumbled across a rather striking and beautifully maintained military cemetery in Staraya Russa during a road trip from St Petersburg to Kholm in Russia. Upon closer examination I discovered that it contained the grave...
For several decades a succession of Soviet and Russian leaders have used a particular state sponsored narrative regarding the Great Patriotic War to support their grip on power. The aggressive ambition of Germany was, so the official lin...
Some might think that there is little left to say about Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig. Lionized by his brothers-in-arms in the 1920s, Haig’s reputation was systematically demolished in the 1930s to the point where, for many, he came to...
Since the 1930s the cultural legacy of British involvement in the First World War has been dominated by a cadre of individuals who are often acknowledged as the greatest of all war poets. The exquisitely crafted words of men like Sassoon...
Last year I took a thrilling high-speed ride out to the island of Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel. There’s no harbour or jetty and visitors to the island are obliged to step out into the surf before embarking on the climb up to the top...
Since the 1980s there has been a concerted effort to refute the idea that the men of the BEF were ‘sacrificed’ by remote, arrogant leaders who were totally bereft of ideas and imagination – an idea that found particular resonance in the ...
It surely takes a high degree of confidence and determination for a writer of military history to challenge the prevailing view that the leadership acumen of renowned leaders like Napoleon Bonaparte, Erich Ludendorff, Erwin Rommel and Ro...
A year or so ago, whilst on holiday in Pembrokeshire, I took my family to The Royal Oak in Fishguard for a pub lunch. I was intrigued to discover that what is now a popular hostelry was, on 23rd February 1797, the site of a surrender cer...
Like so many others, my impression of the defence of the Falkland Islands against an Argentinian invasion force in April 1982 was, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by a frequently published photograph of a small group of seemingl...
A few years ago I chanced across a Sherman tank standing, seemingly incongruously, on a beach near the village of Slapton in Devon. An explanatory plaque told me that a man called Ken Small had recovered the tank from the sea in 1984. Ke...
It is perhaps surprising that armoured forces played a significant role in the battles around Cassino – this was certainly not ‘tank country’! The main Gustav Line stretched from the coast near Monte Cassino in the west to the mouth of t...
In January 1945 war ‘came home’ to Germany with a vengeance when the Red Army re-crossed the border into what was then known as East Prussia. The retreating Axis forces had conducted the war on the Eastern Front ruthlessly and the popula...
One hundred years on, many vestiges of the First World War can be found across the country. In this superbly produced book a range of experts from Historic England have used a variety of tools to locate, identify and document physical ev...
British military planners often described Italy as the ‘soft underbelly of Occupied Europe’ during 1943. The term is usually attributed to Churchill though there are no specific references to these words in his speeches and writings. How...
The scale of the BEF’s final offensive in November 1918 was on a par with the opening days of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 and yet the Battle of the Sambre has not, until now, attracted much interest – academic or otherwise. In t...
Over the course of human history, interpreters have played a unique role in enabling communication between individuals who would otherwise find it difficult to converse. In wartime such skills are at a premium because of the need to deri...
Few would argue that the Nieuwpoort sector of the Western Front was of strategic significance during the First World War but this lavishly illustrated book puts a lie to the common misconception that the area is devoid of interest for th...
It is perhaps surprising that the majority of military historians in the West give scant attention to the study of Asian warfare apart from conflicts involving Western powers in which case any analysis is invariable imbued with European ...
Alan Seegar’s poem I Have A Rendezvous With Death is the starting point for this book – a slim twelve chapter volume which provides real insight into the lives and - more pertinently, the deaths - of twelve immensely creative men whose w...
Later this year I will be visiting a number of sites in the Russian Republic of Karelia which are associated with the Finnish – Soviet Winter War of 1939 to 1940. This book appealed to me because it is written by an acknowledged expert a...
During the course of First World War the scaling up of industrial production and concomitant distribution channels in order to service British and Commonwealth forces on the Western Front was a critical enabler for battlefield success. W...
The 2014 annexation of The Crimea is a modern day reminder of the strategic importance of Sevastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. During 1854-55 an Anglo-French military expedition allied with Turkey captured the city from Russ...
The establishment of continuous trench lines along the full length of the Western Front in 1914 brought the small town of Nieuport, Belgium to the notice of military planners – for it is here that the ‘Race to the Sea’ ended leaving this...
The British and American newspapers are currently full of distressing stories about the sexual impropriety of powerful individuals. Those accused stand to lose their reputations, their career prospects and, in some instances, their liber...
The centenary of the ending of the First World War next year is unlikely to bring a change in approach by the popular media. The notion of an unnecessary war conducted by incompetent military leaders is strongly embedded in the public ps...
'Best love to All' concerns the letters of Captain Eric Rigby-Jones MC & Bar who served as an infantry officer with the Liverpool Pals from the spring of 1917 through to the end of the Battle of the Lys a year later. Rigby-Jones’s letter...
The letters of Private Bright Fraser (Artists Rifles) and his brother Signalman William Fraser (RNVR) are very lightly edited (again by their respective grandsons) and the accompanying text is in the form of explanatory notes. Many of Br...
One might be forgiven for thinking that there is little more that can be said about the Battle of the Somme. The historiography of the battle is, after all, voluminous – particularly after the plethora of book and articles which appeared...
At first glance it would be easy to assume that this book is simply a ‘written word’ memorial to the 124 people who died when a V1 destroyed the Guards’ Chapel in Central London on Sunday, 18 June 1944 – after all ninety five pages are d...
Tsingtau beer is ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants across the UK and indeed elsewhere in the world. It is probably not widely appreciated that German brewers set up the original Tsingtau production facility in a place of the same name in...
The popular conception is that the Confederacy reached a ‘high tide’ mark on the 3 July 1863 when ‘Pickett’s Charge’ failed to breech the Union line at Gettysburg. Leigh is not alone in making a counter argument that the second half of 1...
This impressive portfolio of contemporary images from Army Group North’s 1944-45 theatre of operations is a welcome addition to Pen & Sword’s ‘Images of War’ series. Ian Baxter has drawn from his extensive collection of WW2 photographs t...
Whilst many readers will know that Chinese labourers were active on the Western Front throughout WW1 and for some time afterwards, many will be unaware of the full breadth of China’s involvement. In attempting to fill this gap the scope ...
Following the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 and the subsequent call for volunteers, the men of Cambridgeshire were not slow in stepping forward in the service of their country. However, in a departure from standard practice, thes...
There are few Second World War topics that have attracted more public interest than the death of Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Führerbunker on 30 April 1945. Although this was an iconic moment, marking the end of a twelve-year reign of terr...
At the outbreak of the First World War France, Germany and Russia had vast conscript armies. As is well known, Britain had, by comparison, a tiny land force and it wasn't until 1916, almost two years after the first fatal shots were fire...
Most accounts of the 1943 campaign in North Africa dwell on the achievements of the British 8th Army. Montgomery’s victory at the Second Battle of Al Alamein at the end of the previous year was famously referred to by Churchill ‘as the e...
On the wall of Marshall Carl Gustaf Mannerheim's wartime operations room in Mikkeli, Finland there is a large map of Western Russia. During what the Finns refer to as the Continuation War (1941-44), a member of Mannerheim's staff would p...
On 27 February this year, the Reuter news agency reported that President Vladimir Putin had put Russia's nuclear deterrent on high alert 'in the face of a barrage of Western reprisals for the invasion of Ukraine'. Whilst many commentator...
There are few Second World War topics that equal the Battle of Stalingrad in terms of drama, scale and impact. For just over five months during the Autumn and Winter of 1942 / 43 Friedrich Paulus's German 6th Army, along with elements of...
It is sometimes said that "there is a reason for everything" and for a world changing event as impactful and far-reaching as the First World War then the quest for a root cause takes on a particular urgency. Whilst the expansive histogra...
The 14th Army, a one million strong multi-national Allied force formed in 1943 and tasked with defending India against the Japanese, was famously described by its' commander, Lieutenant-General William (Uncle Bill) Slim, as having been '...
