War & Defence Operations

Operation Tonga - The Glider Assault: 6 June 1944 is an account of the Glider Pilot Regiment's role in Operation Tonga, the first stage of the ai...

The fighting in Europe during the Seven Years War hung in the balance. After initial successes the Austro-French forces had been driven back across...

On 26 August 1346, near the village of Crecy in northern France, Edward III's outnumbered English army confronted the French forces of Philip VI an...

In just 10 weeks from 8 December 1941 to mid February 1942, British and Imperial forces were utterly defeated by the numerically inferior Japanese ...

This is the story of the SAS raid on Pebble Island during the Falklands War. In atrocious weather, 48 men of 22 SAS Regiment were landed by Sea Kin...

The Battle of the Silver Helmets was an engagement orchestrated according to the previous successes of the cavalry of Frederick the Great. It was s...

Hitler's Ardennes Offensive - known to the Germans as Wacht am Rhein and to the Allies as the Battle of the Bulge - was intended to turn the course...

1st July 1916 saw a campaign that devastated the lives of thousands of young men serving under the British Empire. It was a day chosen to begin wha...

Beginning on the night of 23 March 1945, Operation Plunder was the crossing of the River Rhine at Rees, Wesel, and south of the Lippe River by the ...

In 1945 a joint committee of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was appointed to investigate and hear testimony from a variety of mili...

Everyone is familiar with the story of D-Day and the triumphal liberation of France by the Allies: a barbaric enemy was defeated by Allied ingenuit...

Rome was liberated on 5 June 1944 but the Italian campaign had another eleven gruelling months to run. The US Fifth and British Eighth Armies drove...

Here is a fascinating record of the British Pacific Fleet during the Second World War, in particular the closing years of conflict with Japan and t...

On 16 November 1916, Lieutenant Geoffrey Dorman took off from Shoreham in a Royal Aircraft Factory FE2b with the intention of heading West along th...

A highly illustrated study of the Solomons campaign in 194344 from Guadalcanal, as the US forces advanced through the island chain, to the vital Ja...

Gregory Blaxland has written a superb account of 1918, the final year of the war when the balance of advantage between the combatants changed so dr...

Following nearly two years of planning and exacting preparation, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of the Nazi-dominated European continent, ...

William Clarke of Prestonpans, Scotland, joined the 2nd Royal North British Dragoons, the Scots Greys, in 1803. Clarke had risen to the rank of ser...

What was it like as a French soldier to defend the Maginot Line when the Germans invaded in 1940, and was the line really a strategic and tactical ...

Passchendaele is the next volume in the highly-regarded series of books from the best-selling First World War historian Richard van Emden. Once aga...

In April-May 1917 the sleepy hamlet of Bullecourt in Northern France became the focus of two battles involving British and Australian troops. Given...

Why are some battles remembered more than others? Surprisingly, it is not just size that matters, nor the number of dead, the 'decisiveness' of bat...

The Battle of El Alamein is well established as a pivotal moment of the Second World War. Following the wildly fluctuating fortunes of the opposin...