Military History Matters

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Military History Matters magazine
April 2020 is out now

Balaklava

Balaklava is one of the most famous battles in British history. Yet it cannot really be compared with, say, Hastings, Waterloo, or the Somme, all of which were large-scale struggles with great issues at stake. Balaklava is an altogether different matter. In this month's issue, we examine why the battle acquired such notoriety.

Latest features

War Athletes: François Faber and Octave Lapize

On 28 June 1914, the 12th annual Tour de France began in Paris with the blast of a starter’s pistol. The same day, another gun killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion World War I ...

MHM Competition: April Online Exclusive

We’re giving away three copies of Mastermind of Dunkirk and D-Day, courtesy of Casemate Publishing. Mastermind of Dunkirk and D-Day is the first modern biography of Bertram Ramsay, the man who planned the Dunkirk evacuation and the D-Day landings. Author ...

MHM Book of the Year 2020 – Winners Announced!

The ballots have been cast, the votes have been counted, and we are delighted to announce the winners of the MHM Book Awards ...

REVIEW – The Elite: the story of special forces – from Ancient Sparta to the War on Terror

Fiennes had picked his moment well. Ever since the dramatic Iranian Embassy Siege of 1980, the press, and to some degree the public, have been obsessed by the idea of special forces ...

Back to the Drawing Board: the T-64 Tank

Although its ‘high-tech’ features, such as an auto-loader for the main armament and its ultra-compact multi-fuel engine, were superficially impressive, they proved to be complex to maintain and highly unreliable ...

Behind the Image

BEHIND THE IMAGE: Wind tunnel testing, Messerschmitt Bf 109, 1940

It may look like a scene from a movie shoot – Germany’s answer to The Dam Busters, perhaps – but this strikingly modern photograph from 1940 offers instead a real-life glimpse behind the scenes of a top-secret aeronautical project. The state-of-the-art wind tunnel at the Herman Goering Aviation Research Institute, near Braunschweig (or Brunswick) in Lower Saxony, was one of Germany’s most closely shrouded military sites. Spread over 1,000 acres, the Institute’s 60 buildings were low-rise, nestling under the treeline, and well camouflaged from the air. As a result, until the end ...
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BEHIND THE IMAGE: The Unknown Warrior, 1920

The coffin of the unknown warrior is carried into Westminster Abbey. On 11 November 1920, the largest funeral ever held in London took place – and yet the deceased was a man unknown to the hundreds of thousands of mourners who turned out in his honour. Described as the greatest outpouring of grief the country had ever known, the event was the burial of the Unknown Warrior, whose remains lie at Westminster Abbey alongside kings, princes, and other assorted dignitaries ...
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BEHIND THE IMAGE: The Paris Exodus

Eighty years ago, on 10 May 1940, the German assault on Western Europe began. The Nazi Wehrmacht stormed through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg with devastating ease. Paris was on edge. Remembering the previous war, the French government had prepared for a defensive conflict, and had not anticipated an invasion of the capital. But, by the beginning of June, the Nazis began to bomb Paris ahead of their full-scale takeover of France. This campaign of terror provoked an exodus – ...
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