Military History Matters

Latest issue

Military History Matters magazine
August 2019
is out now

Operation Market Garden

The world’s largest ever airborne operation was launched during September 1944, with less than a week of planning. This was one of many ingredients in what, for the Allies, would become a major strategic setback. What went wrong?

Latest features

MHM August Caption Competition

Think of something appropriately witty for this image from our feature on the Bombay Grenadiers at Maiwand, published in the August issue of Military History Matters. Leave your caption as a comment below. The best caption will be judged by the editorial ...

MHM August Quiz

This issue, we’re giving away three copies of Arms and Armour of the English Civil Wars. The English Civil Wars tore families and friendships apart, setting father against son and brother against brother. Raging across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, ...

Operation Market Garden

Julius Caesar: Europe’s greatest military commander?

The story of Julius Caesar’s military career is that of a special relationship between a brilliant commander and an elite fighting force. Caesar was a skilled politician and a master of military engineering. Highly drilled, heavily armoured, and tightly disciplined, ...

War Reporters: William Howard Russell

Seema Syeda on battlefield scoops throughout the ages. William Howard Russell William Howard Russell was one of the most prolific and revolutionary journalists of his time. Best known for his reporting on the Crimean War, he narrated the events of ...

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: North Vietnam

North Vietnamese Radio Team, 1970 The radio team of a North Vietnamese attack group photographed during the offensive on the city of Quang Tri in 1970. An explosion has just gone off in the background, and three troops advance through the smoke. A soldier takes aim to provide covering fire, while the two men in the foreground, with stoic concentration on their faces, attempt to use the radio amid the chaos of battle. When Quang Tri was still the South’s border with North Vietnam, it suffered a major attack ...
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BEHIND THE IMAGE: Charge of the Royal Naval Division, 1915

This photograph shows infantry from the British Royal Naval Division climbing out of the trenches as if for a charge at the Battle of Gallipoli during 1915. Every man grasps their rifle with bayonet fitted, ready for the kind of close-quarters encounter with the enemy that it was expected – wrongly – would decide the war. The hills in the background are typical of the Gallipoli peninsula, making the terrain that had to be covered by the Allied forces uneven and difficult to negotiate. This photograph was taken by ...
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