Military History Matters

Latest issue

Military History Matters magazine
November 2019
is out now

Viking Surge

The very word 'Viking' conjures up images of fearsome longships, merciless invasions, and slaughtered victims. But were the Vikings unique in their savagery, or were they instead products of an era in which all those who wished to conquer did so without taking any prisoners?

Latest features

REVIEW – The Lion and the Dragon: Britain’s Opium Wars with China, 1839 – 1860

There can be little doubt that the export of opium from India to China by, among others, the Honourable East India Company is hard to condone. Indeed, Mark Simner makes the point that the trade was always kept quiet in ...

REVIEW – Panzer Commander Hermann Balck: Germany’s master tactician

Hermann Balch has been described as the ‘greatest German general no one ever heard of’. Stephen Robinson, a graduate of the Australian Command and Staff College, has attempted to address this paradox, but with only partial success ...

Viking Surge

Hurricane restored by volunteers

It perished in the freezing wastes of Arctic Russia on 20 June 1942. Now, thanks to a 20-year volunteer project, it has been fully restored and put on display at the Brooklands Museum at Weybridge in Surrey ...

MHM Caption Competition: November 2019

Can you think of something appropriately witty for this image taken from our War Reporters article about William Beach Thomas, featured in the November issue of the magazine? Leave your caption as a comment beneath the article ...

Advertisement Feature

The Battle of the Ardennes

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Ardennes, which took place in the Wallonia region of Belgium. To mark this date, Wallonia Belgium Tourism examine the build up to the German offensive, and the Battle’s opening manoeuvre.
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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: Spectators at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919

Perched on sofas and peering in from every angle, these Allied officers were obviously desperate to catch a glimpse of the momentous events unfolding next door. The Great War was finally coming to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the dazzling surroundings of the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. After the German surrender of November 1918, hostilities had ceased — but between January and June 1919, the representatives of 21 nations had met in ...
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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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