Military History Matters

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Military History Matters magazine
February 2020 is out now

Willing executioners

Historian Christopher Browning labelled members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 ‘ordinary men’. Neither of the SS or the Wehrmacht, they were mostly middle-aged, unskilled workers. So what drove them to murder 38,000 civilians in Poland at the height of the war? In our special this time, we drill down to the level of the individual perpetrator, to ask to what degree ordinary people were responsible.

Latest features

REVIEW – Aerial Warfare: the battle for the skies

This book is written rather in the style of an excellent set of lecture notes produced by a diligent tutor. Frank Ledwidge, a Fellow of Law and Strategy at the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, leaves very few stones ...

Back to the Drawing Board: the Davy Crockett ‘Tactical’ Nuke

In the 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. To many, it seemed to be a question of when, rather than if, Soviet forces would exploit their overwhelming numerical superiority with a ‘steamroller’ offensive against Western Europe ...

War Reporters: Kate Webb

Kate Webb was the war reporter who came back from the dead ...

REVIEW – The hidden places of WWII

Like a sort of Second World War smorgasbord, you can take a look and pull tasty morsels out of Hidden Places of World War II. After digesting these, you look for some more titbits. The wartime stories are all linked ...

War Reporters: Bennet Burleigh

At the time of his death in 1914, Bennet Burleigh was quite possibly the most famous war correspondent in the world. The Daily Telegraph, the paper for which he had spent a large part of his career reporting, published a ...

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: 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: 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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