On 13 December 1939, while Britain was living through a ‘Phoney War’ at home, in the waters off the River Plate a vicious sea battle was being played out, pitting three small cruisers against the pride of Germany’s Navy: the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The Battle of the River Plate has acquired, over the subsequent […]
WWII
D-Day: Plan of Operations on 6 June, 1944
How were tens of thousands of infantry landed on the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944? How was the supply of ammo, fuel, water, rations, and everything else required by an army of invasion managed on crowded beaches under heavy fire from artillery and machine-guns? How were the beachheads protected from counterattack and given time […]
D-DAY TIMELINE
MHM places D-Day within the context of Operation Overlord, picking out some of the most brutal clashes and key events, from the huge-scale preparations to the Liberation of Paris.
WAR ON FILM – The Longest Day
Taylor Downing takes a look at how 1960s Hollywood dealt with one of the most important days of the Second World War. ‘Hollywood meets D-Day’ is probably the best way to describe the all-star spectacular The Longest Day released in 1962. Most of the key players in early 1960s Hollywood competed to be in the […]
WAR ON FILM – Overlord
Taylor Downing remembers Stuart Cooper’s ground-breaking 1975 World War II film. Stuart Cooper’s film Overlord (1975) is the only feature film ever produced by the Imperial War Museum. While the museum has worked closely with many television companies on documentary productions over the decades, Overlord uses the museum’s resources in the production of a drama-documentary […]
RECOMMENDED READ – Death from the Skies
Even though nearly 70 years have passed since the end of the Second World War, the statistics on the destruction caused by the aerial bombing campaigns still beggar belief. Around 400,000 people, many of whom were civilians, died within the 1942 borders of the German Reich. Up to 25,000 people, again mostly civilians, perished in […]
Film Review: The Railway Man
Based on the autobiography of WWII prisoner-of-war Eric Lomax, this moving and harrowing new film deals with the horrific torture inflicted on prisoners by the Japanese on the infamous Burma Railway. The set-up is cleverly orchestrated. The film begins as if it is going to be a saccharine love story between the charming stranger Patti […]
WAR CULTURE – Cricket in WWII
What did cricket mean to troops and civilians during WWII? Crispin Andrews has scoured the MCC library to find out. Even Hitler had the common decency to wait until the 1939 cricket season was almost over before invading Poland. When war broke out, cricket was seen as a metaphor for life for both English high […]
WMD – The Elefant
Eric Bryan examines one of the most fearsome machines of WWII. Germany’s advanced WWII war machinery included intercontinental ballistic missiles (the V-2), rocket planes (the Me 163 Komet), and jet fighters (the Me 262). The Wehrmacht was no less determined to attain ground superiority, and with its armour it likewise reached for the most powerful […]
WMD – The Kettenkrad
Eric Bryan examines the only gun tractor small enough to fit inside the hold of a Junker Ju 52 aircraft. Popularly named the ‘motorcycle halftrack’, Kettenkrad translates as ‘tracked motorcycle’. Also called the SdKfz 2 or Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101, the Kettenkrad was designed in 1939 as a gun tractor which could pull artillery through boggy, […]
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