In the post-war years, they were remembered on monuments and in cemeteries, ‘made present’ by absence, by anonymity rather than by naming. The bereaved had no bodies over which to grieve, only the landscape itself and a few souvenirs sent home from the front.
Books
REVIEW – Churchill and Stalin: comrades-in-arms during the Second World War
As Churchill liked to say, to defeat the Nazis the Russians gave their blood, the Americans their money, and Britain held out for the crucial year from the summer of 1940.
REVIEW – Hunger: how food shaped the course of the First World War
Hunger is breezy in its approach, but the subject Blom discusses is a serious one. Indeed, the spectre of food – or lack of it – haunts the First World War.
REVIEW – Race of Aces: WWII’s elite airmen and the epic battle to become master of the sky
Thirty years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews have resulted in this fast-paced book seeing the light of day – a book so captivating that it reads almost like a pacy and well-researched novel.
REVIEW – The King’s Irish: the Royalist Anglo-Irish Foot of the English Civil War, 1643-1646
Just as there was no single Parliamentarian army during the English Civil War, there was no single Royalist Army either. But while there are a number of works about the various armies which formed the Parliamentarian forces during the Civil War, Royalist forces tend to be studied as a single entity.
REVIEW – Britain’s War: A New World, 1942 – 1947
Like the first volume, Britain’s War is not a military history, although the great battles of the war are described in some detail. It is not a political history either, though there is much analysis of political arguments. Nor is it an economic history, although it includes much economics.
REVIEW – Conflict Landscapes: an archaeology of the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War
The approach is admirably interdisciplinary, blending traditional archaeological fieldwork with historical documentation, and analysis of 38 photographs from the 15th International Brigade.
REVIEW – Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: how a British civil servant helped cause the Second World War
Adrian Phillips gives us a new and fascinating angle on the whole sorry saga of miscalculation and moral surrender that led up to the Second World War.
REVIEW – Military Strategy: a global history
Black’s ‘shotgun’ approach takes us from Thucydides to Vergennes via Clausewitz, Napoleon, and Hitler, as he attempts to blend incisive historical insight with contemporary practice.
REVIEW – Dresden: the fire and the darkness
Sinclair McKay’s well-researched, detailed, and all-embracing book is the first major study of the bombing of Dresden to be published for 15 years, and covers equally the pre-war history of the city – ‘The Florence of Germany’ – the horrors of the RAF and USAAF attacks, and the mainly Stalinist-style rebuilding prior to German reunification.
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