In 1942 Sir Winston Churchill stirringly declared, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ His fervent encomium of the Empire was almost religious in sentiment. The Empire stood as a ‘veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.’ It was the bulwark of […]
Books
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 […]
RECOMMENDED READ – Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power
It is 1799. After a decade of political turmoil, more than 40,000 executions and a brief but bloody Reign of Terror, France has at last thrown off the shackles of absolutist tyranny. Or has it? In the second hefty volume (800 pages) of his biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, the distinguished Australian scholar Philip Dwyer takes […]
MHM INTERVIEWS…Saul David
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner spoke to Saul David about his major new book All the King’s Men: the British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo. You don’t have a military background, but you’ve always been a military historian. How did you get into it? I did in fact mull over joining the Army when […]
Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing
Military Times Promotion SPIES IN THE SKY is the thrilling, little known story of the partner organisation to the famous code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. It is the story of the daring reconnaissance pilots who took aerial photographs over Occupied Europe during the most dangerous days of the Second World War, and of the photo […]
Right and Glory by Max Adams
May 1940. Explosives expert Eddie Dawson and logistics specialist Major Sykes are sent to Eben Emael in Belgium, notoriously the most impregnable fort in the world.
British Spies & Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and Ireland 1916-1945
Anglo-Irish relations can be likened to a long unhappy marriage in which, although the couple have finally divorced, they still share the same house, bump into each other in the kitchen, and attend family events together. This superb book tells the hidden inside story of the ‘marriage’ during and after the break-up. It begins with […]
New Ways of War by Tom Wintringham
We look at a rich mix of militia tactics and anti-fascist politics in a British bestseller from the dark days of 1940. Tom Wintringham’s New Ways of War was a response to the acute national crisis Britain faced in the summer of 1940. He sums it up himself in the opening lines: ‘In September 1939, […]
To War with Wellington: from the Peninsular to Waterloo, by Peter Snow
Wellington’s Peninsular campaign was waged amid a war that remains totally dominated by naval strategy within the British historical memory. Where glory was available at sea, land operations were relegated to colonial operations or, by borrowing enough cash – at more favourable terms than could the French – to paying other European powers to keep […]
Wavell: Soldier & Statesman by Victoria Schofield
Pen & Sword, £30 ISBN 978-0719563201 Archibald Wavell, as his name implies (his grandfather, father, and son were all soldiers, and all were called Archibald Wavell) was a General of the old school: conservative, steady as a rock, upright, unflappable – and often very unlucky. Of him, it can truly be said, as his fellow […]