The truth is that the Normandy Campaign was a vast enterprise, of engineering, logistics, strategy, and planning, but it was also, once under way, driven by events that could not be foreseen.
Books
REVIEW – The British are coming: the war for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775 – 1777
With his description of the events at Portsmouth, Atkinson once again justifies a New York Times review of a previous volume which described his work as ‘a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity… Atkinson is a master of what might be called “pointillism history”, assembling the small dots of pure colour into a vivid, tumbling narrative…’.
REVIEW – Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill, and the road to war
Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler strides boldly and confidently through a decade of British political and diplomatic history. Such history could be dull, but not in the hands of Bouverie, whose narrative is tense and written with great verve.
REVIEW – 24 Hours at Balaclava, 25 October 1854: Voices from the Battlefield
It was less a pitched battle than a succession of accidental collisions; less a decisive trial of strength than a momentary eruption of episodic violence that changed nothing and settled nothing.
REVIEW – Arnhem: the complete story of Operation Market Garden, 17 – 25 September 1944
William F Buckingham has written what may become the definitive British account of the Battle of Arnhem. In a crowded field, Buckingham’s meticulous reconstruction of the battle provides the reader with a detailed yet accessible narrative of those remarkable events of 75 years ago.
REVIEW – The American Military: a concise history
The American Military: a concise history is an essential introduction to the development of the US army. From the landing of the first English settlers at Jamestown to the protracted conflicts in the Middle East today, the book documents the key transformations that have occurred within the American armed forces over the centuries.
The sinking of the Lusitania
Anthony Richards uses first-hand testimony to recreate the dying moments of the stricken Lusitania on 7 May 1915.
REVIEW – Fighting the People’s War: the British Commonwealth armies and the Second World War
It is perhaps surprising that no one had written a history of the Commonwealth armies in the Second World War before this new book by Jonathan Fennell. At the heart of Fennell’s history is the story of the morale of the different armies – British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Indian.
MHM Book of the Year 2019 – Winners Announced
The ballots have been cast, the votes have been counted, and we are delighted to announce the winners of the MHM Book Awards 2019. We carefully curated a list of 2018’s best military-history titles and asked you, our readers, to vote for your favourite. Our selection included some of the best researched, most insightful, and most readable titles reviewed and featured in the magazine over the last year.
REVIEW – Seapower States: maritime culture, continental empires, and the conflict that made the modern world
Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, has been described as ‘the outstanding British naval historian of his generation’. Seapower States is the latest book in what has been an extraordinarily prolific few years for him, and it is certainly no conventional historical narrative.
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