Military History Matters

Latest issue

Military History Matters magazine
July 2019
is out now

Julius Caesar: Europe’s greatest military commander?

The story of Julius Caesar’s military career is that of a special relationship between a brilliant commander and an elite fighting force. Caesar was a skilled politician and a master of military engineering. Highly drilled, heavily armoured, and tightly disciplined, the legions of the Late Republic were superb instruments of war. We analyse how Caesar used them to devastating effect.

Latest features

MHM July Caption Competition

Think of something appropriately witty for this image from our feature on Barbarossa, published in the July issue of Military History Matters. Leave your caption as a comment below. The best caption will be judged by the editorial team and ...

MHM July Quiz – win 24 Hours at Balaclava!

This issue, we’re giving away three copies of 24 Hours at Balaclava, courtesy of the History Press.
At the Battle of Balaclava, the British squandered a near victory against Russia by recklessly sending 664 British light cavalry spurring down ...

Julius Caesar: Europe’s greatest military commander?

War Reporters: William Howard Russell

Seema Syeda on battlefield scoops throughout the ages. William Howard Russell William Howard Russell was one of the most prolific and revolutionary journalists of his time. Best known for his reporting on the Crimean War, he narrated the events of ...

The Troubles: Northern Ireland, 1968-1998

The wounds are still raw. It was a bitter conflict, it left many grieving, and it remains well within living memory. But that does not mean that military historians should not study it and attempt to understand it. Patrick Mercer ...

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: North Vietnam

North Vietnamese Radio Team, 1970 The radio team of a North Vietnamese attack group photographed during the offensive on the city of Quang Tri in 1970. An explosion has just gone off in the background, and three troops advance through the smoke. A soldier takes aim to provide covering fire, while the two men in the foreground, with stoic concentration on their faces, attempt to use the radio amid the chaos of battle. When Quang Tri was still the South’s border with North Vietnam, it suffered a major attack ...
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BEHIND THE IMAGE: Charge of the Royal Naval Division, 1915

This photograph shows infantry from the British Royal Naval Division climbing out of the trenches as if for a charge at the Battle of Gallipoli during 1915. Every man grasps their rifle with bayonet fitted, ready for the kind of close-quarters encounter with the enemy that it was expected – wrongly – would decide the war. The hills in the background are typical of the Gallipoli peninsula, making the terrain that had to be covered by the Allied forces uneven and difficult to negotiate. This photograph was taken by ...
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