Military History Matters

Latest issue

Military History Matters magazine
March 2019
is out now

Grant and the Overland Campaign

Grant’s conduct of the Overland Campaign has sometimes been criticised as bludgeoning – lacking in tactical finesse, restricted to frontal attacks, callous about casualties. But is this assessment fair? Neil Faulkner weighs up the debate.

Latest features

Grant and the Overland Campaign

War Reporters: Xenophon

Introducing Seema Syeda's new series on battlefield scoops throughout the ages. Greek commander Xenophon The practice of recording the events of war is as old as war itself. The likes of Herodotus and Thucydides are well known as great ancient ...

Legendary Ancient Fortress Discovered in Egypt

The ancient city gate, located near the fortress. Image: S E Sidebotham/Antiquity The location of a fortress dating back to the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt has been found at Berenike on the Red Sea coast. The Ptolemaic dynasty was a
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The Military History Behind the Vagrancy Act

The 1824 Vagrancy Act – which criminalises rough sleeping – has become the subject of public debate after Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, committed to repeal it in the event of a Labour government. A parliamentary debate ...

MHM Competition – Win a pair of tickets to The D-Day Darlings at Union Chapel London

MHM are giving away a pair of tickets to see The D-Day Darlings at Union Chapel in London on 1 March 2019. The D-Day Darlings are a nine-piece group who are supported by Dame Vera Lynn. The singing group consist ...

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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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