Military History Matters

Latest issue

Military History Matters magazine
May 2019
is out now

Yi Sun-sin: history’s greatest admiral

When we think of great naval commanders, Nelson immediately comes to mind. He fought 13 battles, winning 8. Admiral Yi Sun-sin fought 23 battles against Japan between 1592 and 1598, and won every one of them without losing a single ship. In 14 of these battles, moreover, not a single Japanese ship survived. How did he accomplish so much, and why was Japan unable to defeat him?

Latest features

Yi Sun-sin: history’s greatest admiral

MHM May Quiz – win a copy of HMS Belfast Pocket Manual

This issue, we’re giving away three copies of the HMS Belfast Pocket Manual, courtesy of Osprey. A familiar sight on the Thames at London Bridge, HMS Belfast is a Royal Navy light cruiser, launched in March 1938. Belfast was part ...

Polly Napper collects the MHM Book of the Year 2019 award on behalf of Peter Hart, author of The Last Battle

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 ...

MHM April Caption Competition

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

MHM April Quiz – win a copy of Spomenik Monument Database

This issue, we’re giving away three copies of the Spomenik Monument Database, courtesy of FUEL. Spomenik – the Serbo-Croat/Slovenian word for ‘monument’ – refers to a series of memorials built in Tito’s Republic of Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the ...

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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