Seema Syeda watches the premiere of The Head and the Load at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The past year has seen a whole raft of performance art, poignant memoir, and academic enquiry proliferate across the world stage in commemoration of the centenary of the end of the ‘war to end all wars’. The UK’s own 14-18NOW […]
WWI
RAF Museum London: into the future
Seema Syeda reviews the newly remodelled RAF Museum. Museums, I thought in a rather prosaic way as I sat underneath the bomb bay of an Avro Vulcan B2 in the RAF Museum’s Hangar 5, usually chronicle the events of the past. Meandering through the corridors of the British Museum, for instance, gazing at the ossified warriors […]
WWI: Pershing on the Western Front
No general in American history held the kind of absolute power General Pershing wielded. With complete backing from President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D Baker, Pershing could shape the American Expeditionary Force, due to deploy on the Western Front of the First World War, as he saw fit. But how successful was his military strategy?
Shell shock cover-up at Passchendaele
Taylor Downing reveals an official cover-up of mental illness in the later years of the war. It was not just the scale of the physical casualties that overwhelmed the British Army in the summer of 1916 on the Somme, terrible though these were – 38,000 wounded to be processed through medical facilities on the first day […]
The Somme’s forgotten history
Film-maker Ross Barnwell is crowdfunding for a new documentary drama based on Geoffrey Malins, the cameraman who famously shot footage of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Here’s a sneak preview of the stories Barnwell uncovered while filming.
MHM 91 – April 2018
The April issue of Military History Monthly, the British military history magazine, is now on sale. In this issue: ON THE COVER: BIRTH OF THE RAF 100 years after its birth, renowned military historian Jeremy Black revisits the creation of a revolutionary military organisation: the Royal Air Force. SPECIAL: CHAKDARA, 1897 – THE OTHER RORKE’S DRIFT? In an […]
Kaiserschlacht, Spring 1918
Could the Germans have won the First World War in 1918? Almost certainly. A quarter of a century later, the tide of war would turn irretrievably against Hitler’s Third Reich in 1942/1943. The massive industrial power of the Soviet Union and the United States combined – still rising towards a wartime peak –guaranteed eventual defeat. The outcome was far more open in 1917/1918.
MHM 90 – March 2018
The March issue of Military History Monthly, the British military history magazine, is now on sale. In this issue: THE FIRST BLITZKRIEG This month our 17-page special feature looks back on Kaiserschlacht –General Ludendorff’s great offensive of spring 1918. Kaiserschlacht ushered in a new tactical doctrine of speed, surprise, and infiltration that almost won the war for Germany. In our first […]
MHM 89 – February 2018
The February issue of Military History Monthly, the British military history magazine, is now on sale. In this issue: ON THE COVER: SPARTAN LAST STAND American military historian Fred Chiaventone recounts the Spartan defence of the Hot Gates at Thermopylae, 480 BC. SPECIAL: LEE AND JACKSON This month, our 15-page special looks at the partnership between two […]
Pigeons at Passchendaele
Gervase Phillips reports on the vital role of the ‘pigeon post’ amid Passchendaele’s waterlogged crater-fields. For Major Alec Waley, the commanding officer of the British Expeditionary Force’s Carrier Pigeon Service, 31 July 1917 was a peculiarly tense day, but ultimately a very satisfying one. It was the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres […]
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