The German invasion of the Netherlands was meant to be a lightning-fast surgical strike, aimed at shoring up the right flank of the assault on France and Belgium. With a bold plan based largely on Luftwaffe air power, air-landing troops, and the biggest airborne assault yet seen, a Dutch surrender (...)
This illustrated study explores, in detail, the RAF's first concentrated air campaign of World War II against one of the hardest and most important targets in Germany - the industrial heartland of the Ruhr that kept Hitler's war machine running.Between March and July 1943, RAF Bomber Command (...)
A fascinating study of the devastating new form of warfare that redrew the map of Europe in the opening year of World War II, bringing about the military collapse and capitulation of seven modern industrialized nations.On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany launched the invasion of Poland, employing a (...)
In the early 1880s, Britain intervened in independent Egypt and seized control of the Suez Canal. British forces were soon deployed to Egypt's southern colony, the Sudan, where they confronted a determined and capable foe amid some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. In 1881 an Islamic (...)
This superbly illustrated study explores the epic clashes of British and German heavy cruisers at the beginning of World War II.The opposing heavy cruisers of the German Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy engaged in a global game of cat and mouse during the opening years of World War II. This was a (...)
This is the compelling story of an Eternal City brought low, of the terror and hardship of occupation, and of the disparate army of partisan fighters, displaced aristocrats, Vatican priests, Allied POWs and ordinary citizens who battled for the liberation of Rome. In September 1943, following wave (...)
Driven by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the insecurities it provoked in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi dictatorship, the Iran-Iraq War would become the largest conventional conflict of the period. Curiously little-known considering its scale and longevity, the struggle between Iran and Iraq was (...)
In March 1941, an anti-German coup in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia prompted Hitler to order an invasion using allied Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian forces. Operation Marita was an invasion of Yugoslavia and simultaneously Greece. At the same time, the constituent region of Croatia broke (...)
The crossing of the river Rhine marked the beginning of the end of the Third Reich, but the Wehrmacht would fight ferociously on its home soil until the fall of Berlin. The Battle of Germany saw the most advanced tanks of the Allies pitted against the remnants of the once-formidable Panzerwaffe, (...)