French Armies of the Thirty Years' War presents the development of the French Army, one of the first standing armies in Europe, from 1617 to 1648. It shows how Louis XIII and Richelieu exploited the complex legacy of the Wars of Religion to the benefit of both the Crown and the Country.The Three (...)
Nominally at least, the bloody and ruinous eight-year war fought between Iran and Iraq was a confrontation dominated by operations on land. The traditional impression is that the resources devoted to naval warfare were minute in comparison to those of its major land battlefields. As so often, the (...)
Well away from the major battlefields on the ground in the Iran-Iraq War, and hidden from the gaze of the curious public, the navies and air forces of the two belligerents contested the waters of the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf. This naval aspect of the war still remains largely unknown and hugely (...)
In Last War of the Superfortresses the authors provide a detailed history of the confrontation between Soviet fighters and the United States Far East Air Force's B-29 Superfortress' bombers during the Korean War of 1950 1953, drawing on Military documents in the Central Archive of the Ministry of (...)
Ireland at the outset of the Tudor era was a highly militarized society, with more than sixty Gaelic lordships maintaining independent armed forces. By the 1540s, the centralizing Tudor state had ended the self-rule enjoyed by the Anglo-Irish Pale and was embarked on an increasingly severe program (...)
In the early seventeenth century the Principality of Transylvania was a new state, organized in the decades that followed the dissolution of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. The rulers of Transylvania were vassals of the Ottoman Empire but enjoyed a (...)
This book describes and analyses the Manchu, or Qing, army in all its aspects. The emphasis lies on the Qing army in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, because this is the time when the Manchu military system developed its own characteristics and reached maturity. Furthermore, having (...)
In December 1979 the USSR's 40th Army crossed the border into Afghanistan. Special forces troops the infamous GRU Spetsnaz and KGB agents had already entered the country and in a fierce gun battle assassinated Afghanistan's President Hafizullah Amin in Tajbeg Palace so that he could be replaced by (...)
On 24 February 2022, the Russian Federation launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine. Coming after years of tensions following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and thinly veiled direct armed support for separatists fighting in Donbass and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, observers gave Ukraine's (...)
A frequent visitor to Spain and Portugal who has specialized in the history of the Peninsular War for his entire career, Charles Esdaile has visited most of the battlefields and other sites associated with that conflict. In this work, he places his unrivalled knowledge of the subject at the (...)