Osprey

Drawing on difficult-to-access wartime documents and other contemporary sources, this is the first compact, illustrated study of the tactics and techniques of the US fast carriers of Task Forces 50, 58 and 38 during the naval war against Japan in 1943-45.This title concentrates on exactly how these (...)

Faced with an increasingly formidable anti-ship cruise missile threat from the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War, and with the recent memory of the kamikaze threat from World War II, the USN placed a great priority on developing air defence cruise missiles and getting them to sea to (...)

During the American War of Independence (1775-83), Congress issued almost 800 letters of marque, as a way of combating Britain's overwhelming naval and mercantile superiority. At first, it was only fishermen and the skippers of small merchant ships who turned to privateering, with mixed results. (...)

The bombing of Guernica has become a symbol of Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War, but the extent of the German commitment is often underestimated. The Luftwaffe sent 20,000 officers and men to Spain from 1936 to 1939, and the Condor Legion carried out many missions in support of the Spanish (...)

The siege of Constantinople in AD 717-18 was the supreme crisis of Western civilization.The Byzantine Empire had been reeling under the onslaught of Arabic imperialism since the death of the Prophet, whilst Jihadist armies had detached Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Carthage from imperial control and (...)

The final months of Allied naval bombardments on the Home Islands during World War II have, for whatever reason, frequently been overlooked by historians. Yet the Allies' final naval campaign against Japan involved the largest and arguably most successful wartime naval fleet ever assembled, and was (...)

The Battle of the Bulge raises many questions which, until now, have not been adequately answered: How did the major tank types perform during the battle? What were the specific lessons learned' from the combat? And did these lessons result in changes to tanks in the subsequent months?Offering (...)

The restoration of the Meiji Imperial dynasty in 1868, after 250 years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, decisively opened Japan to the outside world and the monarchy embraced modernization, including the creation of a new Westernized army. However, this modernization process was resisted by the (...)

The first two volumes of the History of the Panzerwaffe have described how the Germans transformed armored warfare from a lumbering and ponderous experiment in World War I into something that could decide the outcome of conflicts, and how the legendary Panzerwaffe overran Western Europe and reached (...)