Osprey

Hunt the Bismarck tells the story of Operation Rheinubung, the Atlantic sortie of the Nazi Germany's largest battleship in May 1941.Bismarck entered service in the summer of 1940. She was well-armed, with eight 15-inch guns as well as a powerful array of lighter weapons, while her armoured (...)

The army of the German Empire was born out of the once great Prussian army that Napoleon Bonaparte had humbled at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars. The eventual defeat of Napoleon initiated a slow process of military reform that gained momentum during the pan-German (...)

During the 14th and 15th centuries military tactics in Europe underwent a period of sustained transformation of which the outcome was the rejuvenation of the footsoldier as the major tactical unit. One nation alone stands principally responsible for this development - the Swiss Confederation. For (...)

Amphibious assault ships have been at the centre of nearly all of Britain's expeditionary campaigns since World War II, from the Suez crisis of 1956 to operations as far afield as Borneo (1963 66), the Falklands (1982), Sierra Leone (2000) and Iraq (2003). In major operations such as Suez and the (...)

Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle-making brothers from Dayton, Ohio, secured their place as the most famous names in aviation history when, on December 17, 1903, they made the first powered, controlled, and sustained heavier-than-air flight. But their success over the cold and windswept (...)

USS Iowa (BB-61) was the lead ship in one of the most famous classes of battleships ever commissioned into the US Navy. Transferred to the Pacific Fleet in 1944, the Iowa first fired her guns in anger in the Marshall Islands campaign, and sunk her first enemy ship, the Katori. The Iowa went on to (...)

Adopted from the Celts in the 1st century BC, the spatha, a lethal and formidable chopping blade, became the primary sword of the Roman soldier in the Later Empire. Over the following centuries, the blade, its scabbard, and its system of carriage underwent a series of developments, until by the 3rd (...)