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Books > Humanities > History > European history > 1750 to 1900
With this third volume John Gill brings to a close his magisterial
study of the war between Napoleonic France and Habsburg Austria.
The account begins with both armies recuperating on the banks of
the Danube. As they rest, important action was taking place
elsewhere: Eugene won a crucial victory over Johann on the
anniversary of Marengo, Prince Poniatowski's Poles outflanked
another Austrian archduke along the Vistula, and Marmont drove an
Austrian force out of Dalmatia to join Napoleon at Vienna. These
campaigns set the stage for the titanic Battle of Wagram. Second
only in scale to the slaughter at Leipzig in 1813, Wagram saw more
than 320,000 men and 900 guns locked in two days of fury that ended
with an Austrian retreat. The defeat, however, was not complete:
Napoleon had to force another engagement before Charles would
accept a ceasefire. The battle at Znaim, its true importance often
not acknowledged, brought an extended armistice that ended with a
peace treaty signed in Vienna. Gill uses an impressive array of
sources in an engaging narrative covering both the politics of
emperors and the privations and hardship common soldiers suffered
in battle. Enriched with unique illustrations, forty maps, and
extraordinary order-of-battle detail, this work concludes an
unrivalled English-language study of Napoleon's last victory.
The Napoleonic Wars gripped Europe, and beyond, for over ten years
at the beginning of the Nineteenth century. Hundreds of battles
were fought between the armies of France (and its allies) and all
those powers that wished to see Napoleon Bonaparte stopped in his
tracks and an end to the French Empire. The battles and sieges of
the Napoleonic Wars, which cost the lives of between 3 and 6
million men, made unprecedented use of large guns, and every
participating army possessed a range of artillery. With the wars
covering such a long period of time, and with so many armies
involved, the subject of Napoleonic artillery is a complicated one,
and no work has attempted to examine all the weapons involved in a
single, detailed volume. Until now. The product of years of
research, this book presents most of what is known about the
artillery pieces of the Napoleonic Wars. Including numerous
drawings, contemporary illustrations and modern photographs of
surviving guns, it will be an invaluable addition to the library of
historians, modellers, wargamers and re-enactors.
Any miniature wargame is greatly enhanced by realistic and
evocative scenery and buildings, but commercial ready-made pieces
can be expensive. Building your own can be a cost-effective and
very rewarding alternative, another hobby in itself, but it can be
hard to know where to start. Wargames Terrain and Buildings is a
series of books aimed at giving wargamers the skills, techniques
and guidance they need to create their own stunning and practical
model buildings. In this volume, master modeller Tony Hardwood
shares his years of experience and presents the reader with a wide
range of projects for the Napoleonic era. With the aid of
step-by-step photographs, he guides the reader through building and
finishing each of these models, which are organized in three
sections of increasing complexity and encompass a range of scales
and different materials. Nine projects are included but the
techniques and skills demonstrated along the way, along with
valuable advice on tools, construction materials and paints, can be
adapted and applied to a much wider range of structures to grace
your battlefields.
From Roger Knight, established by the multi-award winning The
Pursuit of Victory as 'an authority ... none of his rivals can
match' (N.A.M. Rodger), Britain Against Napoleon is the first book
to explain how the British state successfully organised itself to
overcome Napoleon - and how very close it came to defeat For more
than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in
continental Europe. How was it that despite multiple changes of
government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain
survived and eventually won a generation-long war against a regime
which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and
manpower? This book looks beyond the familiar exploits (and
bravery) of the army and navy during the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars. It shows the degree to which, because of the
magnitude and intensity of hostilities, the capacities of the whole
British population were involved: industrialists, farmers,
shipbuilders, gunsmiths and gunpowder manufacturers. The
intelligence war was also central; but no participants were more
important, Knight argues, than the bankers and international
traders of the City of London, without whom the armies of Britain's
allies could not have taken the field. ROGER KNIGHT was Deputy
Director of the National Maritime Museum until 2000, and now
teaches at the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of
Greenwich. In 2005 he published, with Allen Lane/Penguin, The
Pursuit of Victory: the life and achievement of Horatio Nelson,
which won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military History, the
Mountbatten Award and the Anderson Medal of the Society for
Nautical Research. The present book is a culmination of his
life-long interest in the workings of the late eighteenth-century
British state. 'Superb' - Spectator
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