One of the greatest and most terrible years in world history.'This war has now assumed the character', wrote Benito Mussolini, before 1941 was six months old, 'of a war between two worlds', and the Italian dictator had rarely predicted more truly. Before the year had ended, following Hitler's surprise assault on Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, thirty-seven nations were engaged in an all-out war reminiscent of Armageddon, 'the battle of that great day of God Almighty'. Richard Collier's latest narrative spans both this entire, devastating year, as well as the events that led up to it. From the hunting of the Bismarck through the North Atlantic to the triumphs of Rommel's Afrika Korps, from the horror and heroism of besieged Leningrad to the debacles of Hong Kong, Malaya and the Far East, this is a panorama of truly world-wide proportions. An unputdownable narrative of the most extraordinary year in world history, perfect for readers of Max Hastings, James Holland and Antony Beevor.

This book describes the wartime experiences of Reverend David Railton, MC, who was a chaplain on the Western Front during WWI. As a chaplain, Railton supported soldiers in their worst moments, he buried the fallen, comforted the wounded, wrote to the families of the missing and killed, and helped the survivors to remember and mark the loss of their comrades so that they were able to move on and do their job. He was present at many battles, and received the Military Cross for rescuing an officer and two men under heavy fire on the Somme. It was Railton's idea to bring home the body of a fallen comrade, whose identity was unknown, from the battlefields of Belgium and France to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Although suffering from what was obviously Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after the war he carried out his duties as the vicar of Margate and took on many philanthropic works on behalf of the poor, especially supporting ex-servicemen who came home and had to deal with the aftermath of a terrible war and crippling unemployment. The story of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior has been told several times, including the part played by the Reverend David Railton, M.C. However, this book - based on hundreds of Railton's original letters, notes, and writings - is the first book to tell the story of the man himself and his flag, which he used as an altar cloth and shroud throughout the war, was consecrated a year after the burial of the Unknown Warrior, and now hangs in Westminster Abbey.

From the army of Marc Antony in the 1st century BC, Roman generals hired Oriental heavy armoured cavalry to serve in their military alongside the legions. These troops, both from the northern steppes and the Persian frontiers, continued an ancient tradition of using heavy armour and long lances, and fought in a compact formation for maximum shock effect. They were quite distinct from conventional Roman light cavalry, and they served across the Empire, including in Britain. They became ever more important during the 3rd century wars against Parthia, both to counter their cavalry and to form a mobile strategic reserve.

Displaying these impressive and imposing cavalry units using vivid specially commissioned artwork, this first book in a two part series on Roman Heavy Cavalry examines their use over the Imperial period up to the fall of Western Empire in the 5th century A.D.

As the war began to swing in favour of the Allies, it became clear that no final defeat of the Third Reich would be possible until the armoured monsters of the Panzerwaffe were defeated. But who would, or even could, take on the mighty Tigers and Panthers, just a handful of which could stop entire formations in their tracks? The answer lay with the formation of a new type of unit, the Tank Destroyer Battalion. This is the story of the men and machines that made up the very first Tank Destroyer Battalion, the 601st, from their unique training and formation, to the final, desperate battles in the heart of Nazi Germany. Packed with rare material, letters, diaries and previously unpublished photographs, and now available in paperback, this is an intense and intimate chronicle of the men who fought the Panzers in an astonishing 10 campaigns and 546 days of lethal combat.

Civil wars are among the most difficult problems in world politics. While mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some positive results in helping to end civil wars, they fall short in preventing them in the first place. In Incentivizing Peace, Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth show that considering civil wars from a developmental perspective presents opportunities to prevent the escalation of nascent armed conflicts into full-scale civil wars. The authors demonstrate that highly-structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, or regional development banks) are particularly well-positioned to engage in civil war prevention. When such IGOs have been actively engaged in nations on the edge, their potent economic tools have helped to steer rebel-government interactions away from escalation and toward peaceful settlement. Incentivizing Peace provides enlightening case evidence that IGO participation is a key to better predicting, and thus preventing, the outbreak of civil war.

This is the first systematic pan-European study of the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who fought - either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures - for the Waffen-SS (or auxiliary police formations operating in the occupied East). Building on the findings of regional studies by other scholars - many of them included in this volume - The Waffen-SS aims to arrive at a fuller picture of those non-German citizens (from Eastern as well as Western Europe) who served under the SS flag. Where did the non-Germans in the SS come from (socially, geographically, and culturally)? What motivated them? What do we know about the practicalities of international collaboration in war and genocide, in terms of everyday life, language, and ideological training? Did a common transnational identity emerge as a result of shared ideological convictions or experiences of extreme violence? In order to address these questions (and others), The Waffen-SS adopts an approach that does justice to the complexity of the subject, adding a more nuanced, empirically sound understanding of collaboration in Europe during World War II, while also seeking to push the methodological boundaries of the historiographical genre of perpetrator studies by adopting a transnational approach.

This publication from PeKo Publishing gives an overview of three subversions of the Panther medium tank with the help of 103 original, large and high quality photographs, many of which were unpublished so far.

M4 Sherman was the most popular American tank of World War II. Between February, 1942, and June, 1945, a total of 49.000 units of all versions were produced. Dozens of variants of M4 tanks were created. They differed in the method of hull production (welded, riveted, casted) as well as turret, main armament and additional equipment. Several special versions were also made (especially for the needs of the Normandy landing in 1944): the floating Sherman DD (Duplex Drive), Sherman Crab (with anti-mine trawl), Sherman Dozer (with bulldozer at the front - for demining and engineering tasks), Sherman Zippo (Sherman with a flamethrower mounted instead of the main gun).

Hitler's drive to modernize his armed forces gained a new momentum with the arrival on stage of Col. Heinz Guderian - the future spiritus movens of German armored warfare doctrine. Behind the scenes German design teams were busy working on prototypes of vehicles that would soon become the tools of the future war - light Pz.Kpfw. I and II, heavy (in keeping with contemporary classification) Pz.Kpfw. IV and medium Pz.Kpfw. III armed with a 37 mm gun. In the early stages of fighting in France it became clear that the vehicle didn't carry enough punch and in later marks of the tank the 37 mm main gun was superseded by a 50 mm weapon. The ultimate version of the Pz.Kpfw. III was armed with a short barrel 75 mm gun, the largest that the tank's turret could accommodate.

Irish troops had fought for Louis XIV in the 1670s, under Irish officers who had little choice but to fight in foreign service, with the blessing of Charles II. With the accession of James II, and the religious politics of who might earn the English crown, they became embroiled in the Jacobite succession crisis, fighting in Ireland, then sent to France under Lord Mountcashel in 1689. With the fall of Limerick in 1691, Patrick Sarsfield led the second 'flight' of 'Wild Geese' to the continent, to fight in a war for the French, against the Grand Alliance of Europe, in the vain hope that their loyalty might warrant French support in a return to Ireland under a Jacobite king. From the Nine Years War, through the War of the Spanish Succession, and beyond, their descendents would be present at Fontenoy, Culloden and in the Americas, forever destined to fight for a cause and land which had changed beyond recognition. D.P.Graham explains the origins of the brigade and its regiments, the personalities who led them and formed their reputation, and the circumstances of their final dissolution in the aftermath of French Revolution.

The armour clashes in May 1940 were the biggest the world had yet seen, as the sweeping German advances of that period came to epitomize Blitzkrieg. The Wehrmacht's Panzer III was well matched by the French Somua S35 tanks, the two representing very different design philosophies and yet both ranking among the best in the world at the time. Fully illustrated with specially commissioned colour artwork, this work draws upon the latest research to provide a definitive analysis of the clash between these two high-quality, cutting-edge tank designs. It describes one of the key duels at the heart of a new type of warfare, in the epic battles at the outset of Hitler's conquest of France and the Low Countries.

One of Osprey's most popular titles now available in a handsome paperback edition. The exploits of the 3rd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment have long been overshadowed by those of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion. Yet the actions of the 3rd Battalion during the D-Day landings were every bit as incredible. This is the astounding story of how, after suffering many immediate casualties on landing, the surviving paratroopers fought on towards their objective against horrendous odds. Using fascinating first-hand accounts of the soldiers and the French civilians who witnessed the Normandy campaign, and illustrated with black and white photographs and maps throughout, the authors offer a unique and comprehensive account of the experiences of the 3rd Battalion from training through to D-Day and beyond.

The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross was principally the highest award given to German fighters to recognise extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership during World War II. The Gold Close Combat Clasp, awarded for at least 50 days of hand-to-hand fighting and often regarded in higher esteem than the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross by the German infantry, was only awarded to 631 German soldiers. Out of the millions who fought for Germany in World War II, only 98 received both the Knight's Cross and the Close-Combat Clasp in Gold; providing definitive reference with action-packed narrative and exhaustive footnotes, this volume includes profiles of those servicemen from the Army, the Luftwaffe, and the Waffen SS. Packed with hundreds of photos, many of them not available elsewhere, this is a fascinating profile of some of the bravest soldiers of World War II.

The Soviet T-34 was the most produced tank of the Second World War and its revolutionary sloping armour became a major influence on future tank design. With its combination of heavy firepower, mobility and protection, the T-34 gave the Red Army a war-winning weapon with which to break the German Army on the Eastern Front. A mainstay of the Soviet armoured divisions, it was widely exported after the war and in 2017 it remains in frontline service with many third world countries. Author Mark Healy combines a detailed technical examination of the T-34 with its legendary combat history.

For centuries, mounted cavalry dominated the battlefield through shock and mobility. Cavalry from Hoof to Track traces the evolution of cavalry through the ages, from the warhorse to the tank and helicopter, demonstrating how cavalry's survival has depended on creative responses to the changing dynamics of modern warfare. The sweeping narrative covers the ancient world, medieval knights, the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, the world wars, the Cold War, the Gulf War, and more.

In the summer of 1967, the Marines in I Corps, South Vietnam's northernmost military region, were doing everything they could to lighten the pressure on the besieged Con Thien Combat Base. Still fresh after months of relatively light action around Khe Sanh, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was sent to the Con Thien region to secure the combat bases' endangered main supply route. On 7 September 1967, its first full day in the new area of operations, separate elements of the battalion were attacked by at least two battalions of North Vietnamese infantry, and both were nearly overrun in night-long battles. On 10 September, while advancing to a new sector near Con Thien, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was attacked by at least a full North Vietnamese regiment, the same NVA unit that had attacked it two days earlier. Divided into two separate defensive perimeters, the Marines battled through the afternoon and evening against repeated assaults by waves of NVA regulars intent upon achieving a major victory. In a battle described as 'Custer's Last Stand-With Air Support', the Americans prevailed by the narrowest of margins. Ambush Valley is an unforgettable account of bravery and survival under impossible conditions. It is told entirely in the words of the men who faced the ordeal together - an unprecedented mosaic of action and emotion woven into an incredibly clear and vivid combat narrative by one of today's most effective military historians. Ambush Valley achieves a new standard for oral history. It is a war story not to be missed.

Allied success in invading Fortress Europe (the area of Continental Europe occupied by Nazi Germany) depended on getting armor onto the beaches as fast as possible. This book explains how the Allies developed the specialist tanks it needed, their qualities, deployment and numbers, and how they performed on the two crucial days when France was invaded, firstly in Normandy and then in Provence. The focus of this volume will be on the specialized tanks developed for the Operation Neptune amphibious landings including the Duplex Drive amphibious Sherman tanks used on both the US and British/Canadian beaches. It also covers the specialized engineer tanks called "Armoured Funnies" of the British 79th Armoured Division and addresses the popular myth that US Army refusal to employ the Armoured Funnies was a principal cause for the high casualties at Omaha Beach. There is also coverage of Operation Overlord's "Forgotten D-Day", the amphibious landings of Operation Dragoon. This book addresses why there were so few Panzers opposing the landings from the German perspective as well as detailing the extent of German tank/assault gun activity on D-Day.

Born in Kulm, Germany, on 17 June 1888, Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was the son of an army officer. He eventually joined the German Army and was commissioned in the Jaegers in 1908 where he became a communications specialist. He fought in the First World War and afterwards was a member of the right-wing Freikorps units. Between the wars, Guderian became a catalyst for developing a Panzer division in the German Army. By February 1938 he had been promoted to Lieutenant General; later that year Hitler appointed Guderian to the new post of Chief of Mobile Troops. Guderian was a man of ideas equipped with the ability to turn inspiration into reality. A master of strategy and tactics, he was the officer who led the attack on Poland in September and in so doing introduced the world to the reality of Blitzkrieg. This biography draws on material from Enigma sources and information taken directly from the extensive Guderian family archives to explore the man who was partly responsible for the development of modern tank warfare and who is considered to be the father of Blitzkrieg.The author also looks at Guderian s reaction to the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler as well as illuminates the struggles within the German hierarchy, in the process investigating why Guderian was so admired by some while denigrated by others.

This book examines the origins and development of the Polish 'Winged' Hussars. Using many years' painstaking research drawn from unpublished Polish sources, the author provides a rounded view of the training, tactics, appearance and experiences of these legendary and fascinating warriors. Most dramatic of all Hussar characteristics were the 'wings' worn on the back or on the saddle, although not all Hussars wore them, and their purpose has been fiercely debated. The Hussars terrified the Turks, Tatars, Muscovite boyars, Ukrainian Cossacks and Swedes, who did everything to avoid facing them directly in battle.

When Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the 23-tonne Panzer III was in the vanguard of the German assault. It saw widespread use during the Second World War in campaigns that included Poland, France, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, North Africa and Normandy. Centrepiece of the Haynes Panzer III Tank Manual is the Bovington Tank Museum's PzKpfw III Ausf L, which has been restored to running condition. Full coverage is given of the tank's design, construction, war service and the restoration of the Tank Museum's Ausf L version.

Readers have come to expect a level of detail and critical rigour from the established military historian and author Bryan Perrett. They will not be disappointed at all here by this new publication. Focussing predominantly on the British armoured car units of World War One, it also untangles many fascinating strands forming the history of modern warfare. Full of detail, it acquaints the reader with the complete history of the armoured car, from invention onwards, setting the history of its Great War service career firmly in context. Well written in an accessible style, this publication serves as an impressive tribute to the armoured car, one of the most effective weapons utilised by the allies during the course of the Great War.

This book is the first comprehensive manual on the law of armed conflict prepared by a team of expert scholars and practitioners working for and with the UK Ministry of Defence. It covers all aspects of the law of armed conflict as applied today, including means and methods of warfare, the treatment of civilians and other non-combatants - including prisoners of war - and the conduct of operations in all three environments: land, sea and air. It also includes discussion of some of the key elements of relevance in the modern strategic environment, not least the legal aspects of internal armed conflict and the application of the law during peace support operations. This is a significant publication providing sound evidence of the legal views of one of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. As such it will become an essential reference and source for legal scholars working in this field, for officials working in foreign and defence ministries around the globe, and for military officers and lawyers requiring a sound grasp of the legal framework of military operations

The SU-76 assault gun was the second most widely manufactured Soviet armoured fighting vehicle of World War II, out-numbered only by the legendary T-34. Inspired in part by the German Marder series of tank destroyers, Soviet designers realized that the chassis of the obsolete T-70 light tank could be adapted to a much more substantial gun if it was placed in a fixed casemate rather than in a turret. This led to the design of the SU-76, which saw its combat debut at Kursk in the summer of 1943. The SU-76 was deployed primarily as an infantry direct support weapon, becoming the infantry tank of the Red Infantry, much as the StuG III became the infantry tank of the German infantry.

Featuring full colour artwork and written by an expert on tank warfare during World War II, this fascinating study describes one of the Soviet Union's most important armoured vehicles during its struggle with Nazi Germany.

Was the outcome of the First World War on a knife edge? In this major new account of German wartime politics and strategy Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.