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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
The Siege of Sarajevo remains the longest siege in modern European
history, lasting three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad
and over a year longer than the Siege of Leningrad. Reporting the
Siege of Sarajevo provides the first detailed account of the
reporting of this siege and the role that journalists played in
highlighting both military and non-military aspects of it. The book
draws on detailed primary and secondary material in English and
Bosnian, as well as extensive interviews with international
correspondents who covered events in Sarajevo from within siege
lines. It also includes hitherto unpublished images taken by the
co-author and award-winning photojournalist, Paul Lowe. Together
Morrison and Lowe document a relatively short but crucial period in
both the history of Bosnia & Herzegovina, the city of Sarajevo
and the profession of journalism. The book provides crucial
observations and insights into an under-researched aspect of a
critical period in Europe's recent history.
This book analyses the relationship between the Irish home rule
crisis, the Easter Rising of 1916 and the conscription crisis of
1918, providing a broad and comparative study of war and revolution
in Ireland at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Destenay
skilfully looks at international and diplomatic perspectives, as
well as social and cultural history, to demonstrate how American
and British, foreign and domestic policies either thwarted or fed,
directly or indirectly, the Irish Revolution. He readdresses-and at
times redresses-the well established, but somewhat inaccurate,
conclusion that Easter Week 1916 was the major factor in
radicalizing nationalist Ireland. This book provides a more nuanced
and gradualist account of a transfer of allegiance: how fears of
conscription aroused the bitterness and mistrust of civilian
populations from August 1914 onwards. By re-situating the Irish
Revolution in a global history of empire and anti-colonialism, this
book contributes new evidence and new concepts. Destenay
convincingly argues that the fears of conscription have been
neglected by Irish historiography and this book offers a fresh
appraisal of this important period of history.
By the end of the First World War the combat formations of the
Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in both France and the Middle East
were considered among the British Empire's most effective troops.
While sometimes a source of pride and not a little boasting, how
the force came to be so was not due to any inherent national
prowess or trait. Instead it was the culmination of years of
training, organisational change, battlefield experimentation and
hard-won experience-a process that included not just the
Australians, but the wider British imperial armies as well. This
book brings together some of Australia's foremost military
historians to outline how the military neophytes that left
Australia's shores in 1914 became the battle winning troops of
1918. It will trace the evolution of several of the key arms of the
AIF, including the infantry, the light horse, the artillery, and
the flying corps, and also consider how the various arms worked
together alongside other troops of the British Empire to achieve a
remarkably high level of battlefield effectiveness.
Horace 'Jim' Greasley was twenty years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just thirty rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France and Belgium en-route to Holland.
Horace survived...barely...food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion leaves, small insects and occasionally a secret food package from a sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and the corpse left to rot. After a three day train journey without food and water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl interpreting for his captors.
He experienced the sweet taste of freedom each time he escaped to see her, yet incredibly he made his way back into the camp each time, sometimes two, three times every week. Horace broke out of the camp then crept back in again under the cover of darkness after his natural urges were fulfilled. He brought food back to his fellow prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. He broke out of the camp over two hundred times and towards the end of the war even managed to bring radio parts back in. The BBC news would be delivered daily to over 3,000 prisoners. This is an incredible tale of one man's adversity and defiance of the German nation.
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