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'Taylor Downing is a wonderful historian and a wonderful history
communicator' Dan Snow, History Hit 'Vividly brings to life a
terrible year' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Sheds intriguing light
on just how close Churchill was to losing his grip on power'
Publishers Weekly In 1942, Britain stood at the brink of defeat.
From the collapse in Malaya and the biggest surrender in British
history at Singapore to the passing of three large German warships
through the Straits of Dover in broad daylight and the longest ever
retreat through Burma to the gates of India, a string of military
disasters engulfed Britain in rapid succession. People began to
claim that Churchill was not up to the job and his leadership was
failing badly. Public morale reached a new low. In 1942: Britain at
the Brink, Taylor Downing charts the frustration and despair that
characterised this year. Most people think that Britain's worst
moment of the war was in 1940 when the nation stood up against the
threat of German invasion. Here, Downing describes in nail-biting
detail what was really Britain's darkest hour.
'Taylor Downing vividly brings to life a terrible year' Max
Hastings, Sunday Times 'Taylor Downing is a wonderful historian and
a wonderful history communicator.' Dan Snow, History Hit Eighty
years ago, Britain stood at the brink of defeat. In 1942, a string
of military disasters engulfed Britain in rapid succession : the
collapse in Malaya; the biggest surrender in British history at
Singapore; the passing of three large German warships through the
Straits of Dover in broad daylight; the longest ever retreat
through Burma to the gates of India; serious losses to Rommel's
forces in North Africa; the siege of Malta and the surrender at
Tobruk. All of this occurred against the backdrop of catastrophic
sinkings in the Atlantic and the Arctic convoys. People began to
claim that Churchill was not up to the job and his leadership was
failing badly. Public morale reached a new low. 1942 Britain At the
Brink explores the story of frustration and despair in that year
prompting the Prime Minister to demand of his army chief 'Have you
not got a single general who can win battles?' Using new archival
material, historian Taylor Downing shows just how unpopular
Churchill became in 1942 with two votes attacking his leadership in
the Commons and the emergence of a serious political rival. Most
people think that Britain's worst moment of the war was in 1940
when the nation stood up against the threat of German invasion. In
1942 Britain at the Brink, Taylor Downing describes in nail-biting
detail what was really Britain's darkest hour .
The First World War is often viewed as a war fought by armies of
millions living and fighting in trenches, aided by brutal machinery
that cost the lives of many. But behind all of this a scientific
war was also being fought between engineers, chemists, physicists,
doctors,mathematicians and intelligence gatherers. This hidden war
was to make a positive and lasting contribution to how war was
conducted on land, at sea and in the air, and most importantly life
at home. Secret Warriors provides an invaluable and fresh history
of the First World War, profiling a number of the key figures who
made great leaps in science for the benefit of 20th Century
Britain. Told in a lively, narrative style, Secret Warriors reveals
the unknown side of the war.
'A carefully researched and hugely readable account of the build-up
to war, the momentum inexorably growing as he assembles each part
of the jigsaw. Indeed, his narrative is so persuasive that by the
time you are about two- thirds through, it takes some effort to
remind yourself that the Third World War never happened' Dominic
Sandbrook, Sunday Times 1983 was a supremely dangerous year - even
more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In
the US, President Reagan massively increased defence spending,
described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' and announced his
'Star Wars' programme, calling for a shield in space to defend the
US from incoming missiles. Yuri Andropov, the paranoid Soviet
leader, saw all this as signs of American aggression and convinced
himself that the US really meant to attack the Soviet Union. He put
the KGB on alert to look for signs of an imminent nuclear attack.
When a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines flight KAL 007
after straying off course over a sensitive Soviet military area,
President Reagan described it as a 'terrorist act' and 'a crime
against humanity'. The temperature was rising fast. Then at the
height of the tension, NATO began a war game called Able Archer 83.
In this exercise, NATO requested permission to use the codes to
launch nuclear weapons. The nervous Soviets convinced themselves
this was no exercise but the real thing. This is an extraordinary
and largely unknown Cold War story of spies and double agents, of
missiles being readied, of intelligence failures, misunderstandings
and the panic of world leaders. With access to hundreds of
extraordinary new documents just released in the US, Taylor Downing
is able to tell for the first time the gripping but true story of
how near the world came to the brink of nuclear war in 1983. 1983:
THE WORLD AT THE BRINK is a real-life thriller.
Cold War is the story of the half-century since the end of the
Second World War - the story of our lives. Its framework is the
confrontation, military and ideological, between two great powers
that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of
crises and conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade and
the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw,
Budapest and Prague, to spies, student riots and encounters in
space. In Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing record epic
history through the detail of individual human experience: the
recollections not only of statesmen whose decisions led to these
momentous events, but also of the ordinary men and women whose
lives were bound up in these years of conflict. Cold War is the
first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from
the recent opening of Soviet, East European and Chinese archives as
well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving
narrative that it both gripping and informative, the true story of
the Cold War can at last be told.
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938) is one of the most controversial
films ever made. Capitalising on the success of Triumph of the Will
(1935), her propaganda film for the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl secured
Hitler's approval for her grandiose plans to film the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. The result was a work as notorious for its politics as
celebrated for its aesthetic power. This revised edition includes
new material on Riefenstahl's film-making career before Olympia and
her close relationship with Hitler. Taylor Downing also discusses
newly-available evidence on the background to the film's production
that conclusively proves that the film was directly commissioned by
Hitler and funded through Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and
not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, commissioned independently from
the Nazi state by the Olympic authorities. In writing this edition,
Taylor Downing has been given access to a magnificent new
restoration of the original version of the film by the
International Olympic Committee.
Paralysis. Stuttering. The 'shakes'. Inability to stand or walk.
Temporary blindness or deafness. When strange symptoms like these
began appearing in men at Casualty Clearing Stations in 1915, a
debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what
had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers
were never large. Then in July 1916 with the start of the Somme
battle the incidence of shell shock rocketed. The high command of
the British army began to panic. An increasingly large number of
men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire
battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and
military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as
to what was going wrong. 'Shell shock' - what we would now refer to
as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front. By the beginning
of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or
wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another
300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army
always said it could not calculate the exact number of those
suffering from shell shock. Re-assessing the official casualty
figures, Taylor Downing for the first time comes up with an
accurate estimate of the total numbers who were taken out of action
by psychological wounds. It is a shocking figure. Taylor Downing's
revelatory new book follows units and individuals from signing up
to the Pals Battalions of 1914, through to the horrors of their
experiences on the Somme which led to the shell shock that,
unrelated to weakness or cowardice, left the men unable to continue
fighting. He shines a light on the official - and brutal - response
to the epidemic, even against those officers and doctors who looked
on it sympathetically. It was, they believed, a form of hysteria.
It was contagious. And it had to be stopped. Breakdown brings an
entirely new perspective to bear on one of the iconic battles of
the First World War.
SPIES IN THE SKY is the thrilling, little-known story of the
partner organisation to the famous code-breaking centre at
Bletchley Park. It is the story of the daring reconnaissance pilots
who took aerial photographs over Occupied Europe during the most
dangerous days of the Second World War, and of the photo
interpreters who invented a completely new science to analyse those
pictures. They were inventive and ingenious; they pioneered the
development of 3D photography and their work provided vital
intelligence throughout the war. With a whole host of colourful
characters at its heart, from the legendary pilot Adrian 'Warby'
Warburton, who went missing while on a mission, to photo
interpreters Glyn Daniel, later a famous television personality,
and Winston Churchill's daughter, Sarah, SPIES IN THE SKY is
compelling reading and the first full account of the story of
aerial photography and the intelligence gleaned from it in nearly
fifty years.
The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach
alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a
sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and
anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial
reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower
on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre. The truth must be
revealed. The decision was taken to launch a daring raid on the
Bruneval site to try and capture the technology for further
examination. The planned airborne assault would be extremely risky.
The parachute regiment had only been formed a year before on
Churchill's insistence. This night raid would test the men to the
extreme limits of their abilities. Night Raid tells the gripping
tale of this mission from the planning stages, to the failed
rehearsals when the odds seemed stacked against them, to the night
of the raid itself, and the scientific secrets that were discovered
thanks to the paras' precious cargo - the German radar. Its capture
was of immense importance in the next stages of the war and the
mission itself marked the birth of the legend of the 'Red Devils'.
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