This is the second part of a two volume set exploring the inception, planning and preparation of the offensive to liberate Europe, Operation Overlord, culminating in its launch on D-Day.

The Old West may have faded from living memory but the actual locations where the robberies and shoot-outs took place can still be found over one hundred years later. In the pages of On the Trail of the Old West Then and Now, we glimpse the past through contemporary newspaper reports, illustrated with comparison then and now' photographs. Here are towns like Dodge City and Tombstone and the stories of the clashes between lawmen and the badmen, with grim details of lawlessness, violence, and harsh frontier justice meted out by vigilante committees, to recall a timeless era of American history the Wild West!'

This is the first of a two volume set exploring the inception, planning and preparation of the offensive to liberate Europe, Operation Overlord, culminating in its launch on D-Day.

During the 1960s swarms of motorcyclists roamed along London's North Circular Road in nightly burn ups. Their pit stop was the Ace Cafe at Stonebridge Park. This is their story as told by the boys who raced and the policemen who chased, woven against a background of contemporary reports.

In the 12 years that the National Socialist Party was in power in Germany, upwards of 15,000 concentration and labour camps were established in the Greater Reich and the occupied countries to incarcerate all who were deemed enemies of the state. Contents includes: GERMANY Dachau, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Niederhagen/Wewelsburg, Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora-Nordhausen, Arbeitsdorf. AUSTRIA Mauthausen. BELGIUM Breendonk, Mechelen: Caserne Dossin. CZECHOSLOVAKIA Theresienstadt. ESTONIA Vaivara/Klooga. FRANCE French Transit Camps, Natzweiler-Struthof, Wiesengrund/Vaihingen. HOLLAND Westerbork, Amersfoort, Herzogenbusch/Vught. ITALY Fossoli, Bolzano, Risiera di San Sabba. LATVIA Riga-Kaiserwald. LITHUANIA Kauen. NORWAY Falstad, Grini. UNITED KINGDOM Alderney, Channel Islands. BERLIN Wannsee Conference and Operation Reinhard'. POLAND The Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek-Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof-Danzig, Krakow-Plaszow, Auschwitz , Birkenau, War Crimes Trials.

Besides being the only British territory occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, it is perhaps less generally known that the Channel Islands were fortified out of all proportion to the rest of Hitler's Atlantic Wall: a legacy that is explored in individual chapters on Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark. First-hand accounts of all seven Commando raids are brought together for the first time. A summary of how the Islands' hotels were put to use by their German guests may intrigue present-day visitors, and a review of the war museums gives an insight into the variety of relics that enthusiasts have had the foresight to preserve. The war cemeteries are described, and there is a list of every grave of both sides of the two World Wars. Annotated aerial photographs form an important aspect of the book among them unique pictures of Sark for which exceptional permission was granted to enter the island's inviolable airspace.

The period in question began quietly with the Luftwaffe busy elsewhere, yet the increasing attacks on Germany by the Royal Air Foce provoked a response in the form of the so-called Baedeker offensive of 1942. And it is against this background of the hammer blows dealt out to German towns and cities that the Blitz on Britain during 1942 - 1944 period must be viewed. Hitler's frustration at not being able to hit back, like for like, led to the appointment in 1943 of a Blitz supremo to mete out retaliation. This finally came in 1944 with the Steinbock raids - known better as the "Baby Blitz" - yet it was only an interim measure. As the manned bomber attacks faded, so a new and fearsome method of attack by robot bomb began with weapons of vengence The V1 and V2 period is fully documented with the basic facts and figures balanced by eyewitness accounts. The three volumes of "The Blitz Then and Now" are dedicated to the 60,000 British civilians who died and the 86,000 who were injured.

Sixty years ago over 100 aerodromes in east and north-eastern England were occupied by the men and machines of RAF Bomber Command. The tenure of the majority of the bases was brief - some six years - but during that time more than 55,000 men lost their lives while flying from them to attack targets on the Continent. Split into seven operational groups, the airfields of Bomber Command formed the cornerstone of Britain's efforts to carry on the war against Germany in the years before the landings in Normandy. Thereafter they played their part in the battle against the V-weapons with one of the last raids of the war being carried out against Hitler's personal mountain retreat. Each airfield has been explored and photographed in the "then and now" style of Roger Freeman's previous books for After the Battle on the US Eighth and Ninth Air Forces. The physical development, construction and operational history of every airfield is described in detail and all are illustrated with wartime and present-day aerial photographs.

Winston and Gail Ramsey This book focuses on the systems used by the Axis powers for the governance of the countries that they occupied during the Second World War. It would be easy to assume that the administration of each country was carried out on a somewhat ad hoc basis, but streams of detailed orders and decrees were enacted to cover all aspects of everyday life . . . from finance to crime. Dr Raphael Lemkin was a Polish émigré and the person who coined the term `genocide’ during his study of international law concerning crimes against humanity which he began in 1933 — the year that the Nazis assumed power in Germany. Dr Lemkin’s much-acclaimed work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published in 1944 and extracts from it now form the framework on which we have built this `then and now’ coverage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, Danzig, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Monaco, the Channel Islands, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Soviet Union, Romania, Italy and Hungary. Individual chapters also cover the most serious crimes committed by the occupier: the destruction of whole villages in Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands and Greece, and the genocidal acts carried out in Italy, Greece and Belgium, although nothing can equal the wholesale slaughter enacted in the Balkans and the USSR. It has been estimated that the Axis occupation of Europe cost between 20 and 25 million civilian lives, apart from the deaths of at least 16 million servicemen and women who paid the ultimate price in trying to put Europe back together again. It is a debt that can never be repaid. SIZE 12”×8½”   368 PAGES   OVER 1,000 ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN 9 781870 067935  £39.95

In December 1943, an American four-star general was appointed to lead the huge operation - code-named "Overlord" - which had been planned by Britain and the United States to defeat Germany. To that end, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London in January 1944 to establish his headquarters as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Although over 500 correspondents, photographers and broadcasters had been accredited by the Public Relations Division to cover the invasion of France due to take place in four months' time, SHAEF also decided to issue its own daily communiques, charting the progress of the battle, to be released under the signature of a former US pressman, Lieutenant Colonel D. Reed Jordon, the Chief of the Communications Section. Over the following months nearly 400 communiques were released by SHAEF and these are reproduced in the book. They were designed mainly as a guide for the press covering battlefield activities, so descriptions of the horror, the suffering, and the destruction that go with each shell fired and each bomb dropped were purposely left to the scores of talented news and photo reporters nearer the action. Alongside the measured text of the official communiques hundreds of photographs - many complete with censor deletions - taken by war photographers in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany, are reproduced alongside 'then and now' comparison photos taken by After the Battle. Illustrating the battles by the western Allies to liberate western Europe, we follow the fighting month by month, beginning with D-Day in Normandy until signatures on a document in Berlin eleven months later denoted the final defeat of Nazi Germany.

The story of the attack on the Mohne and Eder dams in the Ruhr has been recounted many times before but not until now has it been told from the German side. The author has spent over a third of a century studying the raid and its consequences, collecting an archive of documents and photographs, and producing documentary films on the attack. His book "Wasserkrieg", published in Germany in 1992, has now been translated and adapted for this "After the Battle" edition in the "Through the Lens" series.

This volume covers the first year of World War II, the period from phoney war to total war: September 3rd, 1939 to September 6th, 1940. Beginning with endless air raid warnings and a sense of unreality, it was a phase which was to culminate in Hitler threatening to raze Britain's cities to the ground. As a direct source of the day-to-day effects of Luftwaffe operations over Britain at the time, the book utilizes extracts from the 24-hour log compiled by the Ministry of Home Security, and this provides a contemporary diary of events as they affected the Home Front. These entries ideally form the setting for a detailed record of the losses sustained by the Luftwaffe over Britain and within sight of land: a barometer of the air war, showing clearly the changing climate of hostilities. Every German crash on land is listed with its crew, and footnotes are included on all the crash sites which are known to have been investigated or excavated since the end of the war, together with photographs of some interesting discoveries. Also featured are articles by historians and eyewitnesses that interspace the daily happenings.