Erwin Rommel was a complex man: a born leader, brilliant soldier, a devoted husband and proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant. In France in 1940, then for two years in North Africa, then finally...

The First Jihad tells the story of Muhammad Ahmad, a Muslim religious leader in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the uprising he led against British and Egyptian forces in the late nineteenth century. In 1881, Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi – the "Expec...

The Frantic operations were conceived in late 1943 as Soviet advances made Soviet airfields accessible to Allied long-range aircraft. American aircraft could hit targets in central Europe, refuel and rearm at Soviet bases, then fly back to bomb addit...

Using the Russian Ministry of Defense's archives and Western sources, the author has produced a companion work to his masterful study of II SS Panzer Corps' offensive and the culminating clash at Prokhorovka. He lays out the German and Soviet plans f...

Polish pilot W³adek Gnyœ was credited with shooting down the first two German aircraft of World War II on September 1, 1939. On 2 September 1939, as Gnys' squadron took off near Krakow to intercept the German invaders, German Stuka pilot Frank Neuber...

"Retreat, hell! We just got here!" The words of Captain Lloyd Williams at Belleau Wood in June 1918 entered United States Marine Corps legend, and the Marine Brigade's actions there – along with the censor's failure to take out the name of the Brigad...

Reverend David Railton MC served as a chaplain on the Western Front during World War I. Attached to three divisions between 1916 and 1918, Railton supported the soldiers in their worst moments, he buried the fallen, comforted the wounded, wrote to th...

The denouement of the battle of Normandy, the fighting around Falaise and Chambois in August 1944 and the pursuit of the retreating German armies to the Seine provided the Allies with an immense victory. After ten weeks of hard attritional fighting,...

More than 200 years ago – under the inspiration and leadership of Bonaparte – a revolutionary French Army invaded Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire; this presence lasted beyond Bonaparte's own departure and subsequent rise to power as First Cons...

In 1907 Edward VII commissioned Peter Carl Faberge – court artist-jeweller to imperial Russia – to produce miniature sculptures of animals on the royal estate at Sandringham. Designed to please Queen Alexandra, the project was suggested by the king's...