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A fresh and incisive examination of one of the Second World War's crucial campaigns, the battle for Normandy in the months after D-Day. What happened to the Allied armies in Normandy in the months after D-Day, 1944? Why, after the initial success of the landings, did their advance stall a few miles inland from the beaches? Why did the British take so long to capture Caen? Why did the US infantry struggle so much in the bocage south of Omaha beach? Who was right about the conduct of the land campaign - Eisenhower or Montgomery? How did the Germans, deprived of air support, manage to hold off such a massive Allied force for more than two months? And if Enigma was allowing the Allies to read Ge...
The defeat of Nazi Germany in the words of those who were there New Year's Day 1945 was not a day for rest or rejoicing on the embattled continent of Europe. Hard winter gripped the land, from the Channel coast to the distant Urals. Only the thought of victory warmed the frozen soldiers huddled in tanks and foxholes as the New Year dawned and they faced the prospect of battling onwards toward Berlin. This is the story of the last five months of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, from New Year's Day to VE Day, May 8, 1945. It is a story told not in the words of historians or scholars, but in the words of the people who lived through it, who fought and endured: soldier and civilian, American infant...
A concise and entertaining study of the vicious wars between the English noble houses of York and Lancaster during the 15th century. The vicious wars between the English noble houses of York and Lancaster marked the end of medieval England and the birth of the Renaissance. The end of that thirty-year period of strife and bloodshed saw the collapse of the great Plantagenet dynasty, rulers of all England and much of France for over three hundred years, and the rise of the Tudors. All the characters are here: Henry V and his luckless son, Henry VI, together with his unfortunate uncles, John of Bedford and Humphrey of Gloucester, not to mention the notorious Richard III and his nephews - The Princes in the Tower. Neillands skilfully tackles this complex period providing a clear and entertaining analysis.
In 1942, a full two years before D-Day, thousands of men, mostly Canadian troops eager for their first taste of battle, were sent across the Channel in a raid on the French port town of Dieppe. Air supremacy was not secured; the topography of the town and its surroundings - hemmed in by tall cliffs and steep beaches - meant any invasion was improbably difficult; the result was carnage, the beaches turned into killing grounds even as the men came ashore, and whole regiments literally decimated. Why was the Raid ever mounted? Was the whole thing even, as has been darkly alleged, expected and even intended to fail, a cynical conspiracy to prove to the Americans, at the expense of so many Canadian lives, the impracticability of staging the Normandy landings for another two years? Robin Neillands goes behind the myths to tell what really happened, and why.
This masterful epic of military history thrillingly chronicles the defeats and triumphs of the Eighth Army, considered by many to be the most remarkable fighting force of WW II, renowned for holding the Axis at bay from North Africa to the Alps from1939 to 1945. Photos. Maps.
Robin Neillands' studies every aspect of the airborne fight against Germany in WW2. He looks at the strengths and fundamental flaws in doctrine; the technical difficulties and developments; and the day-by-day, night-by-night endurance of the crews, flying to the limit in discomfort and danger. The book includes oral history in the shape of personal accounts not only of the British but of Americans, Australians, Canadians and other Allied fliers, and also of German aircrews and civilians.
The British entered World War I convinced of victory. Many even predicted an end to hostilities by Christmas. For the British Expeditionary Force, which was instead obliterated by 1915, this proved a costly assumption. In his robust re-examination of the onset of war, Robin Neillands reviews the exploits and character of the BEF, revealing how it came to be both the focus of hasty British hopes and, in the tragedy of its defeat, the catalyst for a policy shift without which the war would surely have been lost. Affectionately known as 'the Old Contemptibles' (a subversion of criticism from the Kaiser), the BEF was, although small, so highly trained and motivated that enemy lines mistook the u...
A wide-sweeping panorama of the end of British world domination, A Fighting Retreat is the stirring tale of both the long, drawn out campaigns which accompanied the transfer of power and the untold oral history of the courageous individuals who took part