On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty?s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain.While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island...

When British troops first deployed to Northern Ireland in 1969, to halt the threat of a new rising force - the Provisional Irish Republican Army - they could not have known that the longest campaign in the British Army's history was beginning. While patrols, vehicle bombs and incendiary speeches are the defining memories of the Troubles, the real war was fought out of sight and out of mind. For thirty years, Britain's Special Forces waged a ferocious,...

From the dawn of the very first civilizations, people have fought for control of resources and territory. This book takes a look at all of the principal military struggles, from the ancient Egyptians and Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh to more recent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Gulf.

From Marathon in 490 BC or Hastings in 1066 to Trafalgar and Austerlitz in 1805; from Midway, Stalingrad or Leyte Gulf during the Second World War to the fall of Baghdad in 2003, this companion to great battles of the world will be essential reading for anyone fascinated by military set-pieces and strategy.

During 1940 the German army swept with devastating speed across the Low Countries and into northern France and drove Allied forces back into a small pocket around Dunkirk. Without a swift withdrawal across the English Channel, the latter faced certain death or capture. The evacuation plan - Operation Dynamo - initially calculated that 45,000 men might be rescued, but between 26 May and 4 June 338,226 men were in fact brought back to England. Naval...

Taking us from the French Revolution to the Cold War and the Falklands, Andrew Roberts presents us with a bracingly honest and insightful look at nine major figures in modern history: Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher. Each of these leaders fundamentally shaped the outcome of the war their nation was embroiled in. Meticulously...

Dan Jones turns his attention to the history of the Crusades - the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods, in which armies from European Christian states attempted to wrest the Holy Land from Islamic rule, and which have left an enduring imprint on relations between the Muslim world and the West.

A FAMILIAR FOE. A BATTLE FOR THE HEART OF A COUNTRY AT WAR WITH ITSELF. South Africa, 1899 - the smouldering hostility between the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State and the British colonies of the Cape and Natal is about to burst into flame. War is coming and no one can prevent it. Colonel Penrod Ballantyne, hero of Abu Klea and Omdurman, is sent to Mafeking, 'the place of stones', to recruit and train men for the fighting ahead. Amber,...

In 1942, young British soldier Arthur Dodd was taken prisoner by the German Army and transported to Oswiecim in Polish Upper Silesia. The Germans gave it another name, now synonymous with mankind?s darkest hours. They called it Auschwitz. Forced to do hard labour, starved and savagely beaten, Arthur thought his life would end in Auschwitz. Determined to go down fighting, he sabotaged Nazi industrial work, risked his life to alleviate the suffering...

In this history of the soldier, primarily from the Napoleonic Wars to the global war on terror, Darren Moore provides an in-depth analysis of the politics, human emotions and psychology behind soldiering, and presents a disturbing image of the true nature of war.