The first ever authorised history of the SAS, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Regiment. In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was imaginative, radical and entirely against the rules: a small, undercover unit that would wreak havoc behind enemy lines. Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission...

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were 30 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 off the...

Every battle is different. Each takes place in a different context - the war, the campaign, the weapons. However, battles across the centuries, whether fought with sticks and stones or advanced technology, have much in common. Fighting is, after all, an intensely human affair; human nature doesn't change. So why were battles fought as they were? What gave them their shape? Why did they go as they did: victory for one side, defeat for the other? In...

The iconic Spitfire found fame during the darkest early days of World War II. But what happened to the redoubtable fighter and its crews beyond the Battle of Britain, and why is it still so loved today? In late Spring 1940, Nazi Germany's domination of Europe had looked unstoppable. With the British Isles in easy reach since the fall of France, Adolf Hitler was convinced that Great Britain would be defeated in the skies over her southern coast, confident...

This authoritative text recreates the battle for Stalingrad that became the focus of Hitler and Stalin's determination to win the gruesome and vicious war for the Eastern front.

The British fascination with heroic failure has clouded the story of Arnhem in myths. Antony Beevor, using often overlooked sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of the fighting, which General Student himself called 'The Last German Victory'. Yet this work, written in Beevor's inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single, dramatic battle. It looks into...

This is the story of the Walkers, six siblings (including the author's grandfather) who survived Blitz, battle and internment and lived to tell the tale. This ordinary family's extraordinary experiences combine to tell a new social history of World War Two.

March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany. Victory is finally within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final 100 days of the Second World War will prove to be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town. In this book, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams brings this closing stage of the Allies' fight against Nazi Germany...

The story of Bletchley Park's codebreaking operations in the Second World War is now well known, but its counterparts in the First World War - Room 40 & MI1(b) - remain in the shadows, despite their involvement in and influence on most of the major events of that war. From first Battle of the Marne, the shelling of Scarborough, the Battles of Jutland and the Somme in 1916, the first 'Battle of Britain', the 'Zimmermann Telegram', to the Battles of...

From Boudicca to Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Tracing the long history of female fighters, 'Forgotten Warriors' puts the record straight, exploring how war became an all-male space, and getting to the bottom of why women were allowed to be astronauts a full thirty years before they were allowed to fight in combat. From the Mino, the all-female army that protected Dahomey from the West for two hundred years...