Showing results for "david battley"

High comic drama among the humble members of a local council in the Home CountiesBroadcast live from the Club Akimbo, Bletchley, this is Britain's first public access cable radio show, presented by a group of Buckinghamshire district councillors who really should know better. Chairman of the Ways and Means committee Mr Dutton is our host as he introduces us to the items on the agenda, which include sparkling sketches, surreal escapades and musical interludes from C...

In October 1941, Hitler launched Operation Typhoon—the German drive to capture Moscow and knock the Soviet Union out of the war. As the last chance to escape the dire implications of a winter campaign, Hitler directed seventy-five German divisions, almost two million men and three of Germany's four panzer groups into the offensive, resulting in huge victories at Viaz'ma and Briansk—among the biggest battles of the Second World War. David Stahel's groundbreaking new account of Operation Typ...

Oliver Twist meets The Crimson Petal and the White in this devilishly funny, emotionally charged tale of finding a new path in life after a great fall.William Dempsey rose from a life of thieving and prostitution to be the personal plaything of the Marquess of Argyll. Then a betrayal sees him returned to the rough streets of London without patronage, his West End apartment, or a place among the ton.So on a stormy night, he arrives...

In just four weeks in the summer of 1941 the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three quarters of a million men. This was the Battle of Kiev—one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. For the first time, David Stahel charts the battle's dramatic course and aftermath, uncovering the irreplaceable losses suffered by Germany's...

In November 1941, Hitler ordered German forces to complete the final drive on the Soviet capital, now less than 100 kilometers away. Army Group Center was pressed into the attack for one last attempt to break Soviet resistance before the onset of winter. From the German perspective, the final drive on Moscow had all the ingredients of a dramatic final battle in the east, which, according to previous accounts, only failed at the gates of Moscow. David Stahel challenges this well-established...

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the east, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances. Yet the German Blitzkrieg depended almost entirely upon the motorised Panzer groups, particularly those of Army Group Centre...

The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished.From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this book recounts in chilling d...

During World War II, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia found themselves trapped between the giants of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Over the course of the war these states were repeatedly occupied by different forces, and local government organizations and individuals were forced to choose between supporting the occupying forces or forming partisan units to resist their occupation. Devastated during the German invasion, these states then became the site of some of the most vicious fighti...

1918 was the critical year of battle as the Great War reached its brutal climax. Warfare of an epic scale was fought on the Western Front, where ordinary British soldiers faced the final test of their training, tactics and determination. That they withstood the storm and began an astonishing counterattack, is proof that by 1918, the British army was the most effective fighting force in the world. But this ultimate victory came at devastating cost.Using a wealth of previously unpubl...

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion—largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period—that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to...

Germany's winter campaign of 1941–1942 has commonly been seen as its "first defeat." In Retreat from Moscow, David Stahel argues that, in fact, it was its first strategic success in the east. Though the Red Army managed to push the Wehrmacht back from Moscow, the Germans lost far fewer men (1:6), frustrated their enemy's strategic plan, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.Hitler's new strategic plan called for holding important Russian...

Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time.In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, les...