A Royal Navy Vice Admiral describes the strategy and logistics in deploying ships and crafts for the D-Day amphibious landings in World War II.Operation NEPTUNE was the codeword for the naval side of the OVERLORD plan for the historic June 1944 landings in Normandy. Massive in its scale, its tasks were wide-ranging and varied, from beach reconnaissance, minesweeping, shore bombardment as well as the organization of loading, assembly and disembarkation; it was also r...

Admiral Schofields accounts of the Taranto and Bismarck battles make for unforgettable reading.The author traces the development of British naval aviation from its early beginnings in 1912, through the First World War and the frustrations of the inter-war years. The November 1940 attack on the Italian fleet in its strongly defended base at Taranto demonstrated for the first time the battle-winning capability of carrier-borne aircraft from HMS Illustrious. The lesson was quickly learnt by t...

"I recommend The Rescue Ships and the Convoys to any person desiring an account of the Battle of the Atlantic told from a little known and unique perspective." -Nautical Research Journal The Rescue Ships and the Convoys tells the history of one of the least known aspects of Second World War maritime history. Despite the threat of heavy losses of ships and lives, no hospital ships, which had to be lit, could accompany the convoys as they would betray a convoy's position. The solution was to...

This detailed military history of the Spanish Civil War dispels long-held misconceptions and sheds significant new light on the conflict.Spain in Arms chronicles the development of the Spanish Civil War on the battlefield, examining eight campaigns waged between 1937 and 1939. Through detailed analysis, it demonstrates how many accounts of military operations during this conflict are based upon half-truths and propaganda.From the Madrid Front to th...

The epic of Dunkirk has been told many times, but the numerous accounts from surviving soldiers and sailors were often a blur of fear and fighting with the days mingling into each other, leaving what is, at times, a confusing picture. In this book, adopting a day by day approach, the author provides a clear portrayal of the unfolding drama on the perimeter around Dunkirk, in the port itself and along the beaches to La Panne and the Belgian border.Reports from many of the captains of the ve...

What was the soldiers experience of the Battle of the Somme? How did the men who were there record their part in the fighting or remember it afterwards? How can we, 100 years later, gain an insight into one of the most famous and contentious - episodes of the Great War? Matthew Richardsons graphic account, which is based on the vivid personal testimony of those who took part, offers us a direct impression of the reality of the battle from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers and junior...

"A radical re-assessment . . . This is fascinating stuff . . . a most useful addition to the Waterloo—and indeed Napoleonic—bookshelf."—Military Modelling MagazineMore has probably been written about the Waterloo campaign than almost any other in history. It was the climax of the Napoleonic Wars and forms a watershed in both European and world history. However, the lethal combination of national bias, willful distortion and simple error has unfortunately led to the...

When the German Battleship Bismarck was commissioned in 1940 she was one of the fastest and most powerful ships afloat. To the Royal Navy and the security of Allied shipping in the Atlantic she posed an enormous threat she must be destroyed. When she broke out into the Atlantic in 1941, some of Britains most powerful ships were sent to pursue and sink her. The first encounter proved disastrous for the British Battleship HMS Hood, which was sunk at 0800 on 24 May. Bismarck had sustained sev...

"Much more than a mere catalogue of a naval officer's experiences of war . . . All-in-all an excellent read and very highly recommended." —World Ship SocietyThe author's naval war experiences make the most exciting reading. After being mined on the battleship Nelson in 1939, he served on the Prince of Wales, during the Bismarck action, witnessing the sinking of the Hood and Churchill and Roosevelt's historic meeting. He survived the disast...

The Battle of the Somme is fixed in the country's collective memory as a disaster—probably the bloodiest episode in the catalogue of futile offensives launched by the British on the Western Front. Over five months of desperate fighting in 1916 the British wrestled with the Germans for control of a narrow strip of innocuous French countryside. When the fighting petered out the British had barely pushed back the Germans from their original positions for a combined casualty figure of over a m...

Victors write history. German Admiral Reinhard Scheer knew this, and wrote his own anyway. In this memoir of World War One, he says, "We are victors and vanquished at one and the same time, and in depicting our success the difficult problem confronts us of not forgetting that our strength did not last out to the end."Admiral Scheer took command of the German High Seas Fleet in 1916. He championed unrestricted submarine warfare as the key to winning, maintaining that it was...

This WWI history examines the significant yet overlooked British offensive that achieved major advances on the Western Front.Fought between April 9th and May 16th of 1917, the Battle of Arras was the most lethal and costly British offensive battle of the First World War. Lasting a brutal thirty-nine days, its average casualty rate was far higher than at either the Somme or Passchendaele. It also represented the longest advance against Germany up to that point since ...