Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 119 i History of War

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war, the United States found itself fighting on two fronts: in Pacific Asia and Europe. To prepare for these arduous campaigns, with the expectation that amphibious landings would certainly form part of the coming battles, the US Navy founded the Amphibious Training Base at Little Creek, Virginia, in August 1942. Two naval special forces units known as the Amphibious Scouts and Raiders (S&R) were established to prepare for Operation Torch in North Africa. They were tasked to conduct beach reconnaissance and lead night assaults on landing beaches. At the same time, Little Creek developed a specialised team under the Naval Demolition Project. Consisting of 19 men, including two officers, the team was made up of experienced naval frogmen…

The success of the 1944 Normandy Campaign had come at a heavy cost. Having sustained over 200,000 casualties, the battered and bruised Allies faced new logistical challenges as their advance took them further and further away from the beachhead secured months earlier. While Germany’s decisive defeat in the Falaise Gap had enabled sizable gains in France and across the Belgian border, the enemy had retained control of several channel ports, preventing the Allies from shipping supplies into these facilities. A crisis threatened if war materiel could not be brought to the continent and then transported to the liberating forces on a far larger scale. Located on the left flank closest to the French coastline, First Canadian Army was allocated the unenviable task of besieging the channel ports. Unfortunately, the German…

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Authors: Andrew Sangster and Pier Paolo Battistelli Publisher: Casemate Price: £25 (Hardback) The tens of thousands of Allied soldiers who took part in the Italian Campaign were disparaged as ‘D-day dodgers’, a grossly unfair description of the men who fought one of the toughest and least understood episodes of the Second World War. The authors here deserve credit for shining a light on the fighting and showing how the main Allied commanders involved didn’t do themselves any credit in what was often a bungled and hesitant campaign. Harold Alexander – often lauded as the perfect English gentleman – was too vague in his orders and lacked grip, while Bernard Montgomery – the hero of El Alamein – was over-cautious and determined to protect his reputation. The Americans don’t get away…

MAREK SOBIERALSKI This month marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the scene of some of the most horrific but also courageous actions of the Second World War. Marek reveals first-hand testimony of the uprising from Jewish and Polish resistance fighters (p40). ALEX BOWERS In the autumn of 1944 a month-long campaign was launched to oust the German occupiers from the Scheldt estuary, freeing the port of Antwerp and logistical lines for the invasion of Germany. Alex recounts the Battle of the Scheldt on page 32. CRAIG MOORE In this month’s Operator’s Handbook, Craig takes a look at the British variant of the M10 tank destroyer. Designated the 17-pounder SP Achilles, this design saw action in the Royal Artillery and Royal Canadian Artillery during the fierce Normandy Campaign…

The newly formed Navy SEALs were first sent into Vietnam in an advisory capacity in March 1962, just a few months after their inception. US military advisors had already been in the country from the mid-1950s, training the forces of the Western-leaning South Vietnamese government as they fought the communist-supported North. When America formally entered the conflict in 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogmen surveyed the beaches of Da Nang before the first US Marines set foot on the Vietnamese coast in March 1965. After the swelling of the US military commitment into Vietnam, the Navy SEALs’ role in the war widened to undertake active combat missions in the country against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army. However, the number of active SEALs was…

The Battle of Eylau, in February 1807, had been a wintry bloodbath, proving to be little more than a Pyrrhic victory at best for the French. French casualties were as high as 25,000, and when compared to the enemy’s 15,000 and their withdrawal from the field, Napoleon Bonaparte had been denied the most central tenet of his military maxims: a decisive battle. He had failed to knock the Russians out of the war by forcing them to the negotiating table, and would seek to remedy that before the end of the year. Napoleon had one overriding objective after Eylau: the complete annihilation of General Levin August Bennigsen and his Russian army. To achieve this, he had to make the most of the winter months. Having taken up residence during this…

“When flames engulfed the upper parts of a building, Jews appeared on the top floors. These were their last minutes. They ran from window to window. They gestured vigorously. They climbed onto the windowsills. Their black silhouettes stood out against the fiery background, against the moving wall of flames. “To save themselves from a painful death by fire, they jumped down. Not onto pillows, but onto the asphalt of courtyards and streets below. There lies some black suicidal mannequin with a red head. The skull is cracked. Piles of brain next to it. The house continues to burn. The roof collapses with a crash and the house is on fire. And it continues to glow for many days. Only the May rain choked everything that smouldered.” These were the…

HISTORY OF WAR GREATEST MILITARY DISASTERS IS ON SALE NOW The words ‘Romans’ and ‘defeated’ do not sit well as neighbours in one sentence. However, the might of Rome met its match on more than one occasion, and few of her defeats were more devastating than the one inflicted at Carrhae, when Crassus’ legions ran into the guile and determination of the Parthian army. It should have been a mismatch from the start as 40,000 highly trained, battle-hardened fighting men of Rome descended upon what was thought to be a feisty but less battle-proven Parthian army. As it happened, it was indeed a mismatch, but not as expected. There were still more questions than answers at the end of this bloody battle. How did it all go wrong? Why was…

Author: Norman S Poser Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press Price: £27.99 (Hardback) Historians wishing to write about John Burgoyne have a hurdle to overcome – a lack of primary source material upon which to draw. This has deterred most from even trying and the result is that Norman S Poser’s book is the first for more than 30 years to focus on this controversial British general. The other stumbling block is the crowning failure of Burgoyne’s career – his defeat and surrender at Saratoga in 1777 during the American War of Independence. This was such a catastrophe it tends to overshadow all other aspects of the man’s life and career. This is a shame because, as Poser makes clear in this engaging and highly readable book, Burgoyne was a fascinating character.…

Author: Tim Luckhurst Publisher: Bloomsbury Price: £22.49 (Paperback) Tim Luckhurst brings together his skills as an award-winning journalist to offer case studies of newspaper coverage during the Second World War, drawing on his experiences covering wars and conflict in hotspots like Romania, Iraq, Kuwait, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Serbia. While the BBC’s broadcast journalism during the Second World War has been extensively explored, newspaper reporting on the conflict has until now received less attention. Luckhurst’s effort to address this issue marks an important step forward in the study of British print media during the conflict, for at the time Briton’s were the world’s most avid newspaper readers. The book examines what news can do for democracy, from the duty to inform readers about what they need to know to investigating…

Author: Dr Paul Brown Publisher: Osprey Publishing Price: £40.50 (Hardback) Released: 13 April 2023 It’s not by accident that the title of Dr Paul Brown’s new book links two of the most enduring symbols of British ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in the last 70 years: the Royal Navy and Queen Elizabeth II. The decline and final end of the British Empire over the course of the 20th century was nowhere more evident than in the shrinking of the Royal Navy – a force that in 1952, at the start of the late queen’s reign, numbered over 300 warships and more than 150,000 personnel. In contrast, today, as the author so forensically analyses, the navy has more admirals than warships, and many vessels are various states of arduous repair and refit.…

The strategically important Königsberg Castle lay near the Pregel River and had served as a key port and access point to the Baltic Sea for hundreds of years by the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The Teutonic Knights constructed the first wooden fort and site in 1255, with the earliest renditions of the stone castle taking shape in 1257. It would be greatly expanded over the centuries, serving as a seat of power for the grand masters of the Teutonic Knights and then later for Prussian nobility. The castle had a palace that was 274ft (83.5m) long, with a gothic-style tower of 300ft (91.4m) with nearly 300 steps to get to the top and an extensive library. The palace church of the castle would see Friedrich I crowned King of…

Hiroshi ‘Hershey’ Miyamura was drafted into the US Army in January 1945, in the final months of the Second World War. The young Japanese-American eagerly joined the war effort – proving that he was just as patriotic as everyone else during a time when Americans with Japanese heritage were being placed in internment camps, and their loyalty was under question by US government policy. During the war Miyamura would briefly serve with the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a Japanese-American unit, in which he received training as a machine gunner before returning to the United States due to ill health. He was later discharged after Japan surrendered, leaving him to enlist in the US Army Reserve. Miyamura, when asked why he joined the Reserve, replied: “I thought that with my training that…

By the end of the Second World War, Britain’s Royal Navy was at the peak of its powers, emerging victorious despite immense adversity in the Pacific, Mediterranean and Atlantic theatres. However, this supremacy on the waves was followed by a period of gradual decline as the huge demands of the global conflict disappeared. This watershed moment for the navy coincided with the start of a new era for the nation, with the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Over the following seven decades, the Royal Navy underwent a huge amount of change, transitioning from a vast imperial fleet that ruled the waves and defended the empire to a smaller but nonetheless potent force. In his new book, Elizabeth’s Navy: Seventy Years of the Postwar Royal Navy, author and maritime historian Dr…

LIBERATION OF TUNISIA At the beginning of May 1943, British-led Allied soldiers launched the final ground attacks against German and Italian forces in Tunisia. Axis troops were positioned in defensive pockets at Tunis, Cape Bon and Bizerte. Operations Vulcan and Strike saw British and American forces overcome the Axis positions during 22 April to 12 May 1943. German commander General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim surrendered on 12 May and all remaining Axis forces commanded by Italian Marshal Giovanni Messe capitulated the following day. Almost 240,000 German and Italian soldiers were captured, with Tunis being liberated. It was the end of both the Tunisian and North African Campaigns. DAMBUSTERS RAID Codenamed Operation Chastise, the Dambusters Raid saw RAF 617 Squadron conduct an audacious bombing raid in the industrial heart of Germany on…

Authors: John Harris and Richard Wilbourn Publisher: Uniform Price: £35 (Hardback) The fascination with the bizarre case of leading Nazi Rudolf Hess remains undiminished. Historians have long grappled with the question of exactly why Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man took it upon himself to single-handedly fly to Scotland, purportedly to somehow negotiate peace between Germany and Britain. What followed has all the makings of a James Bond movie. After bailing out, Hess was captured and met with Wing Commander the Duke of Hamilton. The latter was extremely surprised to learn Hess had been trying to contact him for some time with a view to ending the war. By this stage, though, Hess was too late as Winston Churchill was determined to make a stand. Hitler’s reaction to the defection was to…