Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 136 i History of War

At dawn on 10 April 1940, the Royal Navy’s 2nd Destroyer Flotilla steamed up Ofotjord in the middle of a snowstorm. The five ships, under the command of Captain Warburton-Lee, had been part of a force laying mines off the Norwegian coast. At 4.20am, they attacked the German ships moored at Narvik harbour, including ten destroyers, catching them by surprise. A fierce battle followed. By the time the British force limped away, it had sunk nine vessels, including two German destroyers, while leaving another four with heavy damage. Two of the five British destroyers had been sunk, however, while a third had been badly mauled. Both the German naval commander Kommodore Friedrich Bonte and Captain Warburton-Lee were killed in the fighting. Narvik now became a key target for the Royal…

Apart from the cameras and lenses, the most important piece of equipment used by tours was their vehicles. They needed to transport the teams of three in reasonable comfort, provide the ‘office’ space for the intelligence collection, transport the large amounts of equipment needed for their three-or four-day missions and, most importantly, be the means to evade the opposition. Initially using Humbers, they settled into a long relationship with the West German Opel marque, running Kapitäns, then Admirals, and finally Senators. The cars were powerful, had decent tyres and ran on higher-octane Western fuel, but were also extensively modified to suit the very robust driving style needed on tour, much tougher than would be permitted anywhere else in the British military, closer to rallying than normal motoring. They were maintained…

Intervention in the Russian Civil War was hardly a secret before the Armistice as thousands of troops were sailing east on troopships. Yet, the British Army ensured that those who knew operational details kept their exact destinations secret, especially in letters home. Such was the level of discretion that the men sent down to Baku became known as the ‘hush-hush brigade’. When the Armistice came into effect in November 1918, the government lifted censorship and the public was suddenly aware of the vast extent of the intervention. Simultaneously, political life was starting up again. Reid tells History of War: “The papers could start writing and people could start demonstrating. The ‘Hands off Russia’ began on both sides of the Atlantic. It pulled in a broad spectrum of the left, including…

BATTLE FOR PARIS An uprising by the French Forces of the Interior began in Paris on 19 August following radio broadcasts on the Allies’ advance towards the capital. While limited to skirmishes on the first day, barricades began to go up on 20 August and Parisians organised a consolidated resistance. Fighting peaked on 22 and 23 August when the Germans attempted to leave their fortified positions and Adolf Hitler responded with an order to inflict maximum damage on the city. The battle ended after Allied forces started to enter Paris on 24 August, often greeted by civilians singing La Marseillaise. A formal capitulation was made on 25 August by Dietrich von Choltitz, the Nazi military governor of Paris. WARSAW UPRISING ERUPTS On 1 August, the most extensive military effort by…

Author: Myke Cole & Michael Livingston Publisher: Osprey Publishing Price: £25 (Hardback) Released: Out Now In The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae, authors Myke Cole and Michael Livingston offer an analysis of, perhaps, the most famous battlefield of antiquity. Yet as well as the battle between the Greeks (led by the Spartans under King Leonidas) and the Persians in 480 BCE, however, there have been 27 military actions at the pass of Thermopylae between the sixth century BCE and 1943. For some of these actions we have very little detail. More has been written on the 480 BCE battle than all the other combined, even the battles of the Second World War, where the pass was once again held unsuccessfully, this time by Allied and Commonwealth troops against invading…

ANNA REID Anna is a journalist and historian with an expertise on Russia and Ukraine. This month she spoke with History of War about her latest book A Nasty Little War on the West’s flawed military intervention in the Russian Civil War (page 62). ANDREW LONG Andrew is an expert on Cold War history, with several books published on the topic. On page 46 he recounts the overlooked but thrilling history of the British Army’s decades-long intelligence operations in East Germany, codenamed BRIXMIS. EDOARDO ALBERT A prolific fiction and non-fiction writer, Edoardo has multiple books published on the history of Anglo-Saxon England. On page 58 he recounts an almost forgotten battle in the 7th century that defined the English-Scottish border.…

On 14 December 1939, far-right Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling was invited to a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler. The encounter took place in the newly finished Reich Chancellery in Berlin. With its towering 17ft (5m) doors, gargantuan statues and lofty ceilings, this monument to the might of National Socialism was designed to both impress and subjugate those who visited it. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” its architect Albert Speer would later recall Hitler saying of it, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” The building certainly had the desired effect on Quisling. By the time his chat with Hitler was over he’d agreed to betray his country, setting in motion a series of events that would condemn it…

The slog was relentless. Through dark, deep forest and across broken terrain, mountain peaks studded with bare hillocks, draws and ridgelines, the US Seventh Army had fought its way northward nearly 500 miles (800km) from the French Riviera. The Germans had contested virtually every mile of the advance since the Allies had come ashore in southern France during Operation Dragoon on 15 August 1944, intent on supporting the D-Day offensive in Normandy and opening the Mediterranean ports to supply and reinforcement convoys. Once a junction had been affected with the armies advancing from Normandy, the Allies intended to press further across the frontier of the Third Reich on a broad front, bringing the Second World War home to Nazi Germany and striking a fatal blow to the enemy. In late…

As the Great War was coming to a close, a new perceived threat faced Europe: Bolshevism. Standing in the way of the ‘Reds’ were the ‘White’ Russians: a jumbled amalgamation of monarchists, republicans, conservatives, liberals and leftists. Already bruised and bloodied from the trenches, British, American and French troops were thrown into this chaotic civil war that could not have been further from the grinding stalemates of the Western Front. In 2023, Anna Reid released her riveting work on the intervention in the Russian Civil War, A Nasty Little War, now in paperback. She spoke with History of War about the intervention troops’ experiences of the conflict, their exposure to the White Army’s anti-Semitism and how intervention contributed to interwar European instability. She also shares her reflections on the current…

In the summer of 1944, the Allied campaign first to establish a bridgehead, then to break out further into France, deployed a range of unique armoured vehicles – and were up against the Third Reich’s formidable panzers. You can read all about them and more in World War II Tank Spotter’s Guide from Osprey Publishing, which catalogues and compares 40 iconic armoured vehicles from around the world and throughout the conflict. TIGER I NORMANDY JUNE 1944 The Tiger is widely recognised as the most famous tank of the war. Although prone to mechanical problems, it was highly successful in tank-versus-tank combat. In the west, hardly any of the Allied tanks were a match for it, and it could only be defeated at very close range or by specialist armoured vehicles.…

Author: Giles Milton Publisher: John Murray Press Price: £25 (Hardback) Released: Out now This is a tour de force in wartime diplomacy – Milton is a historian who writes with all the verve of a seasoned novelist gripping the reader from the very start. He charts with aplomb the forging of an unlikely Anglo-American-Soviet alliance during the Second World War and its subsequent collapse. Although the creation of this marriage of convenience is well-covered ground, Milton brings a fresh and all too human perspective to the desperate shuttle diplomacy designed to bring ideological enemies together. If it had not been for the actions of Hitler there is no way democratic capitalist America, democratic imperialist Britain and totalitarian communist Russia would ever have united in common cause. It was the power…

Author: Roxanne de Bastion Publisher: Robinson Price: £22 (Hardback) Released: Out Now In this powerful and often deeply moving book, musician Roxanne de Bastion uncovers the remarkable story of her grandfather, Istvan Bastyai von Holtzer, later known as Stephen de Bastion. The story unfolds against the backdrop of Hungary before and during the Second World War, tracing Stephen’s remarkable journey from a celebrated pianist to a Holocaust survivor. The book is based on archival material left by Stephen, including cassette tapes discovered by the author in her late father’s belongings. These recordings, along with unpublished memoirs, letters and various other documents, helped de Bastion reconstruct her grandfather’s life. Born into a family of wealthy textile merchants, Stephen was raised in a secular Jewish household. As the eldest of four, he…

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At 3:55am on 9 April 1940, German forces landed by ferry in Gedser in Denmark and moved north. German Fallschirmjäger units, meanwhile, had made unopposed landings taking Aalborg Airfield, the Storstrøm Bridge and the fortress of Masnedø. At 4am, the German ambassador to Denmark, Cécil von Renthe-Fink, phoned the Danish Foreign Minister Peter Munch to explain the situation. German troops were in the process of occupying Denmark to protect the country from an Allied attack. He demanded that Danish forces stand down to enable talks about the country’s future. Failure to do so, he explained, would result in the destruction of the Danish capital Copenhagen by aerial bombing. Shortly afterwards, at 4:20am, a battalion of German infantry from the 308th Regiment landed by sea in Copenhagen harbour. They swiftly overran…

In September 1946, the British military government of occupied Germany, and its Soviet opposite number, signed an agreement formalising a military liaison between the two newly neighbouring powers. The idea was to create a communications channel to resolve disputes or misunderstandings which could lead to, at best, a diplomatic incident – at worst, a military confrontation. ‘Liaison’ created a pathway for the discussion of issues and resolution of disputes before they escalated out of control. The agreement, which became known as the Robertson-Malinin Agreement (RMA), created reciprocal missions in the British and Soviet zones, accredited to the respective commander-in-chief, and remained in place, unaltered, until German reunification. The British Mission was called the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces of Occupation in Germany – BRIXMIS, BRX, or to those…

The red brick Roman walls of Carlisle loomed high over Cuthbert. The bishop of Lindisfarne had only arrived the day before, after a long and weary journey, and already his worthy hosts insisted that he come to see a fountain, built by the long-gone Romans and set into the city wall, that still flung water into the air. “Bishop Cuthbert, this way,” said one. “The Roman fountain is just here.” But as he turned to look at it, Cuthbert went pale. As if on the verge of fainting, he grabbed his staff and leant on it. His hosts, alarmed for their guest, fanned air over him and sent for water. But Cuthbert turned haunted eyes towards them: “Now, as I speak, the battle is fought.” It was 20 May 685.…

Having been promoted to Minister for War after the Armistice, Churchill was desperate to rescue his military standing after the disaster of the Dardanelles in 1915. As first lord of the Admiralty, he had proposed knocking the Ottomans out of the war by threading his fleet through the narrow Dardanelles Strait and capturing Constantinople. What followed was an unmitigated catastrophe for which Churchill shouldered most of the blame. By the time he was back in the Cabinet, the war with Germany was over and the Russian Civil War was the only remaining battlefield on which he could restore his name. He became the ‘cheerleader-in-chief’ for intervention, arguing that it could bring the Reds’ mass terror to an end while giving little attention to growing concerns about the viability of the…

Author: Gregory Carleton Publisher: Hurst Publishers Price: £27.50 (Hardback) Released: August 2024 In the mid-19th century, the long-standing enmity between the world’s two great empires, Britain and Russia, erupted into open hostility, and it was only a question of time before these two rivals for global supremacy confronted one another on the battlefield. The two-and-a-half-year series of engagements known as the Crimean War was triggered by the Russian occupation of the Turkish vassal states of Moldovia and Walachia. Shortly afterwards, Britain and its ally France declared war on Russia. Author Gregory Carleton makes a convincing case that Crimea changed forever the face of modern warfare, with the introduction of a plethora of technological ‘firsts’: the railway, the telegraph, photography, steam-powered ships, long-range artillery and the first use of landmines, among…

Author: Matt Graydon Publisher: Cranthorpe Millner Price: £12.99 (Paperback) Released: 20 August 2024 Everyone likes to imagine that if they’d been brought up in Germany under the Nazis they would have been a member of the resistance. The simple truth is that most of us, like the vast majority of the Germans who found themselves in this situation, would have gone along with things. It was not a case of the 1933 election and straight into the Holocaust but rather a slide, steep but a slide nevertheless, into totalitarianism. Once down in the pit it was too late to resist. The protagonist – you can’t really call him a hero – of the novel Leaving Fatherland is one such German. Oskar Bachmann is a bookish boy from a middle-class German…

Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentarian commander-in-chief pivotal in creating the New Model Army, was only in his 50s when he started using this wheelchair in the 1660s, turning the handles on the armrests to move around his home. The 13 wounds he’d picked up in battle, along with arthritis and a kidney stone, debilitated the fearsome warrior, who frequently credited God for his fortune in surviving numerous military engagements. Always keen to throw himself into the thick of it, Fairfax was first injured when Sir Thomas Glemham led a surprise attack on his quarters in Wetherby. Not yet fully dressed, Fairfax and four of his men defended themselves against eight cavalrymen. A shot glanced off Fairfax’s head – had his assailant’s aim been better, his military career would have been over…