Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 144 i History of War

One of the most iconic photographs of the Second World OWar – if not all of military history – was taken on 2 May 1945 when the Soviet flag was hoisted above the Reichstag in Berlin. However, rather than a spontaneous snapshot of triumph, the scene was heavily orchestrated and in fact re-created from the first ‘summiting’ of the building two days earlier. In truth, the battle to capture the symbolic heart of the German capital had been in large part a propaganda mission, with several ‘victory flags’ distributed among the Red Army assailants, encouraging courageous or foolhardy acts to be the first to reach the cupola. In the end, the assault on the Reichstag, and the immortal photograph, came at the cost of 2,200 dead, cut down by hundreds…

British fortunes improved in 1900, marking the beginning of the second phase of the war. Nevertheless, the Boers were not quite finished in giving their adversaries a bloody nose. While General Frederick Roberts set about assembling his forces at the Modder River, General Redvers Buller made several more attempts to strike north of the Tugela and relieve Ladysmith. Another two battles would end in yet more defeat for the British. General Charles Warren was instructed to advance to Trichardt’s Drift to perform a wide flanking movement around the Boers. Meanwhile, General Neville Lyttelton was to attack with a smaller force to the east at Potgieter’s Drift. Unfortunately, Warren vacillated in his advance, which allowed the Boers under Louis Botha to strengthen their defences at Tabanyama. Warren failed to dislodge them,…

For the Red Army the most symbolic objective in Berlin was the imposing Reichstag, Germany’s former parliament building on the eastern side of the vast square known as the Königsplatz. Joseph Stalin himself had chosen this as his army’s main goal rather than the Reich Chancellery, where Adolf Hitler’s bunker lay. The ruined Reichstag had suffered an arson attack just four weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933. During the war it was employed as a hospital. As far as Stalin was concerned, once the hammer and sickle flag was raised over the Reichstag it would signal an end to the battle for Berlin. Whoever was first to get the ‘Victory Banner’ in place would become a Hero of the Soviet Union. As an incentive, nine of these banners…

In 1904, the long-simmering tensions between the Russian and Japanese Empires over control of the Chinese region of Manchuria finally boiled over into a full-blown conflict. Following Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the European powers, led by Russia, had pressured the victorious Japanese into relinquishing their territorial gains in the region. This included giving up control of the Liaodong Peninsula and the strategic naval base of Port Arthur, which the Russians coveted as an ice-free alternative to their main Pacific base at Vladivostok. For resource-poor Japan, control over the bustling markets and vast raw materials of Manchuria was both a matter of national pride and a strategic imperative. In 1899, US Secretary of State John Hay proposed an ‘Open Door’ trade policy in China that seemed to…

On the morning of 9 April, B Squadron, 1SAS, were ambushed by some Germans close to the town of Oldenburg. Several of the SAS were trapped in a ditch but Mayne, first on foot and then in a jeep, drove the enemy back and rescued his men. The recommendation for the VC stated: “There is little doubt that Mayne’s exceptional personal courage and leadership saved the lives of many men and greatly helped the Allied advance on Berlin.” But he received only a fourth DSO, a decision that seemed to puzzle even King George VI who, upon meeting Mayne in 1946, asked why the VC had “so strangely eluded him”. It is a question that has never been satisfactorily answered. According to Bob Lowson, who served under Mayne for three…

01 PEASANTS’ REVOLUTION BEGINS 23 JUNE 1524 Peasants from the Evangelical Brotherhood rebel in Stühlingen when the Countess of Lupfen orders her serfs, who’ve experienced a difficult harvest, to collect snail shells for use as thread spools. 02 TWELVE ARTICLES DRAFTED MARCH 1525 Fifty representatives from the Upper Swabian Peasants Groups form the Christian Association and draft the Twelve Articles explaining the peasants’ demands to the Swabian League. They are printed 25,000 times over two months. 03 BATTLE OF LEIPHEIM 4 APRIL 1525 Five-thousand peasants gather to rise against Ulm. They are met by a force led by Truchsess Georg, who distracts them with negotiations before revealing his entire force. Peasants are cut down as they retreat and hundreds drown attempting to escape across the Danube. 04 WEINSBERG MASSACRE 16…

Working side-by-side with inmates daily, many civilian workers like Perrone helped forced labourers to survive, but little is known about them. Greppi reflected: “In Italy, we have an expression about the cat that eats its tail. We know Levi exists because of Perrone. Otherwise, he would have been one of the millions killed. We know about Perrone because Levi survived. There are many questions… but one of them is how many labourers like Perrone were there in Auschwitz? We don’t know because they didn’t survive or because they didn’t save someone like Levi, who went on to write the greatest testimony of the Holocaust. “[My book is] a sad story because of how it ends in Perrone’s life, but I think it’s a very positive message. Even somewhere like Auschwitz,…

Author: Vladislav Zubok Publisher: Pelican Price: £25 Released: May 2025 HOW THE CONFLICT ERUPTED AND ESCALATED SO RAPIDLY TO EMBROIL FIVE CONTINENTS OVER SIX DECADES, CULMINATING IN THE SPECTACULAR COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION Professor of International History Vladislav Zubok has drawn on years of research and his three decades spent in the USSR to offer a striking portrait of a world on the brink. The author argues that the Cold War, often seen as an existential battle between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism, has long been a misunderstood episode in history. He challenges the popular Western narrative that economic superiority and democratic values led America to victory. Instead, he looks beyond the familiar images of East-West rivalry, shining a light on the impact of non-Western actors and placing the…

A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON THE WESTERN ALLIANCE DURING WWII IS OFFERED IN THE CONTEXT OF THE 1944 NORMANDY CAMPAIGN Author: Marc Milner Publisher: Yale University Press Price: £24.95 Released: Out Now The so-called ‘special relationship’ between Great Britain and the United States, that common bond that won the Second World War in the West, is starkly re-evaluated in this sometimes cynical but certainly thought-provoking volume. Marc Milner asserts that the pervasive perspective on the Anglo-American alliance that was perpetuated from the Great War, through the Normandy Campaign of 1944 and the final victory over Nazi Germany, was more than a mutual admiration exercise of cooperation among nations with common bonds and beliefs. Milner contends that the grand alliance was in actuality an extension of a bitter rivalry for 20th century…

By the mid-19th century, India was central to the prosperity of the British Empire, and the task of safeguarding vital routes to the subcontinent fell to the Royal Navy. Britain’s fleets controlled the sea lanes through the Suez Canal and around the Cape of Good Hope. This meant that, strategically, a secure southern Africa was an essential component in the imperial link. The British sought to bring the colonies of South Africa under a confederation. One such colony was the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), known as Transvaal. The Boer republic had been granted independence by the British in 1852, but by the 1870s it was experiencing serious financial problems. Taking advantage of this, British authorities at the Cape annexed Transvaal in 1877. The Boers sent a delegation, including Paul Kruger and…

Despite the fall of Bloemfontein and Pretoria, the Boers were determined to fight on. Although the British did not initially realise it, the war was entering a third phase – guerilla war – one that would drag on until the end of May 1902. In the northern Orange Free State, General Christiaan de Wet began destroying telegraph and railway lines, while also conducting hit-and-run attacks on British outposts and supply convoys. In response, the British initially continued their military operations as before, taking and occupying points of strategic value as well as key towns. However, as the Boers developed their guerilla campaign, orders were issued to field commanders to raze homesteads and burn the farms of Boers suspected of aiding burghers still fighting. De Wet continued to be a thorn…

Q&A WITH CARLO GREPPI The Italian chemist Primo Levi is globally recognised for his Holocaust testimony If This is a Man, but he almost didn’t survive to tell the tale. Of the 650 Italian Jews who were taken from the camp in Fossoli, the 24-year-old Levi was one of just 24 who survived until liberation by Red Army scouts 11 months later, in January 1945. Carlo Greppi, an award-winning Italian author and historian, attributes Levi’s survival to a “spider’s web of delicate, sensible gestures”, at the centre of which was Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian bricklayer from Fossano, Piedmont. Thousands of civilian labourers like him came to Auschwitz amid wartime work shortages. They were technically free men, living outside of the camp’s barbed wire, but suffered increasingly poor conditions, particularly after…

Gurkha Museum overhaul After receiving over £2 million from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Gurkha Museum has announced ambitious plans to transform into an international centre for global heritage In early February 2025, The Gurkha Museum Trust announced that it had been awarded £2,681,278 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. With an extensive collection dating back 210 years, The Gurkha Museum has served as Winchester’s custodian for the Brigade of Gurkhas’ unique history since 1990. The museum’s trust will use its lottery funding to embark on Project Kaida, a large-scale redevelopment plan named after the Nepali term for celebrating heritage and customs while looking forward. Project Kaida’s first step will be to renovate the museum’s permanent public galleries, many of which haven’t changed since the museum first moved to…

A BOOK THAT LIFTS THE LID ON HOW HISTORIANS USE THEIR SOURCES Authors: Matthew Gabriele & David M Perry Publisher: HarperCollins Price: £25 Released: Out now Historians, when writing for the general public, don’t normally draw back the veil on what they do. They tell the story of what happened, when it happened and who did what, but they don’t spend ages going through the painstaking work that allowed them to tell this tale. In Oathbreakers, Gabriele and Perry do something different: they pull back the historical curtains. While this book sets out to tell the history of the bitter civil conflict between the children and grandchildren of Charlemagne that tore apart the Carolingian Empire, it also reveals how historians interrogate their sources to try to get at the real…

On the night of 8/9 April 1945 a patrol of M Squadron, Special Boat Squadron (SBS) embarked on a diversionary raid on Lake Comacchio in northern Italy under the command of Major Anders Lassen. Their instructions from Brigadier Ronnie Tod, commander of No 2 Commando Brigade, was to stir up trouble among the German troops on the eastern shore of the lake so soldiers dug in on the northern shore would be despatched to reinforce their comrades. Tod intended to launch his main assault on the northern shore of Comacchio. The muddy waters of Lake Comacchio were on average only two feet (0.6m) deep, and a thin strip of sand, known as ‘the spit’, separated the eastern edge of the lake from the Adriatic Sea. Several small islands were dotted…

MARTIN LUTHER THE FOUNDER OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION COULDN’T STOP THE GERMAN PEASANTRY FROM USING HIS IDEAS Martin Luther was the religious reformer who founded Lutheranism, beginning the Protestant Reformation. He famously detailed his opposition to the Catholic Church in his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, defended his beliefs at the 1521 Diet of Worms, then went into hiding. By establishing and defending the Reformation, Luther set an example of standing up against the Holy Roman Empire’s religious and feudal power structures. Roper explains the connection between the Protestant Reformation and the peasants’ rebellion: “In 1520, he had written a pamphlet called the Freedom of a Christian that starts with the extraordinary paradox that a Christian is lord of all but also the servant of all, out of which he develops…

In December 1943 Levi, a Piedmontese member of the resistance in the Alps, was arrested. After admitting to being Jewish, the authorities sent him to the Fossoli Camp and Auschwitz shortly after. He survived until the camp’s liberation, largely thanks to support from Perrone and a well-timed illness that prevented him from being sent on the death march evacuation from Auschwitz. After the war, Levi returned to Italy and found work at a paint factory outside Turin. He decided to stay in the factory dormitory during the week and set about writing a memoir of his experience, scribbling notes on scraps of paper whenever a memory came to him. The words came from Levi “like a flood which has been dammed and suddenly rushes forth”, as he described to his…

HITLER DEAD Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves on 30 April after it had become clear Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin. In the days leading up to his suicide, Hitler married Braun, tested the potency of his cyanide capsules on his dog Blondi, and was told of his ally Benito Mussolini’s fate. Red Army troops were less than 1,640ft (500m) from the Führerbunker when Braun took a cyanide pill and Hitler shot himself. Chief of the German Navy High Command Karl Dönitz became the German leader. Dönitz initiated an attempt to surrender to the British and Americans while the German military made a fighting withdrawal west to avoid Soviet capture. BATTLE OF OKINAWA The bloodiest engagement of the Pacific War, lasting 81 days, began on 1 April…

Authors: Adrian & Dawn L Bridge Publisher: Amberley Publishing Price: £22.99 Released: Out now Brian Horrocks, formerly commander of Britain’s XXX Corps, described the campaign to capture the Reichswald on the Third Reich’s northeastern border as a “battle no one has heard of, although it was probably one of the most decisive of the war”. Intended to operate in conjunction with the Americans to the south, circumstances dictated that the First Canadian Army, a joint Anglo-Canadian force, would bear the brunt of the fighting from the opening day of the battle on 8 February 1945. In the event, poor terrain and dreadful weather proved to be as bitter opponents as the Germans as the fighting took an attritional turn, reminiscent of some of the grinding slogs of the Normandy Campaign…