34 War and Militaria


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72818 1944-1945 THE VICTORY IN EUROPE EXPERIENCE: From D- Day to the Destruction of the Third Reich by


Julian Thompson The 11 months from June 1944 to May 1945 remain


the most momentous in modern human history, a period in which the course of the world’s biggest ever conflict was turned around and effectively ended. The Allied invasion and recapture of mainland Europe began with the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and went on to include many of the most famous battles of WWII and events such as the taking of Hitler’s HQ, the discovery of the horrors of the concentration camps, the suicide of Hitler on 29 April 1945 and the subsequent unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, and VE Day, Tuesday 8 May 1945. Published in association with the Imperial War Museum, this is, as it says on the highly impressive slipcase, “history in your hands”. As well as a quite magnificent retelling of events from D-Day, lavishly illustrated with over 200 colour and b/w photos and 20 full-colour battle maps, there are over 30 facsimile items of rare memorabilia integrated into the book’s pages. These include maps, diaries, letters, declassified top secret documents, booklets, propaganda leaflets and posters, which are either newly researched and previously unpublished, held in MoD files or exhibited at the IWM or in other collections around the world. Some leave you speechless, such as Major Hugh Stewart’s account of what he saw as he walked into Belsen, one of Hitler’s last telegrams and his “Political Testament”, both written in his final days in the Reich Chancellery bunker and Eisenhower’s handwritten note, taking full responsibility for the D-Day landings, to have been published if they had failed. Not only does the reader get all this, but in addition there is a 72 minute audio CD, “We Fought in Europe”, a collection of first-hand accounts from veterans of the northwest Europe campaign - quite astounding listening. Non-English documents are translated, and the book is fully indexed. 64pp, 12¼”×10½”, phenomenal value. £30 NOW £12


69153 RAF EVADERS: The Comprehensive Story of Thousands of Escapers and their


Escape Lines, Western Europe, 1940-1945 by Oliver Clutton-Brock


Packed with information, key figure biographies and listings - such as 2,198 evaders who have been identified. Here is the low down on various escape routes such as the PAT/PAO line, which ran along the Mediterranean coast to Perpignan and across the Spanish border, and here too is the Comet line from Brussels to the Pyrenees. There are key figures such as Abbé Pierre Carpentier, who ran a safe house but was betrayed and beheaded, Jean-Claude Camors whose organisation helped some 60 airmen to evade, Geneviève Soulié, who helped 136 Allied airmen to escape from France and dozens more - many of whom paid dearly for their assistance. All the routes were fraught with danger, not only for the evaders, but for anyone who helped them. For those who were caught, the penalty was death. 494 pages 18cm x 25cm with b/w archive photos, map. £35 NOW £10


70810 LANCASTER: The Biography by Tony Iveson and Brian Milton Squadron Leader Tony Iveson DFC joined 617 Squadron The Dambusters in 1944 and flew three sorties against the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway. Lancasters dropped Barnes Wallis’s ‘Bouncing Bombs’ on Germany’s Ruhr Valley Dam to earn the Dambusters’ name. This is a proud story of the finest heavy bomber of any nation and a man who went on to complete over 2,000 hours on them. 256pp in paperback. 16 pages of colour and b/w photos. £7.99 NOW £3.50


70811 HURRICANE: The Last Witness by Brian Milton


Eighteen of the surviving pilots who flew the Hurricane during World War Two tell what it was like to fly and fight in this iconic aircraft, not only over the White Cliffs of Dover, but also during the Battle of France, the defence of Malta, the intense heat of the North African desert, in the freezing temperatures of the Arctic wastes and in the suffocating humidity of the Far East. Bob Stanford Tuck, a celebrated ace who flew Spitfires, was not at first impressed by the Hurricane. Around 60% of claimed ‘kills’ fell to the guns of Hurricane pilots and the only Victoria Cross awarded to a member of Fighter Command during the war went to Flight Lieutenant Eric Nicolson of 249 Squadron. Badly wounded in a dogfight, he attempted to leave his blazing Hurricane but spotted a Messerschmitt ahead. He returned to the cockpit, engaged the enemy and shot it down successfully. 256 pages, 32 photos. £18.99 NOW £6


71310 THE THIRD REICH: A Chronicle by Richard Overy


At once authoritative and informative, this chronicle is enhanced by extensive quotations from documents, letters, diaries and oral testimony, and accompanied by dozens of original and striking images of the era. There are also ‘fact boxes’ which explore many of the important aspects of the Third Reich in greater detail. Defined by the messianic, iconic figure of the Fuehrer, this was one of the pivotal periods of the modern age. Here, in a no- holds-barred account are all the details of the rise and fall of Nazi power, the concentration camps, the roles played by its protagonists, such as Martin Bormann, Rudolph Hess, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering, the deterioration of its leader into madness, the futile attempts of horrified dissidents to kill Hitler and put the brakes on the reign of terror and the final showdown with the forces of the Allies. In this book, history lives. 408 pages packed with photos in colour and b/w, many never before seen, and maps. £25 NOW £10


71288 DISCOVERING BATTLEFIELDS OF


ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND by John Kinross Covers 69 battlefield sites recounting the events of each battle and each entry has an OS Landranger map reference, hand drawn map and mono photograph of how it looks today or historic woodcut illus where appropriate. Since the 1960s, the Battlefield Trust and English Heritage maintain the register of battle sites that need to be conserved and their addresses. Good centres for exploration are Rugby, York and Berwick-Upon- Tweed. 184pp, illus softback. £8.99 NOW £2.75


71447 BRITISH SOLDIER IN EUROPE 1939-1945


by Peter Doyle and Paul Evans From his first arrival in France in 1939 through to the victory over the Nazis in 1945, and even to the Victory in Japan in 1946, this splendid info-packed volume examines the everyday objects associated with the British soldier in wartime. From uniforms to weapons, boots to blanco - a whitener for the soldiers’ puttees - from postcards to phrasebooks, and insignia to ephemera, it provides a visual encyclopedia of the everyday life of the combatant. In many cases, these items have become highly collectable and the book contains extensive info for collectors. 208 pages 22cm x 30.5cm jammed with photos of contemporary documents and equipment in colour and b/w. £25 NOW £9


71452 EASTERN FRONT: Day By Day by Steve Crawford


In a most unusual chronological approach to the conflict that decided the outcome of World War II in Europe, it allows the reader to see at a glance the key battles, such as the great encirclement engagements of 1941 - Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and Operation Bagration, sidebars on all the main commanders who led the German and Soviet armies, such as Guderian, Zhukov, Manstein, Vatutin, Rokossovsky, Model and Konev. Also detailed, in parallel to the military manoeuvres, are the political events, such as the activities of the SS and Einsatzgruppen murder squads, that influenced the outcome. Here too is the technology such as the Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber, the T-34 Tiger and Panther tanks. 192 pages 22.5cm by 29cm. Illus plus maps in colour. £18.99 NOW £6.50


71470 1938: Hitler’s Gamble by Giles MacDonogh


The year 1938 was one of cataclysmic change for Germany. We now remember 1938 above all for Munich, that moment at the end of September when Western leaders apparently gave in to the Führer’s demands. Peace was hanging by a thread and Nazi anti-Semitism took a new turn. The Blomberg-Fritsch Crisis in January, the Anschluss in March that melded Austria to the Reich, Hitler’s alliance with Mussolini in May, the Kendrick Crisis in August which destroyed the British Intelligence Network in Germany and the expulsion of the Polish Jews in October, November’s Reichskristallnacht and the Kindertransporte beginning ferrying children to safety in December. Following the pogrom to the 10th November, as many as 30,000 Jews were shoved into concentration camps. 407pp in paperback, photos. £9.99 NOW £4.50


71879 THE FIFTH PILLAR by Michael Tillotson


Subtitled ‘The Life and Philosophy of the Lord Bramall KG’, the book has a foreword by Sir Alistair Horne. Lord Bramall spoke out vigorously against the war in Iraq. Lord Bramall first put forward his concept of ‘Fifth Pillar’ in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was perceived to present the paramount threat to peace. British defence policy then rested on four pillars: maintenance of the nuclear deterrent, defence of the UK, ground and air contributions to the defence of NATO’s European Central Region and naval and air contributions to the defence of the eastern Atlantic. 40 plates and six maps. 338pp. £8.99 NOW £2


72598 CAVALRY OF THE CLOUDS: Air War Over Europe 1914-1918 by John Sweetman


In this moving and informative volume, the author traces the evolution of air power in North-West Europe, which culminated in the formation of a separate air force - the RAF. Extensively researched, the book draws on a wide range of personal correspondence involving British, Australian, Canadian, South African, American and German airmen as well as a wealth of more formal records and documents. Here are all the details readers could want on: Airfields - from Brattlebury, Lincs to Fort Worth Texas - airplanes - from the Fokker D.VII to the Sopwith Dolphin - and airmen from Lt. A. E. Bonnalie to Major W. S. Douglas, among many, many more. 224 pages with a plethora of b/w contemporary photos, maps, list of abbreviations and appendix: Significant Dates.


£20 NOW £7


71945 AN END OF WAR: Fatal Final Days to VE Day, 1945 by Ken Tout


As conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan remind us today, war does not necessarily end when a ceasefire is declared. Using his own experiences on the front line as well as interviews with many veterans, the author recounts how the last gasps of the German Army in 1944-1945 saw some of the fiercest and most fanatical fighting of the whole war. Major offensives included Hitler’s last desperate attempt to reverse the tide in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Western Allies’ epic struggle to cross the Rhine. Also explored are the lesser known but no less important battles for the Hochwald and the Reichwald. 249 moving pages, archive photos, maps. £18.99 NOW £5


71971 TO SCALE THE SKIES: The Story of


Group Captain J. C. ‘Johnny’ Wells DFC and Bar by Peter Cornwell


Group Captain J. C. ‘Johnny’ Wells DFC story is both an inspiration and a gripping record of one man’s journey through a service career. From idyllic pre-war training he was catapulted into flying bombers against rebels over Iraq, and combat Fw190s over England, in the newly introduced and dangerous Typhoon. He undertook hazardous low-level anti-shipping strikes in the English Channel, as well as train-busting sorties over occupied territory at night. As if this were not enough, following D-Day, he took part in close-support ground- attack operations across northern Europe. 223 paperback pages. Photos. £12.99 NOW £4.75


71975 BOMBERS: From the First World War to Kosovo by David Wragg


Begins with a brief overview of the origins of aerial bombardment which, astonishingly, go back several thousand years. Then come the early raids of the First World War - including Zeppelin airship and bomber operations over Britain, and Royal Flying Corps


attacks on German targets, as well as the use of the bomber between the wars by the Germans in the Spanish Civil War, by the Italians in Abyssinia and by the Japanese in China. Here, vividly brought to life, are Germany’s use of the Blitzkrieg in the opening years, the RAF/USAAF combined bomber offensives, the use of dive- and torpedo-bombers in the Pacific by the US and Japan, the USAAF’s fire raids on Tokyo, and the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also discusses how, during the Gulf War in 1991, credit went to the cruise missiles, despite the deployment of bombers. Could it be that the manned bomber may soon become the first element of air power to be made redundant in this age of high technology? 280 paperback pages 19.5cm x 26cm, colour and b/w. £20 NOW £6


72219 AMAZING AND EXTRAORDINARY


FACTS: The British At War by Jonathan Bastable


The book bristles with martial tales and military anecdotes, stories of horror and valour, bravery and treachery, strategy and ingenuity. Every account is rooted in the battles that Britain has fought, from Hastings to Helmand Province, the doomed Belgrano, the Flagstaff Affair, the face of Kitchener, dirty tricks at Stamford Bridge, in Flanders’ Fields, pioneering moments, the Phoney War, gallant she-soldiers and Hobart’s funnies (the crazy but deadly tanks of D-day). 144pp with line art. £9.99 NOW £3


72443 CONCEAL, CREATE, CONFUSE by Martin Davies


Here is the first complete study of a rarely explored aspect of British battlefield tactics. In a year-by-year account, the author shows how Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig actively encouraged Army commanders to employ trickery. The real art lay in the development of geographically dispersed deception plans which disguised the real time and place of attack and forced the enemy to defend areas threatened by fake operations. Some of these plans such as disguising mules as tanks and the creation of dummy airfields bordered on the farcical, but were often amazingly effective. The driving force behind the plan was GHQ. 256pp in large paperback, maps. £14.99 NOW £4.75


72540 SECRETS OF STATION X by Michael Smith


The definitive history of Bletchley Park by one of the world’s leading experts on Britain’s spies. This astonishing story tells how British code breakers cracked the Nazi Enigma cyphers, cutting an estimated two years off the Second World War. Michael Smith revealed everything that happened at Bletchley Park from breaking the German, Italian and Japanese codes to creating the world’s first electronic computer. In fact two thirds of the people who worked there were young women, including around 2,000 Wrens. Here is the first full enthralling account of their enormous contribution towards the fight for freedom. 328pp, photos. £9.99 NOW £5


72592 ANCIENT WORLD COMMANDERS: From the Trojan War to the Fall of Rome by Angus Konstam


From the mythological warrior Achilles to the Chinese general and strategist Zhou Yu, this superbly illustrated book describes more than 160 prominent war leaders. These fascinating profiles of the great military commanders such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are arranged alphabetically, while geographically the book covers wars and conflict that occurred in a vast region from Eastern Europe through the Middle East to India and China. There is a great deal of detail on those leaders’ successes or failures in battle and on their different methods of waging war, such that the reader may compare the effectiveness of generals of the great formal armies of the Greeks and Romans with that of the devil-may-care yet nonetheless fearsome and successful barbarian hordes of Attila the Hun. 192 gory pages brimming with colour illustrations. $19.95 NOW £7


WANTED NOTICEBOARD


The Odd Angry Shot by William Nagle – Mr J. Bowman, 4 Taftingus Place, St. Margaret’s Hope, Orkney KW17 2UD. Old Highland – Island Tourist Brochure 1930s-60s, any photos or holiday snaps on fashion, boats, cars, trains skiing, youth hostelling etc. RAF – Royal Navy in Scotland WW2, photos and ephemera. Photos needed for a book to be published and will be safely returned. Tel: Mike Hughes, Bellhill, 0169 8843557 or Wendy Austin Bishop, Grantown-on-Spey, 01479 872449.


72668 TWILIGHT YEARS: The Paradox of


Britain Between the Wars by Richard Overy By the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modern thought and experimentation. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists and artists, among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells, sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Colouring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud’s concept of the unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring at the end of civilisation. Britain had not suffered from economic collapse, occupation, civil war or any of the ideological conflicts of inter-war Europe. The author postulates that the coming of the second war was almost welcomed by Britain’s leading thinkers. 522 pages with b/w illus. $35 NOW £9


72800 BRITAIN AT WAR 1939- 1945 by Richard Overy


A very expensively produced outsize hardback which contains rare removable documents, maps and memorabilia in facsimile and has been published in association with The Imperial War Museum covering the invasion of Poland to the surrender of Japan. This package transports the reader right back into the heart of the action - Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, ‘Sea Lion’, the Blitz, St Nazaire, Singapore, the Dams Raid, Alamein, Anzio, D-Day, Arnhem and many more engagements are all presented concisely with maps, photographs and documents bringing this epic story to life as never before. The documents include the Munich Agreement, Hitler’s Directive No. 1 which ordered the invasion of Poland, a calculation about the interception of the Graf Spee, French Intelligence maps, a Flying Log Book, notes from Churchill’s famous ‘The Few’ speech, Montgomery’s orders for the Battle of El Alamein, the front page of the Eight Army News announcing the invasion of mainland Italy, a message from double-agent ‘Garbo’ and even Field Marshal Montgomery’s handwritten notes for D- day among them. New colour maps. £30 NOW £10


72271 TARGET LONDON: Under Attack from the V-


Weapons During WWII by Christy Campbell


The book chronicles the inception of German V-weapons and the Allies’ epic race to discover the truth about them before London was reduced to a heap of rubble. At Bletchley Park, a most unusual partnership, a professor of German linguistics and a London-born physicist with a love of practical jokes, was interpreting


hundreds of decrypted signals. Their work allowed them to make sense of the scrambled stream of messages from French, Danish and Polish patriots who risked their lives to deliver news about the German ‘revenge’ weapons. Then a key message was interpreted from the underground factory called Mittelwerk. Here is the shadowy world of secret intelligence, fighter pilots, the citizens of the Hague, the deceivers of the Double Cross Committee, and the German engineers, soldiers and airmen. 516 pages, photos and maps. £20 NOW £6.50


72801 BRITAIN’S SECRET WAR 1939-1945: How Espionage, Codebreaking and Covert Operations Helped Win the War by Michael Smith


We could not resist a book which claims to include ‘removable documents of historic importance’ and, as we noted that the sources of the pictures included Bletchley Park, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives at Kew, our excitement mounted. Here are removable - facsimile - documents from the archives of MI5, MI6 and SOE, bringing to life as never before the era, personalities and events of World War II. They include intelligence reports, annotated by Churchill, revealing Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe and Russia, a diagram of the ‘Garbo’ network of invented contacts which was used by double agent Jean Pujol when convincing the Nazis he had a whole spy ring operating in Britain, the order for Operation Gunnerside, including maps and diagrams laying out the attack, and many more. Here are a host of new heroes and heroines, never acknowledged since they had to operate under cover. Even astrologers and a stage magician were brought in to help extract allied aircrew from Nazi-occupied Europe. 63 pages 29cm x 25cm in very tough slipcase packed with b/w photos. £30 NOW £10


72803 COMMANDO 50TH ANNIVERSARY:


Commando for Action and Adventure by George Low


Here at last, for the millions of men whose interest in military history was triggered by reading war comics in their youth, is the official history of Commando comic books, published to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. This blockbuster volume features: Six of the best Commando comic books ever, with commentaries, The 50 best iconic full-colour cover artworks, Profiles of the best Commando comic-strip and cover artists, Profiles of the best Commando story writers. Complete Commando comic-book title listing and the inside story of the Commando comic-book bunker and HQ at DC Thomson in Dundee. Here are tales of adventure, daring, honesty, dependability and the triumph of decency, packed with speech and thought bubbles and perfectly rendered Spitfires and Hurricanes, not to mention a wealth of soldiers of different nationalities who all shout ‘Aaagh!’ a lot. 176 pages 29cm x 36cm.


£19.99 NOW £7


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