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74448 SOLDIERS: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors


by Richard Holmes


Richard Holmes explores in minute detail the lives of soldiers, with all their extraordinary contradictions as they torment each other brutally in the barracks yet perform acts of heroism and kindness in times of need. Regimental culture and the


tone set by commanders are often key to behaviour. A World War I volunteer admitted that he was inspired by Kipling and other writers who presented a soldier’s life as one of adventure, but Holmes acknowledges that most soldiers in most eras have been driven to “take the king’s shilling” through unemployment. The Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo, described his own recruits as “scum”, yet boasted of training them up to be “fine fellows”. Holmes examines royal and parliamentary influence on the army, including current attempts to modernise, the routines and training of regulars and territorials, class divisions, straight and gay sex, regimental colours, army chaplains and much else, always using eyewitness testimony. 656pp, notes, colour photos.


£25 NOW £9


72466 PLAYING THE GAME: The British Junior Infantry Officer on the Western Front


1914-18 by Christopher Moore-Bick The Edwardian ideal of war as a gentlemanly game was shattered in 1914. Poets such as Sassoon and Owen recorded unspeakable brutality and suffering among the rank and file, while historians have pointed to a tragic level of incompetence at strategic level. Mail and parcels were treasured luxuries. Leadership qualities were still regarded as a public school preserve, and the author examines the effects of their education on the way young men coped with the situation at the front. Also looks at the problems of inexperienced junior infantry officers who might find themselves commanding older conscripts, some with distinguished careers in civilian life. 327pp. £25 NOW £5


72474 ROYAL AIR FORCE AT HOME: The History of RAF Air Displays from 1920


by Ian Smith Watson The military has always


endeavoured to foster good relations with those whom they defend, and since early times the armed forces have put on entertaining spectacles for the public, typified by parades, bands, mock battles, drill displays. This account of the RAF’s major


public displays since 1920 is generously illustrated with colour and b/w photos and features all the aircraft, pilots and display teams that have flown for the public’s entertainment since then. The first nine chapters, roughly a third of the book, look at the displays themselves, then chapter ten Aircraft ‘At Home’, showcases in a further 80 pages every aircraft to have taken part in displays, 150 pages of appendices cover aircraft and statistics. 345pp. £30 NOW £7


72521 EMPEROR’S CODES by Michael Smith


Subtitled ‘Bletchley Park’s Role in Breaking Japan’s Secret Ciphers’, here is a tale of the consequences for the Second World War. It tells the stories of John Tiltman, the eccentric British soldier turned code breaker who made many of the early breaks into Japanese diplomatic and military codes, Eric Knave, the Australian sailor recruited to work for the British who pioneered breakthroughs in Japanese naval codes, and Hiroshi Oshima, the hard-drinking Japanese Ambassador to Berlin. It was his candid reports to Tokyo of his conversations with Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis that were a major source of intelligence in the war against Germany. 343pp, paperback, illus.


£9.99 NOW £3.50


72567 DOCTOR SEUSS & CO. GO TO WAR


by André Schiffrin An astonishing treasure trove of over 300 incisive political cartoons by Dr. Seuss and 12 others, published between April 1941 and August 1945, which offers, particularly to British readers, a totally different set of perspectives


of WWII. Scathing, vigorous and provocative, the cartoons come from a time when US involvement in the war was by no means a foregone conclusion, and later, when victory was by no means guaranteed. Appeasers such as Lindbergh are lampooned mercilessly, and we particularly liked the Uncle Sam bird, which bears a striking resemblance to a Star Belly Sneech, sitting contentedly on his “star-spangled fanny” as the bombs and bullets fly all around him! 280pp softback, 8¾” square format.


£15.99 NOW £3.50


73076 THE GUN by C. J. Chivers


The Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic designed by Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, in 1947 was famously given the acronym AK-47. It is the AK-47’s spread across the face of the globe and the impact it has had in those 60 years which is the subject of Christopher Chiver’s exhaustive study. A searing examination of modern conflict and official folly, he mixes battlefield reportage and painstaking combing of declassified military documents to put the AK-47 and its derivatives, knock-offs and companion weapons in their social, historical and technological context. 481pp paperback.


$16 NOW £2.50 73774 DUNKIRK: Retreat to Victory


by Major General Julian Thompson The standard treatment of the story of Dunkirk in May/ June 1940 is a near-mythical tale of triumph defined mostly by the llth-hour arrival of the flotilla of civilian vessels that helped deliver the troops to safety, but in this inspiring true account popular misconceptions are finally corrected. For the first time, this account gives full weight to the fighting inland as the BEF found itself in mortal danger, thanks to the collapse of the Belgian army on one flank and the failure of the French on the other. The BEF, ill-equipped and under-trained, conducted a fighting withdrawal in the face of their formidable German foes. Overwhelmed, outgunned, and cornered, they were looking at the possible death knell of the Allied effort, with incalculable sacrifices of morale, equipment and men. 338 pages, archive photos, maps, glossary. £16.99 NOW £7


73894 TRENCH KNIVES AND MUSTARD GAS: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France by Hugh S. Thompson


One of the most celebrated American units sent to France following the 1917 US declaration of war was the 42nd Division, known as the Rainbow Division. After a stint in the trenches of Lorraine, where he was wounded and gassed, Hugh Thompson was on the receiving end of one of Ludendorff’s last desperate offensive “hammer blows” at Champagne-Marne, where he was wounded once again and then, having recovered from his wounds, took part in the September 1918 assault on the St. Mihiel salient, where he received the leg wounds that would end his war and dominate the rest of his life. His record of his experiences was serialised in 1934 in the Chattanooga Times, and this newly edited edition allows the author to tell his story to a new generation. It is an intense journey with the 168th regiment of the Rainbow through the villages, towns, battlefields and hospitals of occupied France enlivened further by his keen eye for detail and penchant for philosophy. This is the Great War as it happened. 205pp, photos. £26.95 NOW £7


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 £5


73423 BATTLE READY


by Tom Clancy and General Tony Zinni The book follows the evolution of General Zinni and the Marine Corps from the cauldron of Vietnam, through the operational revolution of the 70s and 80s, rescue operations in Somalia, CENTCOM, directing strikes against Iraq and Al Qaeda to peacemaking and serving as Special Envoy to the Middle East. Here is a military man with a radically different opinion. 519pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £2.50 73887 MASTER PLAN: Himmler’s Scholars and


the Holocaust by Heather Pringle How did the Third Reich try to turn the scientific study of ancient peoples and cultures into another propaganda tool? Here, in an engrossing account of the Nazi perversion of science in support of the myth of Aryan supremacy, an experienced journalist draws on extensive original research to paint a compelling portrait of the Ahnenerbe. This Nazi research institute was dedicated to manufacturing archaeological evidence for political purposes. With scandalous ease, the German scientists and scholars allowed their research to be used to justify the extermination of political minorities. A ground- breaking story of delusion and excess, and scientific and political abuse on a global scale. 463 pages with b/w archive photos. $24.95 NOW £6


73787 NAPOLEONIC WARS IN CARTOONS by Mark Bryant


After Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul of France, he became the most caricatured figure of his time, with almost 1,000 satirical drawings being produced by British artists alone. He often appeared as various kinds of grotesque creature, from ape, serpent and dragon, to


earwig, toadstool and crocodile, forever battling the mighty John Bull, Britannia and the British bulldog, as well as the Russian bear and the Austrian and Prussian eagles. The Allied monarchs and military commanders themselves were also custom-made for caricature. The Duke of Wellington’s nose, General Blücher’s flamboyant moustache, the one- armed Lord Nelson, the pug-faced and mad Tsar Paul of Russia, the portly Prince of Wales and the wiry Prime Minister William ‘Bottomless’ Pitt all feature prominently. 160 pages 31.5cm x 23.5cm, 300 cartoons and caricatures from both sides of the conflicts in colour and b/w.


£18.99 NOW £6 WAR MEMOIRS


In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.


- Anne Frank 74963 HEROES OF THE


HOLOCAUST by Lyn Smith There was no official celebration of British heroes of the Holocaust until 2010 when 27 people were formally recognised with a silver medal for having sheltered or rescued Jews. Among them was Frank Foley, who up to the War worked in British passport control in Berlin and took a big risk in issuing forged documents and visas. It is estimated that he


may have saved 10,000 Jews in this way. The most colourful chapter in this fascinating account of all the medal winners is the story of the two sisters Ida and Louise Cook. As opera lovers they made regular visits to Europe, wearing a selection of flashy and eye- catching garments including opulent furs. This was their cover for meeting and interviewing refugees, and they smuggled out quantities of jewellery for the people they were helping, pinning an array of diamonds and gold to their cheap chain-store clothing in a bold gamble that everyone would assume their finery was fake. Jane Haining, the only Scot to die in Auschwitz, was the matron of a children’s home in Budapest, and chose to stay with the children to the end. When Greece was divided among the three Axis powers Princess Alice of Greece, the mother of Prince Philip, gave refuge to a Jewish family at her home in Athens, telling the staff that Mrs Cohen was a former governess to her children. Accounts of the medal-holders include the political background to their bravery. 272pp, photos. £16.99 NOW £6.50


74983 PRAGUE WINTER: A Personal Story of


Remembrance and War 1937-1948


by Madeleine Albright Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and a familiar face on our television screens, Madeline Albright only discovered her Jewish heritage when she was being vetted for office in the US government. Albright’s parents


escaped from Czechoslovakia and spent the war in London where she remembers the Blitz before the family finally emigrated to America. Her cousin Dasa reached England on the Kindertransport under Nicholas Winton, but more than 20 of her relatives, including three grandparents, died in the Holocaust. In this gripping and moving memoir Albright goes in search of them. Albright is interested in the choices people made that allowed the Holocaust to happen, but she also as a politician knows the pressures that prompt people to compromise or turn a blind eye. She is particularly interested in the politics of exile. In London her father worked for the Czech government in exile under the leadership of Edvard Benes and Jan Masaryk, corresponding with the Czech democrat Hubert Ripka based in Paris, and working with the Benes group to ensure that there was only one official exiled government. Chamberlain was dismissive but Churchill pledged his support. As Heydrich mounted a campaign of terror in Prague, three agents were parachuted in to assassinate him. The operation did not go according to plan but achieved its end result, with the massacre of the village of Lidice taken as a terrible reprisal. 467pp, timeline, photos. £19.99 NOW £7.50


74564 THESE WONDERFUL


RUMOURS by May Smith Sub-titled ‘A Young Schoolteacher’s Wartime Diaries 1939-1945'. ‘Auntie F came in announcing dramatically that Hitler is coming tomorrow, at which my father remarked that He Would, now that he’s Just Finished Papering Upstairs’. May was a school teacher living with her parents in Derbyshire, an intelligent, often wittily acerbic young woman who


did not particularly like teaching. Evacuees had to be fitted into already over-crowded schools. At one point, May rejoices that, for once, she has only 40 pupils in her class. There was a frustrating shortage of books, paper and pencils, all of which made teaching more difficult. Then, in 1941, rumours circulated that younger female teachers might be compulsorily directed into munitions or aircraft factories, and May decided that teaching children was better than welding! Here are the clever-clogs teachers evacuated from Southend who are anxious to show off their general knowledge, the gas-mask drills, the interminable queues for food, the houses sporting windows shattered from air raids, the sleepless nights crammed into the cold cellar until the All Clear sounds. 401 pages. Illus.


£14.99 NOW £5.50


72737 PEOPLE’S WAR by Felicity Goodall


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A fashionable wedding at St George’s Hanover Square takes place amid piles of debris. Censorship was an important feature of life in Britain and an archive photo shows the censor’s department at the Post Office, unusually staffed mainly by men, meticulously checking the contents of letters abroad. The progress of the war is recounted, including bombs, shelters, air raids, industrial action, rationing, the Enigma code, the internment of “enemy aliens” on the Isle of Man, and the German occupation of the Channel Islands. 288pp, large paperback, superb archive photos on every page. £15 NOW £4.50


74665 501 ESSENTIAL FRENCH VERBS by Heather McCoy


Speakers of French who are a little rusty and intermediate level students often find the appropriate usage of French verbs as one of the most daunting tasks facing them. The book is a handy reference guide to the full conjugations of 501 most commonly used French verbs


including the infinitif, the participe présent and the participe passé. Also the subjunctive, conditional,


War Memoirs 33


74131 LONDON 1945 by Maureen Waller


In 1945, in the harshest winter for 50 years, the people of London were living in primitive conditions, with severe shortages, long queues for food and forays to emergency coal dumps for meagre supplies. Women lost the independence the war had lent them, husbands and wives had to learn to live together again, and children had a great deal of catching up to do. Yet the


people eagerly embraced plans for a modern metropolis and voted overwhelmingly for a Labour government and what they believed would be a new, fairer social order. This year of victory represents an important chapter in the history of London and Britain. 512 paperback pages, photos and illus.


£12.99 NOW £4


74565 TRAFALGAR: The Biography of a Battle by Roy Adkins


This engrossing, lively account of the Battle of Trafalgar details everyday life aboard ship. The men ate a greasy gruel called skillagree, a pudding made with flour, suet and currants known as duff, and boiled gristly meat - cheese soon became full of long red worms, and butter went rancid. Sanitation could be a problem in inclement weather when it was impossible to get to the ‘heads’, and urine was saved in huge tubs and used to bleach clothes. Here, you can relive the battle, smell the smoke, here the thud of the cannonballs and see the ‘vision of hell’, as the surgeon described the injured and dying men. Puts you amongst those brave sailors fighting for their lives in 1805. 392pp, b/w illus. Paperback.


£10.99 NOW £4.50 73770 CHANGING COURSE


by Roxane Houston Roxane Houston was a lively talented girl raised in a comfortable home excited to be gaining a place to study singing at the Royal Academy of Music. Except that Hitler decided to invade Poland and everything changed. By August 1940 she was in the Navy, and by the time the war ended, she had travelled the Mediterranean and the Middle East, survived shot and


shell, and lost her young brother when HMS Neptune sank off Tripoli. determined to ‘do her bit’ she volunteered to join the Wrens. Under constant attack from the Luftwaffe, she was moved around Britain and then to Ceylon. 271pp, photos. £8.99 NOW £2.25


69190 ABOVE ALL, COURAGE by Max Arthur


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Subtitled ‘Personal Stories from the Falklands War’, here are firsthand accounts from action in 1982. Major Michael J. Norman of the Royal Marines looks at the invasion of the Falklands, 2nd April. Four serving officers from the Royal Navy look at the bomb attack on HMS Ardent, 21st May. Sea, air and ground support, the sinking of Sir Galahad 8th June, the Battle for Darwin and Goose Green 28th-29th May, the attack on Wireless Ridge 13th-14th June, attack on Mount Longdon, attack on Mount Harriet, assault on Two Sisters, all on 11th-12th June, assault on Tumbledown Mountain 13th-14th June and more. 463pp paperback, photos. All copies SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. £8.99 NOW £3.50


73647 FIGHTER WRITER: The Eventful Life of Sergeant Joe Lee, Scotland’s Forgotten War Poet


by Bob Burrows


For a while Lee worked as a ship’s stoker, travelling to many lands, and then he worked as a cowpuncher in Canada before turning to his artwork and becoming a cartoonist. In 1910, he sketched a 12 year old girl, Dorothy, winner


of a singing competition - little could he guess that 14 years later they would marry. He began writing poems, and then, in 1914, at almost 40 years of age, he joined the Black Watch and was sent to France where his poems and sketches caused quite a stir. Hopefully will bring Joe Lee and his poems back into prominence. 224pp, b/w illus., sketches. £16.99 NOW £3.50


WORDS


Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.


- P. G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins


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