The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Mark Healy, many congratulations on your new title, The Ancient Assyrians: Empire and Army. Who were the Assyrians? We would locate Assyria in the northern half of modern Iraq. The name Assyria derives from that of its chief god, Ashur. Assyria = ’the land of Ashur’....
Ben Wheatley, many congratulations on your new book The Panzers of Prokhorovka. Was it the greatest tank battle(s) of the war? Thank you. It’s now generally accepted that it was the fighting around Brody and Dubno between the 26th and 29th July 1941, rather than...
It is important to remember (and often overlooked in the West) that despite suffering a very high number of armoured losses on 12 July during the battle of Prokhorovka the Soviets achieved their central aim of halting the German II SS Panzer Korps’ drive on the town...
Many books have been written about the Vietnam War over the years. This, by Ian Gardner, a British reservist paratrooper, focuses on a specific American paratroop unit’s experiences in Vietnam for a 12 month period between November 1967 and October 1968. As such, it’s...
Ho Chi Minh & the Vietnam War I never imagined for one minute that my previous works on Third Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment during World War II would lead to something quite like Sign Here For Sacrifice. However, the synergy between the battalion’s...
Ian Gardner, congratulations on Sign Here for Sacrifice. What sort of unit was the 506th and what was their history? The 506th Airborne Infantry Regiment was a Regular Army organisation of which the Third Battalion (subject of this latest work) was born in early 67 to...
In the Second World War Germany lost four million military dead. Three million of those were on the Eastern Front. From June 1941 onwards never fewer than seventy-five percent of German’s land and air assets were on the Eastern Front. In the whole of the war the...
The 'miracle of Dunkirk' is lauded in British history and folklore as a victory of human endeavor, celebrated each year with a profusion of TV documentary veteran accounts and memorial services. German soldiers constantly referred to the wunder or miracle of reaching...
With the ability of British collective memory to turn abject failure into heroic myth, the 1940 campaign, which eventually saw the Royal Navy fulfil one of its traditional roles of removing a beaten army to be used somewhere else, has become the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’. ...
The British view of Dunkirk is that of an iconic battle, a hugely important morale boost snatched from the jaws of what really was a catastrophic defeat. How is Dünkirchen viewed by the Germans? Dunkirk was viewed by German soldiers as simply a sign-post on the way to...
