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The winter of 1944 saw Nazi Germany undertake its last offensive campaign of the Second World War. The Battle of the Bulge was undertaken in the heavily forested Ardennes region straddling Belgium and Luxembourg in December 1944. The goal here was to launch a surprise counter-attack against the advancing US 12th Army Group and the […]

The Second World War witnessed many great escapes of resistance fighters from occupied countries and Allied prisoners of war from German controlled territory across Europe. The most famous was surely the ‘Great Escape’ from the Stalag Luft III POW camp. Others were carried out, attempted or just planned and there was an entire department in […]

The Allied invasion of northern France with the D-Day landings of the 6th of June 1944 has understandably been focused on as a major episode in the Second World War, as the long-awaited Western Front was opened in Europe. But the campaign in Normandy often completely overshadows events elsewhere, notably the fact that the Western […]

Much of our perception of the latter stages of the Second World War is often focused exclusively on the Western and Eastern Fronts as the Western Allies moved east from France into Germany and the Russians barreled through Poland towards Berlin. But there were several other fronts being opened and fought in during 1944 and […]

It is often assumed that the world’s first inter-continental weapon system was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, a US strategic bomber which was the first plane of its kind capable of flying between continents without refueling. Designed to hold a nuclear bomb it gave the United States the ability to launch nuclear strikes against Russia or […]

Operation Jubilee: August 19th, 1942 Sometimes victory can be rescued from the jaws of defeat. This is certainly a maxim which applies to the Dieppe Raid by the Western Allies against the German-occupied French town of Dieppe in mid-August 1942. Viewed from a purely statistical perspective the Dieppe Raid, or Operation Jubilee, as it was […]

On the 23rd of October 1940 Adolf Hitler and General Francisco Franco, the leader of Fascist Spain, met at a railway station in the town of Hendaye in the Pyrenees region, right next to the border between Spain and Vichy France. At issue was whether Franco would enter the Second World War on the side […]

The Allied Arctic Convoys (1941 – 1945) On Sunday the 22nd of June 1941 Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia, was initiated. This was the largest ever invasion campaign undertaken by a nation state against another country and involved three million Axis troops, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,500 tanks and over 4,000 aircraft. In […]