Åbo Akademis bibliotek

“The flak started about four or five minutes before the target and immediately it was apparent that it was intense and extremely accurate. Oboe entailed the pilot flying dead strai ...

After seven weeks of bitter fighting there was a desperate need to break out of the Normandy bridgehead. In late July 1944 Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey’s Second Army moved ...

The day after Vasiliy Krysov finished school, on 22 June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union and provoked a war of unparalleled extent and cruelty. For the next three years, as ...

Tom Firth was born in Japan where his English father and Polish mother were living. He begins by describing his unusual childhood and the devastating Yokohama earthquake in 1923. ...

Until recently James Beatson was one of the millions of forgotten soldiers of the Great War. But after 90 years his diary has been rediscovered, perfectly preserved, and his story ...

The men of Britain's Merchant Navy, although unarmed civilians going about their lawful business were the first to be involved with the enemy in the Second World War. Less than nin ...

A young captain in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, Reggie Burton was wounded in the closing stages of the disastrous defense of Malaya and Singapore. He vividly, yet calmly and with gr ...

Joseph Pilyushin, a top Red Army sniper in the ruthless fight against the Germans on the Eastern Front, was an exceptional soldier and has a remarkable story to tell. His firsthand ...

Sir Martin Frobisher was one of the great sea dogs of Elizabethan England. He was a pirate and a privateer - he looted countless ships and was incarcerated by the Portuguese as a y ...

Some Desperate Glory charts the progress of an enthusiastic and patriotic young officer who marched into battle with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in his pack. Intensely honest and re ...

The 2nd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry was one of only two battalions of the regiment that did not have its history published in some form after the Great War, the other wa ...

The period of history in which Stilicho lived was one of the most turbulent in European history. The Western Empire was finally giving way under pressure from external threats, es ...

This is the first book to give a detailed, first-hand account of post-World War II RAF Short Sunderland operations in the Far East. The author was a navigator with 88 Squadron and ...

Tony McCrum was born in Portsmouth in 1919, the second son of a naval lieutenant and a mother who came from a line of naval officers that stretched back to and beyond Trafalgar. He ...

Sir Samuel White Baker is one of those larger-than-life heroes only the Victorians could invent. For too long, the British Empire has been denigrated and equated with arrogance at ...

Pat Leonard served throughout the Great War as a Chaplain to the Forces in France, Belgium and, after the Armistice, in Germany. Along with the many hundreds of letters he wrote t ...

This is the story of the clash between two gigantic personalities in the early years of the twentieth century.On one side was Admiral Lord Charles Beresford. Physically strong, co ...

The Royal Norfolk Regiment is one of the oldest and most distinguished fighting forces in the British army. Its line of descent can be traced back for over three centuries, all the ...

Miles Dempsey, Commander of the British Second Army in the invasion of Europe 1944-45, is almost unknown to the general public. Yet his part in Britain’s contribution to that campa ...

‘That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swolen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree-ox wi ...

This book details the treatment of Allied service-women, female civilians and local women by the Japanese occupation forces. While a number of memoirs have been published there is ...

The Wipers Times was the Private Eye of the Ypres Salient during World War One. Edited, while under bombardment, by a battalion commander in the Sherwood Foresters, written by sol ...

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were all German allies in the Second World War, unlike the other countries of Europe which had either been forcibly occupied by the Nazis or ...

Acting Pilot Officer John Freeborn reported to RAF Hornchurch on 29 October, 1938. John was posted from Flying Training School to join the already acclaimed 74 ‘Tiger’ Squadron at ...

The senior British generals of the Victorian era - men like Wolseley, Roberts, Gordon and Kitchener - were heroes of their time. As soldiers, administrators and battlefield command ...