Åbo Akademis bibliotek

Twelve years of rule by Hitler and the Nazi Party could have made Germany a third world country after the end of the war, and according to some highly placed Allied officials of th ...

For those with even a passing interest in the Second World War, the name Colin Gubbins is synonymous with the Special Operations Executive (SOE). This is not surprising as from its ...

At the Battle of Waterloo Sir William Ponsonby, a man who the Duke of Wellington stated had ‘rendered very brilliant and important services and was an ornament to his profession’, ...

Hubert de Burgh rose from obscure beginnings to become one of the most powerful men in England. He loyally served first King John and then the young Henry III and played a crucial ...

Kingston playwright R.C. Sherriff came to fame with his First World War drama Journey’s End, which was based on his own experiences as a young officer on the Western Front. Its suc ...

From 1941 to 1945, a large number of foreign soldiers were incorporated into the ranks of the German army in order to compensate for the enormous losses suffered by the Wehrmacht, ...

Peter Davis was the youngest officer in the SAS during World War II. In his autobiographical account, he reveals the naïve enthusiasm he felt when he joined the Unit, his fears and ...

In 1944-45, Capt. G.H. Davies served with the hard-fighting 53rd Welsh Division. He was an artillery officer in command of a battery of 25-pdr field guns and saw action from Norman ...

George Nichols was an artillery officer serving with the 82nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. He was wounded in 1917, and returned to the guns in March 1918, just in time to experi ...

The Battle of Britain fought by The Few, as Churchill famously called them, will remain a legendary feat of arms for centuries to come. Sadly there remain only a handful today who ...

Patricians and Emperors offers concise comparative biographies of the individuals who wielded power in the final decades of the Western Roman Empire, from the assassination of Aeti ...

Death Before Glory! is a highly readable, thoroughly researched and comprehensive study of the British army's campaigns in the West Indies during the French Revolutionary and Napol ...

These are the diaries of Gerald Achilles Burgoyne, written from the trenches just south of Ypres while he was with the Royal Irish Rifles in the Great War.The author’s daughter, Cl ...

The Thiepval Memorial commemorates over 72,000 men who have no known grave; all went missing in the Somme sector during the three years of conflict that finally ended on 20 March 1 ...

The Japanese advance through Thailand, Malaya and Burma appeared unstoppable and the fate of India looked utterly precarious.The garrison of the Kohima outpost numbering some 1500 ...

Commodus is synonymous with debauchery and megalomania, best remembered for fighting as a gladiator. Ridiculed and maligned by historians since his own time, modern popular culture ...

David Greville-Heygate was one of the few men who served in both the army and the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, but it was in the sky that he really earned his strip ...

Story of the 7th Battalion Durham Light Infantry. With the creation of the Territorial Force in 1908 the battalion was re-designated as the 7th Battalion. It went to France in Apri ...

In December 1916 General Robert Nivelle was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French armies fighting the Germans on the Western Front. He had enjoyed a meteoric rise to high comm ...

Fred Cox, a young soldier in the East Surrey Regiment, was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in February 1942. The next three and a half years were spent in a ...

Whilst a toxic mixture of nationalism and militarism tore Europe and the wider world apart from 1914 to 1919, there was one factor that united millions of people across all nations ...

Small in physical stature Colonel, later Brigadier, Patsy Pagan was seen as a giant by the men of the Gloucestershire Regiment, whom he commanded for over three gruelling years of ...

This is a true historical account of war in the air, at sea and on land in the battle for Malta's survival in the Second World War. It was a battle which decided the outcome of the ...

The first policewomen were established during the Great War, but with no powers of arrest; the first women lawyers did not practise until the early twentieth century, and despite t ...

Like Ypres, Arras was a front line town throughout the Great War. From March 1916 it became home to the British Army and it remained so until the Advance to Victory was well under ...