Air forces and warfare

On the front line of the Cold War, during a decade that saw East-West tensions - and budgets - rise considerably, the United States Air Forces in Europe reached the peak of their power during the 1980s.

Tactical Air Command, based in the United States itself, held the majority of the USAF's tactical air power.

Tracing roots to colonial militia formed in 1636, the National Guard provides the militia of US states, districts, commonwealths and territories.

'Fighter pilots make movies, bomber pilots make history' - or so the bomber pilots say, anyway.

From birth, Nazi propaganda bombarded children with images romanticising war and a glorious death for the Fuehrer and Fatherland.

Everyone is familiar with the story of D-Day and the triumphal liberation of France by the Allies: a barbaric enemy was defeated by Allied ingenuity, courage and overwhelming military force, helped by dreadful German command errors and the terrible state of Wehrmacht forces in the West - but is this all true?

Only six years after man had successfully flown for the first time with controlled, powered flight in 1903, the Royal Navy could already see the potential of taking flying machines to sea.

Heroes in the Shadows focuses on extraordinary examples of heroism during the Second World War away from the battlefield.

The men featured in this book originally came from Germany's big city police forces, where they had previously dealt with traffic control, street crime and the often violent street demonstrations occurring during Germany's politically turbulent 1920s.

Fighting over the beaches of Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, guarding the night skies during the perilous months of the Blitz, pioneering electronic countermeasures, and serving air-sea rescue roles all around our coasts, the Boulton Paul Defiant played a vital part through most of the Second World War, finishing it in the important target-tug role.

After the German surrender in November 1918, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, the anchorage for the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet throughout the First World War.

The ideas behind the Grumman F-14 Tomcat first began to take shape back in the late 1950s when it was discovered that the Soviet Union was quickly developing an increasingly accurate airborne missile system that would pose a major threat to the US Navy's warships.

This is the fascinating true story behind one of the key reasons that RAF Fighter Command saw such success in the Second World War and emerged victorious from the Battle of Britain - the incredible training school that transformed young men from inexperienced pilots into some of the finest airmen in the world.

The Great War Display Team was founded in 1988 and has since gone on to become one of Britain's premier display teams, with a wealth of talented pilots passing through its ranks and amazing crowds with a variety of recreated aircraft including Fokker Dr1s, Royal Aircraft Factory S.

The year 1919 has often been ignored in historians' dizzy haste to enter the world of the Roaring Twenties but it was a year of enormous challenges and change.

The Battle of Normandy was the greatest offensive campaign the world had ever seen.

'Stay low, stay on track, and stay alive' was the motto of the RAF's most secret Station, Tempsford.

The RAF's first and last jet-powered delta-winged fighter, the Javelin was also the very last aircraft to be built by the Gloster Aircraft Company.

The Vought F-8 Crusader was a classic post-war aircraft; loved by its pilots, this big machine was nicknamed 'The Last of the Gunfighters' because of its primary armament of four 20 mm Colt cannon.

Kent has a long and illustrious military history dating back to the Roman occupation but the first great conflict of the twentieth century brought the horrors of war to a new generation.

When Winston Churchill delivered his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech in 1946, he mentioned two words now engrained in Anglo-American terminology - 'special relationship'.

Though personally remembered by very few people, the interwar period was a fascinating time for railway enthusiasts, with the colourful liveries of the pre-Grouping companies allowing for a wide variety of interesting markings in the run-up to Grouping in 1923.

Robert Wilton Bungey was unquestionably an RAF hero.

The Second World War had a profound effect on public transport in the West Midlands.

An extraordinary and forthright character, Dereck French was an original bomber boy and one of those few who managed to survive the war.

Who speaks for the dead?

Ordinary Heroes is the first book to focus on the staggering achievements of hundreds of thousands of civilian volunteers and charity workers, the majority of them women, during the First World War, both at home and abroad.

For anyone who is interested in the air war 1941-45, the information provided here is of inestimable value.

Hans Rose was one of Germany's most successful WWI U-boat aces, and her most successful ace during the convoy period when attacks by U-boats were most difficult and dangerous.

The historic city of Chester in Cheshire, in the north-west of England, experienced tragedies and hardships during the two World Wars.

At the beginning of the Second World War Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway, but left neutral Sweden alone.

In Desperate Victories, professional historian Harry Bennett provides first-hand accounts and commentary on the British reaction to one of the greatest shocks in military history - the German blitzkrieg in the west.

While many films have attempted to convey the experience of the Second World War European battlefield, none adequately portray the mayhem and suffering that befell untold thousands of horses, their bodies impacted by bullet, flame and bomb as well as disease, starvation and backbreaking toil in the searing heat of summer and the freezing winds and snows of winter.

No other combatant nation employed motorcycles on the scale produced by the Third Reich.

During the Second World War Hull spent more than 1,000 hours under air-raid alerts and was the target of the first daylight raid of the war and the last piloted air raid on Britain.

This book brings to light women's experiences in the Holocaust.

This book is a classic narrative history of the last year of the First World War.

The story of today's Jeep Wrangler has an intriguing and unusual beginning, when the demands of the American army during the Second World War led to the production of a simple, yet multi-purpose, go-anywhere vehicle that could easily (and cheaply) be mass-produced.

Alarmstart (scramble) charts the experiences of the German fighter pilots in the Second World War, based on extensive recollections of veterans as well as primary documents, diaries and flying log books, with photographs from the veterans themselves, many never previously published.

Who Betrayed the Jews?

Home-grown terrorists equipped by a foreign power are not a new phenomenon.

This book tells the story of the people of Tyneside and Northumberland during the First World War, both in action on the front line and on the Home Front.

Despite the invasion force landing nearly a mile beyond its intended target location, and while also overcoming its counterpart airborne element being widely dispersed, Utah Beach would prove to be a huge success for the Americans.

Immortalised for a new generation in the graphic opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan, 'Bloody' Omaha Beach was almost an epic failure.

When rifleman Tom Guttridge returned from war in the early summer of 1945, he brought home not only vivid memories of the battlefield and his five years in prisoner-of-war camps, but a unique collection of photographs obtained from his German captors by trading items from Red Cross parcels.

Over the years local journalist and author Tim Butters has interviewed many Abergavenny veterans from the Second World War, ranging from a soldier who helped liberate the notorious Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, a man who was captured during the Allied retreat from Tobruk and ended up spending the war in the cruel confines of Stalag VIII-B, an officer who was at Dunkirk and later served with Field Marshall Montgomery at El Alamein, a Japanese POW whose hellish experiences scarred him for life, a sailor who fought around the world for the duration of the war as a member of the Royal Navy, a soldier who had a school in France named in his honour, and a paratrooper involved in the D-Day landings whose story later became a small part of the book and movie version of The Longest Day.

Nearly forty female agents were sent out by the French section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.

This book tells of the wartime experiences of Bertram, Stanley and Roy George, based on their hitherto largely unpublished writings.

At the very beginning of the Second World War Germany invaded and occupied Belgium.

When RAF Transport Command was created in March 1943, it was formed by the renaming of Ferry Command.