Military forces and sectors

Pat Hughes is today perhaps the greatest unsung hero of the Battle of Britain.

This book tells the story of the famous James ML military motorcycle which had originally been developed as a utility machine for the working man and was then modified for the military during the Second World War.

The Second World War was the most widespread conflict in human history.

The iconic Hawker-Siddeley Harrier was designed to fight the Cold War from the fields of West Germany but won its battle spurs in the Falklands, Belize and Afghanistan.

With the coming of the naval arms race with Germany, in 1903 the Admiralty decided to establish a naval base and dockyard at Rosyth, taking advantage of deep tidal water there.

The enduring legacy of those who said 'No'.

The Blue Star Line was founded by brothers William and Edmund Vestey in 1911 to ship meat in refrigerated vessels from Australia, New Zealand and South America to the UK.

The Battle of the Somme epitomised the cruelty of the Western Front.

'Duty well done.

Summer 1940, Britain is on the brink, fewer than 3,000 RAF fighter pilots stand between Hitler's Luftwaffe and air supremacy over the skies of southern England - the prerequisite for a German invasion.

D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe, began on the night of 5-6 June 1944.

Pitched into the maelstrom of air fighting in the summer of 1940, twenty-four-year-old Gordon Olive barely lived to tell this extraordinary tale of courage and endurance.

British history is rich in enthralling stories: pivotal moments that changed the future of the country; moments of drama, suspense, intrigue.

These are the memories of wartime kids, Swansea children from a variety of backgrounds whose lives were dramatically changed by the brutal strategic planning and waging of war.

'The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have found no area immune from the struggle.

Basking in the summer sunshine of July 1914, the west coast of Wales seemed far away from a war on mainland Europe.

July 1940, and Britain is the only European country which hasn't caved in to Hitler's Third Reich.

'I was happy that Coventry was selected as a target, as it was an important military objective.

This is a fighter pilot's memoir of four tumultuous years, 1938-1942, when he was first trained, then fought and survived in not one but two of the biggest aerial campaigns of the war, the Battle of Britain and the equally epic, but lesser known, Siege of Malta.

Li Wo had been built in 1935 for running a passenger service on the River Yangtse.

For more than 150 years it was the world's most powerful force: between victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and the withdrawal from 'east of Suez' in the 1960s, the ships of the Royal Navy were ubiquitous.

Very Special Agent Fifi was described as 'one of the most expert liars in the world'.

'I saw a mass of ME 109s and went up to attack.

In 1940 a small band of academics was hired by a secret department of the Foreign Office.

In 1904 an eccentric inventor, Noel Pemberton-Billing, took an interest in flying machines.

This is the story of how the Second World War affected leisure boating: of the people who managed to overcome huge difficulties to go sailing during the war itself and the difficulties of re-establishing the sport in post-war years; of the sailing and yacht clubs which survived bombings, requisitioning, shortages and a host of other problems, and still thrive today.

The federal immigration station on Ellis Island, in Upper New York Bay, opened on 1 January 1892.

Smuggling in Cornwall: An Illustrated History tells the story of the smuggling trade that flourished in Cornwall during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

'We ourselves were almost awestruck, not so much at the power of the Bomb, for this we had expected, but because the Americans had used it with so little notice.

In 1939 and 1940 the Nazi blitzkrieg crushed Poland and the Low Countries and France.

Frampton Remembers World War I tells the story of a Gloucestershire village during the First World War, and how its inhabitants individually and collectively contributed towards victory.

During the First World War, there were five air bases in Wales: two airship stations, one at Llangefni on Anglesey (RNAS Anglesey) and one at Milton in Pembrokeshire (RNAS Pembroke), a fighter/bomber station at Aber (RNAS Bangor) and a seaplane base at Fishguard (RNAS Fishguard).

During the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone, defying the Luftwaffe's aerial assault - the prelude to a proposed seaborne invasion.

This fascinating in-depth dossier is based on classified wartime reports issued by the US Military Intelligence Services, and examines the main weapon types - pistols, rifles, grenades, machine guns and mortars as well as anti-tank guns and infantry howitzers.

In the summer of 1940, the fate of Britain hung in the balance.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to enlist in the military in order to set a good example to others, despite being fifty-five.

Edith Wharton, the author of classic novels including The Age of Innocence, was an American living in Paris when war broke out in 1914.

By the time of the First World War, nursing had become vital.

Fought on the heights above the garrison town of the same name on the River Meuse, 140 miles east of Paris, the Battle of Verdun lasted for ten months, between February and December 1916, double the length of the Battle of the Somme and over three times the length of the Battle of Passchendaele.

The Yorkshire spa town of Ilkley is a popular tourist destination famous for its moor and literature festival.

This book takes the reader, alongside Kipling, to the training camps of Kitchener's army in the south of England, to the lines of the French army and the villages just behind them, to sea with submarines, minesweepers and the big ships of Jutland, to the Alpine front between Italy and Austria-Hungary and alongside the Irish Guards as they fight in the first battles of the war in the summer of 1914.

The Great War (1914-1918), later known as the First World War, brought together the major European countries and their empires into the world's greatest conflict so far seen.

Barbara Harper-Nelson was once the 19-year-old girlfriend, living in Liverpool, of 22-year-old French airman Francis Usai, who was in the RAF Bomber Command.

As the 'second city of empire', Liverpool and the surrounding region played a pivotal role in the First World War.

Created in 1973 with the amalgamation of the Caledonian Steam Packet Co.

This superb collection of wartime colour photographs brings the Luftwaffe - its aircraft and personnel - to life in a dramatically vivid way.

Colour photography was a rare thing in the 1930s.

The biggest shipping loss of both world wars was the hospital ship Britannic, at almost 50,000 tons.

During The First World War, the railways of Great Britain were effectively nationalised and put under Government control.

Based on a confidential wartime British Government report, this in-depth dossier details the inner workings of Organisation Todt, which not only built the Reichsautobahns, but also Germany's Siegfried Line and the Atlantic Wall.