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.
Richard Snow, who 'writes with verve and a keen eye' (The New York Times Book Review), tells the thrilling story of the naval battle that changed the future of all sea power.
This book gives a detailed account of the Zeppelin raids on Bolton and Rossendale in late September 1916, setting them in the context of wider events at home and abroad.
In The Royal Marines and the War at Sea 1939-45 military and naval historian Martin Watts records how marines fought at sea, their relationship with the Royal Navy, and the overall contribution they made to victory in the Second World War.
From at least as early as the eighteenth century it became a tradition that, following operations involving the Royal Navy, the commanding admiral would report to the Admiralty in the form of an official despatch.
Part of a new Holocaust remembrance series of important testimonies and memoirs from the unique collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.
Part of a new Holocaust remembrance series of important testimonies and memoirs from the unique collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.
Part of a new Holocaust remembrance series of important testimonies and memoirs from the unique collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.
Birmingham's War: Voices of the Second World War is a collection of 100 accounts by local young men and women who served in the armed forces during the Second World War.
In 1977, the remote British island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, host to Napoleon and Captain Bligh, and Boer War prisoner-of-war camp, was first served by a lifeline motorship dedicated to the purpose.
An advertising illustrator and artist by trade, Private Fergus Mackain enlisted in 1915 to 'do his bit', serving in France when the fighting was at its fiercest.
From early September 1944, Allied special forces teams were deployed in the occupied Netherlands to strengthen the armed resistance and gather intelligence.
A rare and forgotten first-hand account of the first day of the Battle of the Somme by a British infantry soldier who went 'over the top' and survived.
Beginning by drawing parallels between the author's experiences at the British Embassy in Kabul from 2010 to 2013 and her grandfather's experiences of the same just after Indian Independence from 1948 to 1950, this book takes a thematic approach to analyse the role of Britain in Afghanistan since the conclusion of the Second World War.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
