Military forces and sectors

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This book is full of untold short stories of men who created a legend, the legend of the British airborne forces during the Second World War.

Somewhere in France represents a virtually unique archive of the First World War and the conditions under which ordinary soldiers lived.

During the Second World War millions of men left their homes and families to fight for their country.

The elliptical shape and mighty roar of the Supermarine Spitfire continues to inspire people all over the world.

Postcards as a medium of correspondence became popular in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Christmas Truce is seen as a satisfying and hopeful event in a war that is often regarded as unnecessary, bitter, hopeless and futile.

Ryuji Nagatsuka did not know, when he made an application to become a pilot in October 1943, that by the following autumn Japan's situation in the war would be so critical that the role for which he was destined would be part of the most incomprehensible phenomenon of the hostilities - that of a suicide pilot, known to the world as a kamikaze.

On 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated on a visit to Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist called Gavrilo Princip.

The advent of the jet airliner all but killed the liner on the Atlantic route but the ships to Australia survived into the 1970s, not just on the liner trade but also carrying emigrants from the UK and Europe to Australia.

The Avro Lancaster took the RAF's bombing campaign right to the heart of Nazi Germany, night after night, despite sometimes suffering appalling losses.

Many thousands of Royal Naval seamen and Royal Marines fought in the trenches of the Great War alongside soldiers from across the Empire.

On 4 July 1942, American airmen flew in US-built bombers against a German target for the first time.

Manfred, Freiherr von Richthofen, was the top ace of the First World War, with eighty confirmed victories.

A remarkable compendium of oddities, curiosities and little-known facts from the Great War What was a trench rabbit?

In November 1914, Hearts led the Scottish First Division.

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Bishop's Stortford was a small town in the Edwardian period.

Shortly before the First World War, Belfast was one of the most prosperous and vibrant cities in the world, boasting an impressive new City Hall and some of the largest industrial concerns of their kind.

'Tora, Tora, Tora!

On 21 August 1944 German Army Group B was destroyed in Normandy and Allied troops began pressing east from the beachhead they had occupied since the D-Day landings.

As one of Britain's largest cities, Liverpool was heavily targeted during the two world wars.

An amazing number of the words we use today were invented in World War I.

The Writers' War is a collection of excerpts from outstanding accounts of the First World War, a terrifying conflict that would otherwise be beyond our ability to imagine.

Today, the sight of a helicopter speeding toward some destination is familiar enough, but take a moment to consider: is there a life at stake?

Volume 4 of We Were Eagles reaches the climax of the daylight bomber war which saw the Eighth Air Force B-17s and B-24s push back the boundaries and huge fleets of bombers penetrate further into the diminishing Reich.

Volume 3 of We Were Eagles covers the turning of the tide, when the air war was redirected to bombing communications targets in northern France in support of the 6 June D-Day invasion and the eventual breakout by Allied forces from the beachheads.

The Americans' second year of the war saw the Eighth Air Force finally bombing Berlin, or 'Big-B' as it was known.

The four years between 1914 and 1918 saw an incredible growth in air power.

'Kids supposed to evacuate this afternoon.

An original study of the lives and times of a group of inspirational Worcestershire people who would otherwise be forgotten, A Worcestershire Parish at War is a unique and intimate portrait of ordinary people Ellen and Walter Gibbs, along with their family, friends, and local community.

This fascinating book brings together three years' research together witha collection of photographs and memories from local people.

D-Day and operation OVERLORD are often regarded as one of the most important operation of all time.

During the Second World War, Norfolk was truly on the 'front line'.

At the onset of the Second World War, Frank Pleszak's father MikoAaj, aged nineteen, was forcibly removed from his family in Poland by the Russian secret police and exiled to the harshest of the Siberian labour camps, the dreaded Soviet gulags of Kolyma.

In the First World War, the Canadian Field Artillery led the way in artillery technology and tactics.

The wartime airfi eld at Rivenhall is typical of the many airbases that were hastily built in Britain following the entry of the US into the Second World War.