Pen & Sword Military – The Bell Bookshop

Blood in the trenches

Emma — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Written by Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore of the Kings Own Light Infantry, this personal memoir provides an excellent account of the Great War up to the Battle of the Somme. A wide ranging and perceptive relation of events, Radclyffe Dugmores pedigree as a professional writer shines through. In 1914, Radclyffe Dugmore travelled to Belgium as a civilian observer where he was wounded before spending a brief time in German captivity. These experiences gained Radclyffe Dugmore a highly unusual viewpoint for the opening battles of the war, that of a civilian, and later as a participant on the front lines of the Somme.Originally published under the title When The Somme Ran Red in 1918, Radclyffe Dugmores memoir has sadly been long out of print. Yet what the author modestly described as Being a very egotistical account of my own personal experiences and observations from the early days of the war in Belgium to the Great Battle of the Somme in July, 1916 proves to be anything but that, consisting of a fascinating and rare account, sympathetically dedicated to the memory of the officers and men of the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry who fell in the Battle of the Somme.This new re-print of Radclyffe Dugmores classic volume is a worthy addition to the primary source literature of the Great War, and casts new light on the experiences of the brave men who saw the terror of the Battle of the Somme first hand.

Medieval Military Medicine

Emma — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Soldiers of the Middle Ages faced razor-sharp swords and axes that could slice through flesh with gruesome ease, while spears and arrows were made to puncture both armour and the wearer, and even more sinister means of causing harm produced burns and crush injuries. These casualties of war during the 500-year period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries in Northern and Western Europe are the focus of Brian Burfield’s study, but they represent just a portion of the story – disease, disability, disfigurement, damaged minds all played their roles in this awful reality. Surgical methods are described in the book, as are the fixes for fractured skulls, broken bones and damaged teeth. Disfiguring scars and disabling injuries are examined alongside the contemporary attitudes towards them. Also investigated are illnesses like dysentery and St Anthony’s Fire, plus infected wounds which were often more deadly than the weapons of the age. A final chapter on the psychological trauma caused by war is included and contains a significant focus on the world of the Vikings. Brian Burfield’s account features many individual cases, extracting their stories of wounds, sickness and death from chronicles, miracle collections, surgeries, government records and other documents. The prose, poetry and literature of the period are also of great value in bringing these cases to life, as is the evidence provided by modern archaeological and historical scholarship.

Roman Britain’s Missing Legion

Emma — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Legio IX Hispana had a long and active history, later founding York from where it guarded the northern frontiers in Britain. But the last evidence for its existence in Britain comes from AD 108. The mystery of their disappearance has inspired debate and imagination for decades. The most popular theory, immortalized in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s novel _The Eagle of the Ninth_, is that the legion was sent to fight the Caledonians in Scotland and wiped out there. But more recent archaeology (including evidence that London was burnt to the ground and dozens of decapitated heads) suggests a crisis, not on the border but in the heart of the province, previously thought to have been peaceful at this time. What if IX Hispana took part in a rebellion, leading to their punishment, disbandment and _damnatio memoriae_ (official erasure from the records)? This proposed ‘Hadrianic War’ would then be the real context for Hadrian’s ‘visit’ in 122 with a whole legion, VI Victrix, which replaced the ‘vanished’ IX as the garrison at York. Other theories are that it was lost on the Rhine or Danube, or in the East. Simon Elliott considers the evidence for these four theories, and other possibilities.

Codebreaker girls

Emma — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

_”What would it be like to keep a secret for fifty years? Never telling your parents, your children, or even your husband?”_ _Codebreaker Girls: A Secret Life at Bletchley Park_ tells the true story of Daisy Lawrence. Following extensive research, the author uses snippets of information, unpublished photographs and her own recollections to describe scenes from her mother’s poor, but happy, upbringing in London, and the disruptions caused by the outbreak of the Second World War to a young woman in the prime of her life. The author asks why, and how, Daisy was chosen to work at the Government war station, as well as the clandestine operation she experienced with others, deep in the British countryside, during a time when the effects of the war were felt by everyone. In addition, the author examines her mother’s personal emotions and relationships as she searches for her young fiancée, who was missing in action overseas. The three years at Bletchley Park were Daisy’s university, but having closed the door in 1945 on her hidden role of national importance – dealing with Germany, Italy and Japan – this significant period in her life was camouflaged for decades in the filing cabinet of her mind. Now her story comes alive with descriptions, original letters, documents, newspaper cuttings and unique photographs, together with a rare and powerful account of what happened to her after the war.

Missing: The Need for Closure after the Great War

Emma — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How long would you look for a missing son, even if you knew he was dead? How long could you justify such a search? Two years? Five years? A lifetime? Angela Mond’s son, a Royal Air Force pilot, had been shot down and killed, but where was his body? Francis, Angela’s hero son, had fought in 1915; he had been injured and suffered severe shell-shock, but returned voluntarily to France three years later to help stem the German spring offensive. Now, post-war, what hope had Angela of finding him, his body presumed to be amongst the legions of those with no known grave? Angela’s grief drove her to the battlefields in a seemingly hopeless search, longing also to find some semblance of personal peace. The motivation for her search transcends time; it was a desperate need for closure. But does closure really exist? Best selling author Richard van Emden tells Angela’s gripping story, exploring its wider implications and repercussions. How long would the country look for its war dead and how did the public react when that search appeared to end prematurely? France and Belgium were liberated, but did the rights of civilians to their own land conflict with the Allies’ wish to build cemeteries and memorials for the fallen??As financial austerity bit hard, how much money could be spent on the dead when the living, the survivors, needed help? Using a remarkable collection of previously unseen images, Missing is a sweeping, epic story that is as resonant and relevant today, as a hundred years ago.

SS Einsatzgruppen

Emma — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing 4 million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set up in Riga (northern), Mogilev (middle) and Kiev (southern), each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people – listed as ‘Jews’ or ‘mostly Jews’ – in Latvia and Lithuania in the early stages of the operation. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, there is a comment, ‘50,000 executions “foreseen” in Kiev’. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jäger, reported killing 138,272 (48,252 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children). The Einsatzgruppen were death squads – their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews.

The road to Passchendaele

Emma — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Passchendaele is the next volume in the highly-regarded series of books from the best-selling First World War historian Richard van Emden. Once again, using the winning formula of diaries and memoirs, and above all original photographs taken on illegally-held cameras by the soldiers themselves, Richard tells the story of 1917, of life both in and out of the line culminating in perhaps the most dreaded battle of them all, the Battle of Passchendaele. His pervious book, The Somme, has now sold nearly 20,000 copies in hardback and softback, proving that the public appetite is undiminished for new, original stories illustrated with over 150 rarely or never-before-seen battlefield images. The author has an outstanding collection of over 5,000 privately-taken and overwhelmingly unpublished photographs, revealing the war as it was seen by the men involved, an existence that was sometimes exhilarating, too often terrifying, and occasionally even fun. Richard van Emden interviewed 270 veterans of the Great War, has written extensively about the soldiers’ lives, and has worked on many television documentaries, always concentrating on the human aspects of war, its challenge and its cost to the millions of men involved. This book will be published in June 2017, in time for the 100th anniversary of the epic Battle of Passchendaele which began on 31st July 1917 Richard van Emden’s books sold over 650,000 books and have appeared in The Times’ bestseller chart on a number of occasions. He lives in West London and regularly appears on television, mostly recently as BBC1’s historian for the national commemorations of the Somme Battle. He has appeared on over forty television documentaries and has written nineteen books on the First World War.

The Somme

Emma — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The offensive on the Somme took place between July and November 1916 and is perhaps the most iconic battle of the Great War. It was there that Kitchener's famous Pals Battalions were first sent into action en masse and it was a battlefield where many of the dreams and aspirations of a nation, hopeful of victory, were agonizingly dashed. This book explores the battle and uses the soldiers own photographs to illustrate both the campaign's extraordinary comradeship and its carnage.

Saladin

Emma — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The extraordinary character and career of Saladin are the keys to understanding the Battle of Hattin, the fall of Jerusalem and the failure of the Third Crusade. He united warring Muslim lands, reconquered the bulk of Crusader states and faced the Richard the Lion Heart, king of England, in one of the most famous confrontations in medieval warfare. Geoffrey Hindley’s sympathetic and highly readable study of the life and times of this remarkable, many-sided man, who dominated the Middle East in his day, gives a fascinating insight into his achievements and into the Muslim world of his contemporaries.