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This book challenges the view that World War II was decided by land battles. It argues that victory was due to the production and allocation of American and British air and sea weaponry that was used to destroy over half of the Axis's equipment before it reached the traditional 'battlefield'.

Military professionals and theorists have long understood the relevance of morale in war. Montgomery, the victor at El Alamein, said, following the battle, that 'the more fighting I see, the more I am convinced that the big thing in war is morale'. Jonathan Fennell, in examining the North African campaign through the lens of morale, challenges conventional explanations for Allied success in one of the most important and controversial campaigns in British and Commonwealth history. He introduces new sources, notably censorship summaries of soldiers' mail, and an innovative methodology that assesses troop morale not only on the evidence of personal observations and official reports but also on contemporaneously recorded rates of psychological breakdown, sickness, desertion and surrender. He shows for the first time that a major morale crisis and stunning recovery decisively affected Eighth Army's performance during the critical battles on the Gazala and El Alamein lines in 1942.

For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of British Army soldiers during their counterinsurgency activities in Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. He uncovers the uneasy relationship between official notions of minimum force and colonial traditions of using exemplary force to terrorise the civilian population into submission.

Imperial Germany's invasion of France in August 1914 represented a threat to the great power status of both Britain and France. This book tells the story from both British and French perspectives of how the two countries managed to create a winning coalition relationship.

The first comprehensive history of the decisive Fall Campaign of 1813 that determined control of Central Europe following Napoleon's catastrophic defeat in Russia the previous year. Michael V. Leggiere reveals how the defeat of Napoleon in Germany was made possible by Prussian victories and highlights the breakdown of his strategy.

A biography of Sir Douglas Haig, one of the most controversial commanders in British military history. Paul Harris decisively answers the contested issue of whether Haig's tactics cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers during the First World War or were essential to the Allied victory.

For almost 90 years, the battle of Verdun has been synonymous with senseless slaughter. By examining the development of German military ideas from the Franco-German War in 1871 to the First World War, this book offers an unprecedented understanding of one of the bloodiest battles of the twentieth century.

Before 1815 Britain established a global empire, achieved naval domination, and laid the foundations of the first industrial revolution. This book explains the central and often underestimated role of the British state in providing the money and infrastructure to support its maritime ascendancy and develop expertise in overseas expansion.

This book presents a new way of looking at twentieth-century military history and Britain's decline as a great power. G. C. Peden explores how from the Edwardian era to the 1960s warfare was transformed by a series of innovations, including dreadnoughts, submarines, aircraft, tanks, radar, nuclear weapons and guided missiles.

This book tells the story of the invasion of France at the twilight of Napoleon's empire. With more than a million men under arms throughout central Europe, Coalition forces poured over the Rhine River to invade France between late November 1813 and early January 1814. Three principal army groups drove across the great German landmark, smashing the exhausted French forces that attempted to defend the eastern frontier. In less than a month, French forces ingloriously retreated from the Rhine to the Marne; Allied forces were within one week of reaching Paris. This book provides the first complete English-language study of the invasion of France along a front that extended from Holland to Switzerland.

This unique account of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing German and British soldiers' motivation, morale and coping mechanisms.

Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Mustafa Aksakal's dramatic study demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond the war minister, Enver Pasha, and that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public.

This book examines the Habsburg Army's occupation of Serbia from 1914 through 1918, arguing that it was different from other great power colonial projects.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the east, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances. Yet the German Blitzkrieg depended almost entirely upon the motorised Panzer groups, particularly those of Army Group Centre. Using archival records, in this book David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.

This is the first study in English of the French general who led the Allies to victory in 1918. Elizabeth Greenhalgh sheds new light on how Foch grappled with the enemy, with his allies and with his political masters, and how he learned to wage modern industrial war.