Second World War
Showing 1–16 of 46 results
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‘Don’t delay – enrol today’
£15.99‘Don’t delay – enrol today’
The year 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of final demobilisation of the Women’s Land Army in 1950. Hampshire’s contributions were substantial; it might have been the first county to embrace the need for women farm workers, to have more members per head of population, Sparsholt College devoted almost its entire curriculum to training women and girls for employment on British farms, and both First World War ministers of Agriculture came from the county.
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An ordinary youth
£9.99An ordinary youth
Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, ‘An Ordinary Youth’ is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. Here, Walter’s academic struggle sits alongside his father’s conscription; his brother’s love of jazz burgeons amid the destruction of the barrages. And all the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries – communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations – running alongside the Kempowski family’s daily rituals and occasional scandals.
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Arctic convoys
£11.99Arctic convoys
An incisive account of the Arctic convoys, and the essential role Bletchley Park and Special Intelligence played in Allied success
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Cassino ’44
£25.00Cassino ’44
There are no such thing as an easy victory in war but after triumph in Tunisia, the sweeping success of the Sicilian invasion, and with the Italian surrender, the Allies were confident that they would be in Rome before Christmas 1943. And yet it didn’t happen. Hitler ordered his forces to dig in and fight for every yard, thus setting the stage for one of the grimmest and most attritional campaigns of the Second World War. By the start of 1944, the Allies found themselves coming up against the Gustav Line: a formidable barrier of wire, minefields, bunkers and booby traps, woven into a giant chain of mountains and river valleys that stretched the width of Italy where at its strongest point perched the Abbey of Monte Cassino. James Holland has drawn widely on diaries, letters and contemporary sources to write the definitive account of this brutal battle.
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Churchill
£35.00Churchill
Published to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of the man voted ‘the Greatest Briton’, this title tells the incredible story of Winston Churchill’s long life and lasting legacy. With particular focus on Churchill’s pivotal role during the Second World War, the book features artefacts, interviews, documents, art and photographs from IWM’s unparalleled collections – some of them never previously published. Featuring compelling personal testimony from the man himself alongside the accounts of those who worked closely with him, this richly illustrated history brings Churchill’s story to life like never before.
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Churchill’s Citadel
£20.00Churchill’s Citadel
A major new history of Churchill in the 1930s, showing how his meetings at Chartwell, his country home, strengthened his fight against the Nazis
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Churchill’s D-Day
£25.00Churchill’s D-Day
2024 marks both the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy , and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Churchill himself. This book brings together General Lord Dannatt, one of Britain’s most respected contemporary military leaders, and former head of the British Army, with Allen Packwood, one of the world’s foremost Churchill experts, the archivist responsible for the holdings at the landmark Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Together they take us through the decision-making for the planning and execution of D-Day. Reproducing key documents and letters from the Churchill Papers and other collections, this book plunges us back in time and lets us witness events unfolding. It tells the inside story of the conception, planning and execution of the D-Day landings in a unique but authoritative way.
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Cinderella boys
£12.99Cinderella boys
In early 1943 Britain was engaged in a struggle for survival. As the deadly wolf packs of German U-boats roamed the Atlantic, supply lines and shipping losses fell victim to the carnage. In desperation, Churchill turned to the RAF’s maritime wing – an overlooked, underfunded force known as ‘The Cinderella Service’. But the ascendancy of the U-boat forced a change in attitude. Provided with the long-range planes, depth charges, rocket projectiles and radar equipment with which to challenge the enemy. The Cinderella boys provided vital air defence the whole way across the Atlantic. The German hunters were now the hunted, and – in a stunning defeat – had fully retreated by the summer of 1943. Based on a wealth of new sources, including from diaries, log books, official records, archives and interviews, Leo McKinstry shines a new light the courageous pilots, ingenious scientists and political risktakers.
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D-Day
£25.00D-Day
On 6th June 1944, the Allied invasion began. For hours, wave after wave of soldiers, sailors, and airmen crossed the channel and stormed the Normandy coast, fighting to gain a foothold in Nazi-occupied Northwest Europe. It was the largest combined air and seaborne invasion ever, involving over 150,000 Allied troops on the ground, and its eventual success became a critical turning point in the war, spelling the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. As the events of that day fade from living memory, it’s more important than ever to understand what it felt like to be there and to live through it, on both sides. In this definitive work, Garrett M. Graff compiles hundreds of US, Canadian, UK, French and German voices to tell the full story of exactly how that historic day unfolded, in visceral detail.
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Father and son
£10.99Father and son
An extraordinary memoir about family, the past and mortality, and the final work from the peerless Jonathan Raban.
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Final verdict
£25.00Final verdict
It is 17th October 2019, the opening day of a trial in Hamburg’s imposing criminal justice building that is historic in more ways than one. Bruno Dey is accused of being an accessory to a crime that took place more than seven decades ago: the murder of at least 5230 inmates at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp in present-day Poland. He was seventeen at the time, and a member of the SS unit charged with administering and guarding the camps. Dey admits he served as a guard at Stutthof from August 1944 to April 1945, but he denies the accusation that he had any role in the murders, even as an accessory. The trial of Bruno Dey comes at a poignant moment for modern Germany. In ‘Final Verdict’ the author interrogates the questions: is it right to punish Bruno Dey more than seven decades after he stood guard at Stutthof concentration camp? And what would I have done in his place?
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Five Days in London, May 1940
£9.99Five Days in London, May 1940
John Lukacs reconstructs five tense and decisive days during which Churchill and the British War Cabinet debated the future of the war
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Flatlands
£9.99Flatlands
Freda is a twelve-year-old evacuee from East London, who has been sent away at the start of the war, leaving behind everything familiar to her, to escape the expected German bombing. In her new temporary home in Lincolnshire, Freda finds herself billeted with a strange, cold and, ultimately, abusive couple, whose lives mirror the barren landscape in which they live a hand to mouth existence, based upon subsistence farming and poaching. There, deprived of any warmth, she meets a young man – Philip Rhayader – a conscientious objector who has left Oxford and his prospective vocation in the church following a nervous breakdown. Slowly, he introduces her to the wonders of the natural world and its enduring power to heal.
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France on trial
£12.99France on trial
Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain – the great French hero of the First World War – shaking the hand of Hitler on 20th October 1940. In the radio speech after this meeting, Pétain said ‘It is I alone who will be judged by History.’ Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judegment – if not yet the judgement of history – arrived. Pétain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944. Julian Jackson uses Pétain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history.
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Going solo
£7.99Going solo
‘It was truly the most breathless and in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life’. This beautiful edition of ‘Going Solo’, part of ‘The Roald Dahl Classic Collection’, features official archive material from the Roald Dahl Museum and is perfect for Dahl fans old and new. So, enter a world where invention and mischief can be found on every page and where magic might be at the very tips of your fingers.
£7.99