the second world war
The defiance of the ‘ghetto girls’ who resisted the Nazis
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…
Dreading demobilisation: The Autumn of the Ace, by Louis de Bernières, reviewed
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Old men remember: reliving the horror of Tobruk
‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter…
How Hitler’s great gamble nearly paid off
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
Lambs to the slaughter: the fiasco of the Dieppe Raid, August 1942
In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long…
Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task
‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has…
The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless
The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
A stubborn Conservative PM attempting to negotiate with Germany? Not Theresa May but Neville Chamberlain
When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of…
Ernst Jünger — reluctant captain of the Wehrmacht
Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply…
The spectacular suicide mission of the world’s greatest battleship
In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission.…
The BBC’s battle for Britain
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with…
Mussolini’s fall from grace
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
Heroines of the Soviet Union
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…
Franco’s bloody finale
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell and the rebirth of a nation
The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities…
Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…
The swastika was always in plain sight
Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?
The beloved, mistreated and traumatised dogs of war
If you love dogs and or live with one — I declare an interest on both counts — there is…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
The second world war — according to Stalin’s ambassador to London
Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for…
The facts behind France’s most potent modern myth
Patrick Marnham unravels some of the powerful, often conflicting myths surrounding the French Resistance
Ghosts of the past haunt Pat Barker’s bomb-strewn London
If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the…
Britain didn’t fight the second world war — the British empire did
Had it not been for the empire, Britain might have lost the second world war, says William Dalrymple. The war certainly lost Britain the empire
