Celebrating and commemorating 100 years of the RAF and with access to rare archives, Mike Lepine uses photographs and documents to bring the story of the people, aeroplanes and missions to life as never before. The box set includes the DVD Air Aces, a groundbreaking series that tells the story of the most heroic airborne combat missions in history. Using real vintage aircraft, the series films the impossible by recreating mid-air combat scenes and features Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers. The magazine looks at the men, women and aircraft at the heart of this great service. Fully illustrated with archive and colour photos and fact boxes for every aviation enthusiast. DVD running time 50 minutes. Magazine and DVD box set.

How did 13 isolated colonies who in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than 21 navies fighting on five oceans to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea, and of course off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theatres. Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American Independence from a naval perspective and also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. He offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian history and the result is a more profound understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, the path to American Independence and the rise and fall of the British Empire. Using original logs, reports, diaries and archaeological discoveries it is the gripping tale of the birth of the New World. Colour plates, 572 page paperback.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the British Battle Fleet comprised ships that were only marginally different from those that had won the Battle of Trafalgar a generation earlier. By the end of her reign in 1901 their successors would have been unrecognisable to Nelson's sailors. Gone were the towering sail plans, the 'wooden walls' and large numbers of relatively small muzzle-loading guns, to be replaced by black-painted steel hulls, driven independent of the winds by steam machinery, protected with sophisticated armour, and mounting a very few large breech-loading guns firing explosive shells. The only thing unchanged was the Royal Navy's dominance of the world's oceans, seized at Trafalgar and never relinquished. How the Naval Administration coped with this unprecedented revolution in technology without losing maritime ascendancy is the theme of this latest book by Norman Friedman. He analyses the broader factors of politics, economics and international rivalry that bore down on the decision-making and explains how these influences worked through into the ships that were actually built. The result is a much deeper and more sympathetic understanding of the 19th-century Royal Navy and its warship designs. It is a well-illustrated and comprehensive gallery of photographs with in-depth captions accompanied by specially commissioned plans of the important classes by A. D. Baker, and a colour section featuring the original Admiralty draughts, including a spectacular double gatefold. 400 huge pages, 25 x 29.5cm.
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In searing detail and immediacy, all the violence, grief, pathos, black humour and courage of conflict emerges in this collection of first-person accounts. Reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings's lifetime of studying war, his book rings the changes through the centuries. Nearly 350 stories illustrate what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, to a Vietnamese woman holding her child during conflict and SAS troops storming the Iranian Embassy. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Proust and Waugh, Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey, and heroic ambulance drivers of World War One, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: although nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. We enter now the 21st century which some are already calling 'the Post-Heroic Age'. 517 magnificent pages with a gallery of photographs in black and white and colour.

'The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America' is the sub-title of this original combination of cutting edge scholarship and vivid prose. Few individuals, European or Native American, had as much impact on early America as the Pamunkey leader Opechancanough. Generally he plays a brief part as a violent and tragic figure but in contrast renowned historian of early Virginia James Horn reconstructs a remarkable life story that spanned a century at a time when America was digging more deeply into its origins. This eye-opening narrative challenges well-worn tales of Pocahontas and congenial first encounters with a grim record of kidnapping, starvation and total war. In the mid-16th century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian youth, took him back to Spain, and subsequently Mexico. During this time abroad, the boy lived in Madrid, Seville, Havana and Mexico City, becoming a favourite of King Philip II and converting to Catholicism. Eventually after nearly a decade he returned to Virginia with a group of Jesuits to help establish a mission. Shortly after arriving however, he abandoned his fellow missionaries, rejoined his family, and soon organised a war party that killed the Spaniards. In the years that followed, Opechancanough, as the English called him, helped establish the most powerful chiefdom in the mid-Atlantic region. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607 he fought tirelessly to drive them away, leading to a series of wars that spanned the next 40 years, the first Anglo-Indian wars in America, and came close to destroying the colony. But the English settlers proved more resilient than the Spanish missionaries had been 40 years earlier. Additional soldiers, weapons and provisions arrived from England, forcing Opechancanough to continue his offensive for decades. He survived to be nearly 100 years old and died as he lived, fighting the invaders. 296pp, maps and woodcut illustrations.

Blending biography and history this is a highly readable account of Winston Churchill's adventures as a young war correspondent from the jungles of Cuba and the mountains of the North-West Frontier to the banks of the Nile and the plains of South Africa. Enthralled by combat, cigars and whisky, young Winston showed extraordinary courage and tenacity under fire. He was the brazen foreign correspondent covering wars of empire in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa and in those far-flung corners of the world he reported from the front lines between 1895 and 1900. He mastered his celebrated command of language and formed strong opinions about war. He thought little of his own personal safety, so convinced was he of his destiny, jumping at any chance to be where bullets flew and canons roared. Based on his private letters and war reportage, the book intertwines young Winston's daring exploits in combat, adventures, and rise as a major literary talent, experiences that shaped the world leader he was to become. The huge public interest generated by his South African activities, his capture and subsequent escape provided the final boost Churchill needed to edge his way as a Conservative into the formerly Liberal parliamentary seat of Oldham. 309 exciting pages, photos.

World War II was global warfare on an unimaginable scale, generating suffering, deprivation and death of almost limitless dimensions. Not even the Great War saw such barbaric cruelty and atrocity. 100 million men, and a smaller number of women, entered the theatre of war fighting with weapons that had been honed in the earlier conflict, while bombing, deportation, requisitioning and theft completely overturned domestic structure and infrastructure. Coercion, torture and genocide were carried out by regular servicemen and women and the police. The author goes beyond the view of war that sees Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis, and looks at the broader historical forces that prompted the Axis states to undertake imperial territorial conquest. The conflict goes back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and continued a decade after "Victory in Europe" in 1945, with its course being influenced by the civil wars raging in China, Ukraine, Italy and Greece. The author is a major authority on World War II and his argument in this magisterial book is that the long Second World War was the last imperial war. Imperial crises frame the origins and course of the conflict and the outcome ended half a millennium of colonialism. The books starts with the fracturing of trade and finance in the 1920s combined with growing nationalist ideology, particularly in Germany where Hitler blamed the Jews for frustrating his ambitions. The hostility of both the US and Soviet Union, on opposite sides, to the survival of traditional colonial empires was key to the eventual outcome. The progress of the war provides the author with a frame for thematic chapters exploring the wider experience of the conflict. How did states mobilise the colossal manpower and material resources? How did states, parties and individuals justify extreme barbarity? What did the war do emotionally and psychologically to those sucked into it? Along the way the author examines issues such as the role of the BBC and intelligence services, and the contribution of partisans and resistance fighters, particularly in the Pacific where barbarity was extreme. Almost a third of the female partisans in Italy were wounded or killed. A huge 990pp, illus.

First published 10 years ago and still relevant, this study examines the progressive sidelining of the Royal Air Force since its decisive role in the Allied victory of World War II in which the RAF had developed quickly with the help of US and Canadian lend-lease money to form the front line of defence against a numerically superior force. Scaling down began in 1945 as the country contemplated a huge economic challenge following the cost of defeating the Axis powers, in contrast to the US which had not suffered bombing raids on housing and infrastructure. At the same time, in the post-war years, Britain started to negotiate the loss of empire which had constituted a major cost to the nation in administering and defending distant territories. Britain's retention of the nuclear deterrent depended on the special relationship with America as the world started to divide between the two superpowers. The RAF has shouldered a greater burden of defence cuts than the other two forces, particularly following the infamous 1957 white paper from Duncan Sandys which proposed the cutting and discontinuation of forces stationed in Germany. This exacerbated the on-off saga of the TSR2 project, opposed by Mountbatten who was chief of defence staff, and its cost-effective alternative, the F-111 with its variable geometry swing-wing designed by Barnes-Wallace. The "trip-wire" scenario of the fifties gave way to "flexible response" but the whole system and its political assumptions were overturned by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The author follows the RAF from its establishment in 1918 with 22,000 aircraft to the Strategic Defence Review for the coalition government of 2010 with George Osborne as chancellor. Arguments for the disbanding of the RAF came from all political shades of opinion. Some elements would go to the Fleet Air Arm, but big planes such as transports, tankers and airborne warning and control would pose a challenge for the other services to operate, particularly the latter which was deployed in Afghanistan at the time of the book's publication. Here are fascinating tales of aerial adventure, sonic boom and iconic aircraft and the security the RAF brings us. 256pp, many photos.

Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson was a legend and a cult figure in his lifetime, an inspirational commander whose "band of brothers" knew that he would not ask them to do anything he would not undertake himself. Going to sea as a 12-year-old midshipman, he worked his way up and was enjoying semi-retirement with his wife Fanny when recalled to fight the French in the wake of the Revolution, culminating in the triumphant Battle of the Nile where not a single British ship was lost. His subsequent brutal persecution of revolutionaries in Naples was a low point, and by this time Nelson had embarked on his scandalous affair with Lady Emma Hamilton. Finally at Trafalgar in 1805 he defeated Napoleon decisively. This fascinating book examines Nelson's strengths and weaknesses as a commander and strategist. His patriotism was not of a jingoistic sort, but rather in line with Kennedy's famous words "ask what you can do for your country". He had a constant concern for the impact of war on his crews and on ordinary civilians. Nelson was not an effective commander in land or land-sea engagements, but he was a fast learner and rarely made the same mistake twice. He had initiative and moral courage, although the author wryly remarks that someone like Nelson with supreme self-confidence, upright (and sometimes uptight) ethics, insubordinate habits, a scandalous lifestyle, plus severe injuries and acute hypochondria, would never rise in the services to take senior command today. The author examines his strategic decisions in the context of the modern warfighting theory called Manoeuvre Warfare, where results are achieved by constant movement, as in the Battle of the Nile, rather than head-on confrontation. The Admiral's spiritual beliefs played an important role in his morale, and he often dismissed his enemies as atheistic mobs, particularly the French Revolutionaries. 250pp, paperback, glossary, orders of battle, illus.

During World War II around 50,000 German soldiers deserted from their units, of whom around 20,000 were executed by shooting, beheading or hanging. The British Army in World War I had executed 306 deserters, some as young as 16, young boys who panicked in the face of fire, and the author traces a direct link between this barbarity and the German judicial executions for desertion in World War II. He tells the poignant stories of many young men who were executed, but principal sources are the experiences of three who survived and suffered ostracism and discrimination for the whole of the rest of their lives. Their legal position remained equivocal because although the Nazi party was defeated and condemned, the execution of deserters had happened under the rule of law, even though these were the increasingly paranoid laws enacted by Hitler. Those who were unfit to serve through illness were executed as being a burden on the state, and the law did not allow for conscientious objection. 270 Jehovah's Witnesses were executed on account of their religious beliefs. In 1938 the statutes were tightened to allow no appeal. Only a handful survived to see the half-hearted rehabilitation law passed by the Bundestag more than half a century later. Peter Schilling, who at first embraced Nazi ideology, escaped to Switzerland over the border and was relegated to a refugee camp. Ludwig Baumann deserted from the French navy base in Bordeaux in June 1942 with his friend Kurt, stealing weapons and ammunition, but a border patrol picked them up. Tortured during interrogation they were condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted and Ludwig spent the war in military prison, suffering from diphtheria and forced to watch daily executions. Objector Helmut Kober was shocked by Hitler's book-burning and the complicity of the Nazi bishops. Following the war, former Nazis were elevated to high positions while those who had resisted faced a continuing stigma. 173 pp, case histories, photos.