More than 80 years on, the Great War - and particularly the great battles such as the Somme and Verdun - continues to fascinate us and to cast long shadows over the world in which we live. For Britain, the effort and sacrifice involved in creating and sustaining its first-ever and biggest-ever mass citizen army, and in helping to defeat the main enemy in the decisive theatre of operations, left deep emotional and psychological scars that have influenced much of the nation's subsequent history and that are still felt today. In this volume, the author -an acknowledged authority on the Western Front - re-examines the struggle and sheds an interesting new light on the nature, course and effects of the fighting in France and Belgium from 1914 to 1918.
In 1940, fresh from the success in France, Hitler turned his attention to the East. In this volume Geoffrey Jukes explains what led to Hitler's decision to instigate the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) and offers a concise account of the campaign that followed. The Germans expected to conquer Russia in only four months, but at Stalingrad and then Kursk the Russians fought back. At a human cost of 27 million Soviet lives Hitler was forced into a humiliating retreat and Russia emerged from the war as a super power ready to take on the capitalist world.
The Russo-Japanese war saw the first defeat of a major European imperialist power by an Asian country. When Japanese and Russian expansionist interests collided over Manchuria and Korea, the Tsar assumed Japan would never dare to fight. However, after years of planning, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian Port Arthur, on the Liaoyang Peninsula in 1904 and the war that followed saw Japan win major battles against Russia. This book explains the background and outbreak of the war, then follows the course of the fighting at Yalu River, Sha-ho, and finally Mukden, the largest battle anywhere in the world before the First World War.