British Military

This is the riveting story of Noor Inayat Khan, the descendant of an Indian Prince Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, who became a British secret agent for SOE during World War II. Born into an illustrious Indian family in 1914 and brought up in the non-violent Sufi religion, Noor seemed an unlikely secret agent. Yet she became the first female radio operator to be landed in enemy-occupied France, and refused to abandon her post in Paris in 1943, continuing her work under extremely dangerous circumstances.

After being bombed and shipwrecked repeatedly while serving for several wild and war-torn years as a mascot of the World War II Royal Navy Yangtze river gunboats the Gnat and the Grasshopper, Judy ended up in Japanese prisoner of war camps in North Sumatra. Along with locals as slave labor, the American, Australian, and British POWs were forced to build a 1,200-mile single-track railroad through the most horrifying jungles and treacherous mountain passes.

On 28 May 1982, 450 men of the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment—2 Para—went into action to retake the settlement of Goose Green on East Falkland, where more than 1,000 Argentine soldiers were holding 119 Falkland Islanders—men, women, children and one baby—in squalid conditions. Forty years on, Goose Green is still the biggest and bloodiest battle the British Army has fought in modern times. This book is the living narrative of the battle told by the very men who fought it.

In the days between May 24th and 28th, 1940, the British War Cabinet held a historical debate over whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. In this magisterial work, John Lukacs demonstrates the decisive importance of those five days. Lukacs takes us hour by hour into the critical unfolding of events at 10 Downing Street, where Churchill, who had only been prime minister for a fortnight, painfully considered his war responsibilities.

This book is Harry McCallion's blistering account of the history of Britain's war against the IRA between 1970 and 1998. From new insights into high-profile killings and riveting accounts of enemy contact, to revelations about clandestine missions and the strategies used in combating a merciless enemy, Undercover War is the definitive inside story of the battle against the IRA, one of the most dangerous and effective terrorist organisations in recent history.

As a powerful insurgent army closes on Liberia's capital, London is forced to act, and HMS Beaufort is despatched to West Africa to pull British nationals from the teeth of encroaching danger. But when the volatile situation ashore unravels, the frigate's crew must draw deep on reserves of skill, ingenuity and sheer bloody mindedness to save it. And with time running out Beaufort's Captain makes the decision to take his ship up river....

Behind the locked doors of three mansions in London's exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens neighborhood, the British Secret Service established a highly secret prison in 1940: the London Cage. Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to "special intelligence treatment." The stakes were high: the war's outcome could hinge on obtaining information German prisoners were determined to withhold. After the war, high-ranking Nazi war criminals were housed in the Cage, revamped as an important center for investigating German war crimes.

The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how. Victory to Defeat is a captivating history of the mismanagement of a war-winning army.

New Zealand: A Novel spans almost 500 years and covers the respective discoveries of New Zealand by Pacific Islanders and Europeans. From the outset the two stories are interposed. It starts in the 1300’s with the departure of Islanders from Hawaiki in search of land far to the south. The hardy, brown-skinned people who arrive here first call themselves Maori and they call their new home Aotearoa – land of the long, white cloud. The fascinating, eventful and sometimes violent lives of descendants of those first arrivals are traced through the centuries until the arrival of Europeans ...

When World War Two splits Fred Read-Jahn and his English bride, Molly, she is forced to face the Blitz alone while he carries out secret missions on an epic journey from London to Moscow, travelling through North America, Canada, and much of Asia to the USSR. Only recently has it been released that he was working as an undercover intelligence agent for MI-19.

1879. The British Empire marches into Zululand, and disaster. Newly commissioned and untested, Second Lieutenant William Blackwood arrives from Monmouthshire to the wild frontier of South Africa, as Her Majesty’s forces prepare to crush the Zulu Kingdom. For Blackwood, it is meant to be the beginning of a proud military career: clean uniforms, sharp commands, and the steady march of empire. Instead, he finds confusion, chaos, and the first bitter lessons of war. Tasked with reinforcing a remote column of British and colonial troops, Blackwood is plunged into a campaign of dust-choked ...

With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.

Here is the story of how the English acquired their vast domain; how they ruled, maintained, and exploited it; and how, within decades, they presided over its dissolution. Here are Britain's triumphs and also her stinging defeats, her heroes and her scoundrels. It is a full and fascinating chronicle of the growth of the British Empire and its people and of the impact that empire had on the rest of the world.

The first in an action-packed spy series introducing Lieutenant Dragan Kelly. It is 1942. HMS Visigoth has been torpedoed off the coast of German occupied Norway. Sole survivor Lieutenant Dragan Kelly finds himself behind enemy lines, unsure who to trust. The Norwegian resistance share rumours about a mysterious Nazi plant where an Armageddon weapon of terrifying power is under construction. Should Kelly escape to Russia or stay and investigate it? And what of the stunningly beautiful but enigmatic resistance fighter Sybilla? Kelly falls in love with her, but is she all she claims to be? ...

The mission of Commander George Krause of the United States Navy is to protect a convoy of 37 merchant ships making their way across the icy North Atlantic from America to England. There, they will deliver desperately needed supplies, but only if they can make it through the wolf pack of German submarines that awaits and outnumbers them in the perilous seas. For 48 hours, Krause will play a desperate cat-and-mouse game against the submarines, combating exhaustion, hunger, and thirst to protect 50 million dollars worth of cargo and the lives of 3,000 men.

RUN WITH MI6 OPERATIVE FRANK RYDER AS HE STRIVES TO FIND THE ABDUCTED SON OF THE BRITISH PRIME MINISTER AND FOIL THE RUSSIANS FROM DEPLOYING A WEAPON THAT WILL ALLOW THEM TO BECOME A DOMINATE WORLD POWER A strange signal is received by military listening stations in the Arctic. The source of the signal is determined to be from a Russian archipelago in the Barents Sea, but the signal cannot be fully deciphered and its location pinpointed.The British Prime Minister’s son, together with a celebrity naturalist and two camera crew, vanish whilst filming a nature documentary on the same ...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Saul David's comprehensive history, All the King's Men: The British Soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, read by the actor Sean Barrett. "The British soldier," wrote a Prussian officer who served with Wellington, "is vigorous, well fed, by nature highly brave and intrepid, trained to the most vigorous discipline, and admirably well-armed...

More than two centuries after Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh on a small, armed transport vessel called Bounty, the true story of this enthralling adventure has become obscured by the legend. Combining vivid characterization and deft storytelling, Caroline Alexander shatters the centuries-old myths surrounding this story.

The Great Boer War (1899-1902) - more properly the Great Anglo-Boer War - was one of the last romantic wars, pitting a sturdy, stubborn pioneer people fighting to establish the independence of their tiny nation against the British Empire at its peak of power and self-confidence. It was fought in the barren vastness of the South African veldt, and it produced in almost equal measure extraordinary feats of personal heroism, unbelievable examples of folly and stupidity, and many incidents of humor and tragedy.

We speak English today because the Anglo-Saxons took over most of post-Roman Britain. How did that happen? There is little evidence: not much archaeology, and even less written history. There is, however, a huge amount of speculation. King Arthur's Wars brings an entirely new approach to the subject - the answers are out there, in the British countryside, waiting to be found. Months of field work and map study allow us to understand, for the first time, how the Anglo-Saxons conquered England, county by county and decade by decade.