Great Britain World War

As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people - but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge.

When Winston Churchill was a boy of 16, he already had a vision for his purpose in life. "This country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion...I shall be in command of the defenses of London...it will fall to me to save the Capital, to save the Empire." It was a most unlikely prediction. Perceived as a failure for much of his life, Churchill was the last person anyone would have expected to rise to national prominence as prime minister and influence the fate of the world during World War II.

In 1943 Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, in which millions of villagers starved to death.

For fans of The King's Speech, the intriguing bond between monarch and prime minister and its crucial role during World War II. The political and personal relationship between King George VI and Winston Churchill during World War II is one that has been largely overlooked throughout history, yet the trust and loyalty these men shared helped Britain navigate its perhaps most trying time. Despite their vast differences, the two men met weekly and found that their divergent virtues made them a powerful duo.

In the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and his henchman, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring, began their attempt to clear the skies over England to invade Great Britain. Despite very long odds, the Royal Air Force stood its ground, prevented the German invasion, and helped turn the tide of WWII.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Jeremy Paxman's Great Britain's Great War. Read by the actor Roy McMillan, this magnificent history of the First World War tells the story of the war in one gripping narrative from the point of view of the British people. We may think we know about it, but what was life really like for the British people during the First World War?

In this riveting, informative, and entertaining book, Stelzer draws on previously untapped material, diaries of guests, and a wide variety of other sources to tell of some of the key dinners at which Churchill presided before, during, and after World War II.

Built in 1927, the German ocean liner Cap Arcona was the greatest ship since the Titanic. When the Nazis seized control, she was stripped down for use as a floating barracks and troop transport. Hitler's minister, Joseph Goebbels, later cast her as a "star" in the epic propaganda film about the sinking of the legendary Titanic. In the Third Reich's final desperate days, when SS Cap Arcona was mistakenly bombed by the British Air Force, concentration camp prisoners packed the ship.

No Better Friend tells the incredible true story of Frank Williams, a radarman in Britain's Royal Air Force, and Judy, a purebred pointer, who met as prisoners of war during World War II. Judy, who became the war's only official canine POW, was a fiercely loyal dog who sensed danger - warning her fellow prisoners of imminent attacks and protecting them from brutal beatings. Frank and Judy's friendship, an unbreakable bond forged in the worst circumstances, is one of the great recently unearthed stories of World War II.

British and American commanders first used modern Special Forces in support of conventional military operations during World War II. Since then, although special ops have featured prominently in popular culture and media coverage of wars, the academic study of irregular warfare has remained as elusive as the practitioners of special operations themselves.

The broadcast that George VI made to the British nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939 - which formed the climax of the multi-Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech - was the product of years of hard work with Lionel Logue, his iconoclastic, Australian-born speech therapist. Yet the relationship between the two men did not end there. Far from it: In the years that followed, Logue was to play an even more important role at the monarch’s side.

Great Britain? is a much-needed antidote to the pervading sense that Britain is going backwards rather than forwards. It is both a clear-eyed and rigorous diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a unique toxicity of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful case for reclaiming a different future: by building an investment nation of good work, resilient communities and secure homes, a society in which both burdens and prosperity are shared.

Do you want to learn more about the Winston Churchill, but don’t have time to listen to huge, long biographies. Then let The History Journals take you on an hourly history tour of his tenure in World War 2. Winston Churchill had undeniably given his all for King and country and an allied victory promised to be his finest hour; but he was wise to be cautious, and quite incredibly his own future as the nation’s Prime Minister was far from assured.

Vividly evoking the confusion, horror and comradeship of war - from the killing fields of Normandy bocage, through house-to-house fighting in shattered Flemish towns, to the final Rhine crossing - Lion Rampant is a powerful, authentic and moving story, telling with extraordinary clarity how the author, his fellow officers and the men of his company lived through one of the most bitter campaigns in history.

The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight - the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric - a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets - and almost totally unqualified for espionage. Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent.

The fighting in North Africa during World War II is commonly overlooked, aside from the famous battle at El Alamein that pitted the British under General Bernard Montgomery against the legendary "Desert Fox", Erwin Rommel. But while the Second Battle of El Alamein would be the pivotal action in North Africa, the conflict in North Africa began all the way back in the summer of 1940, when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared Italy’s entrance into the war, seeing an opportunity for Italy to enlarge its colonial holdings in Africa by seizing portions of the British Empire.

Combinando tres facetas fundamentales de la vida de Winston Churchill - su vida privada, su trayectoria políticay bélica, y el contexto histórico en el que ambas se desarrollaron-, Breve Historia de Winston Churchill nos presenta la biografía del político que gobernó Inglaterra durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pero que, además, luchó en la Guerra del 98, en la Guerra de los Boers, que participó en la Primera Guerra Mundial como Lord del Almirantazgo y asistió al duro proceso de descolonización de Inglaterra.

We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark and backward time, characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. We believe that life was unchanging over the period, so if a peasant fell asleep in in the year 1000 and woke up six hundred years later, he would return to a world that was instantly recognisable. We hold that change is facilitated by science and technological innovation, and that it was the inventions of recent centuries, from the steam engine to the Internet, that created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

Alone, unprepared, and weak. These are generally the words used to describe Britain's position in 1940, part of a narrative that has been built up ever since the end of World War II. However, the reality is very different. On land, sea, and in the air, Britain was prepared. It had the most powerful navy in the world; the RAF was relatively strong, but more importantly, was operating as part of a plan and a joined-up group system that was in reality never in any real danger of being defeated; even the post-Dunkirk British Army was better armed than the post-war narrative tells us.