Download or read book Gone to Russia to Fight written by John T. Smith and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable period in the early history of the RAF covered in print for the very first time.
Download or read book Force Benedict written by Eric Carter and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second World War fighter pilot Eric Carter is one of only four surviving members of a secret mission, code-named 'Force Benedict'. Sanctioned by Winston Churchill in 1941 Force Benedict was dispatched to defend Murmansk, the USSR's only port not under Nazi occupation. If Murmansk fell, Soviet resistance against the Nazis would be hard to sustain and Hitler would be able to turn all his forces on Britain... Force Benedict was under the command of New Zealand-born RAF Wing Commander Henry Neville Gynes Ramsbottom-Isherwood, who led two squadrons of Hurricane fighters, pilots and ground crew which were shipped to Russia in total secrecy on the first ever Arctic Convoy. They were told to defend Murmansk against the Germans 'at all costs'. 'We all reckoned the government thought we'd never survive' - but Eric Carter did, and was threatened with Court Martial if he talked about where he'd been or what he'd done. Now he reveals his experiences of seventy years ago in the hell on earth that was Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. It will also include previously unseen photos and documents, as well as exploring - for the first time - other intriguing aspects of Force Benedict.
Download or read book Lend Lease and Soviet Aviation in the Second World War written by Vladimir Kotelnikov and published by Helion. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy years have passed since the Second World War yet the books and articles still keep coming in a never-ending stream discussing the question of what role the deliveries of arms and materials by Soviet allies played in the victory of the Red Army. In Russia, the American Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter along with the Studebaker US6 truck and canned stewed meat became the symbols of Allied help to the USSR during the Second World War. Other aircraft which arrived to the country under the Lend-Lease program are less known but also made a valuable contribution to the victory. The author of this book for the first time has assembled a huge volume of information related to the delivery of aviation equipment from the UK and USA. Based on documents from Russian and foreign archives, museums, and veterans' recollections, the author has made a qualitative and quantitative appraisal of the influence of these deliveries upon the Soviet war effort and airpower during the conflict. The book details the routes of the aircraft deliveries to Russia, the modifications which were done in order to suit the demands of the Russian climate and specifics of their front-line use, as well as the process of the new aircraft being mastered by the units of the Red Army Air Force. The first foreign aircraft arrived in the Soviet Union with No. 151 Wing RAF in 1941, and their use expanded rapidly - they took part in the counteroffensive near Moscow, the battles for Stalingrad and the Kursk salient, and operations of the war up to the battle for Berlin and the capitulation of Japanese forces in the North China. The author includes the results of the combat assessments of the aircraft, which were done at the Scientific Testing Institute of the Air Force, as well as reports from front-line regiments, and multiple combat episodes, detailing the views of the Soviet designers and pilots on the British and American aircraft. A separate chapter provides information about the aircraft which were not officially delivered but appeared in the Soviet Union accidentally. For the first time an attempt has been made to assess the influence of the deliveries of material and equipment upon the Soviet aviation industry and war effort. The author's impressive text is supported by nearly 700 color and b/w photographs, 100 color aircraft profiles, plus maps, charts etc.
Download or read book The Royal Air Force written by Michael Napier and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully illustrated history of the Royal Air Force while on operations, publishing to mark the centenary of its foundation in World War I. The world's first independent air force, the Royal Air Force celebrates its centenary in 2018. In the 100 years since the end of World War I, the service has been involved in almost continuous operations around the globe, giving the RAF the longest and most wide-ranging history of any air force in the world. But over the years this history has also become entangled with myths. The Royal Air Force: A Centenary of Operations sets the record straight, dispelling these as it uncovers – in both words and photographs – the true exploits and accomplishments of RAF personnel over the last 100 years. From its formation as an independent service in the dying days of World War I, its desperate fight against the Axis air forces in World War II, to its commitments during both the Cold War and modern times, this is the complete story of how the RAF has defended Britain for a century.
Download or read book Churchill s Secret War With Lenin written by Damien Wright and published by Helion and Company. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the little-known involvement of Royal Marines as they engaged the new Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as “Soviets”) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order. As Russia fractured into loyalist “White” and revolutionary “Red” factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 “Spring Offensive” which threatened Paris. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on several fronts in support of British trained and equipped “White Russian” Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against “White” Finnish troops in North Russia and the German “Iron Division” in the Baltic. It remains a little-known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today. After withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War remains forgotten. Wright’s book addresses that oversight, interspersing the broader story with personal accounts of participants.” —Military History Magazine
Download or read book The Russian Civil War 1918 1921 written by Richard W. Harrison and published by Casemate Academic. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wealth of knowledge . . . For every incident, chasing Kornilov or dealing with Admiral Kolchak, the reader has a 360-degree view.” —Roads to the Great War The Russian Civil War was one of the most fateful of the 20th century’s military conflicts, a bloody three-year struggle whose outcome saw the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime within the former Russian Empire. As such, it commands the attention of the military specialist and layman alike as we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the war’s end. This work is the third volume of the three-volume Soviet official history of the Russian Civil War, which appeared during 1928-1930, just before the imposition of Stalinist orthodoxy. While the preceding volumes focused on the minutiae of the Red Army’s organizational development and military art, this volume provides an in-depth description and analysis of the civil war’s major operations along the numerous fronts, from the North Caucasus, the Don and Volga rivers, the White Sea area, the Baltic States and Ukraine, as well as Siberia and Poland. It also offers a well-argued case for the political reasons behind the Bolsheviks’ military strategy and eventual success against their White opponents. And while it is a certainly a partisan document with a definite political bias, it is at the same time a straightforward military history that manages to avoid many of the hoary myths that later came to dominate the subject. As such, it is easily the most objective account of the struggle to emerge from the Soviet Union before the collapse of the communist system in 1991.
Download or read book Flying to Victory written by Mike Bechthold and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian-born flying ace Raymond Collishaw (1893–1976) served in Britain’s air forces for twenty-eight years. As a pilot in World War I he was credited with sixty-one confirmed kills on the Western Front. When World War II began in 1939, Air Commodore Collishaw commanded a Royal Air Force group in Egypt. It was in Egypt and Libya in 1940–41, during the Britain’s Western Desert campaign, that he demonstrated the tenets of an effective air-ground cooperation system. Flying to Victory examines Raymond Collishaw’s contribution to the British system of tactical air support—a pattern of operations that eventually became standard in the Allied air forces and proved to be a key factor in the Allied victory. The British Army and Royal Air Force entered the war with conflicting views on the issue of air support that hindered the success of early operations. It was only after the chastening failure of Operation Battleaxe in June 1941, fought according to army doctrine, that Winston Churchill shifted strategy on the direction of future air campaigns—ultimately endorsing the RAF's view of mission and target selection. This view adopted principles of air-ground cooperation that Collishaw had demonstrated in combat. Author Mike Bechthold traces the emergence of this strategy in the RAF air campaign in Operation Compass, the first British offensive in the Western Desert, in which Air Commodore Collishaw’s small force overwhelmed its Italian counterpart and disrupted enemy logistics. Flying to Victory details the experiences that prepared Collishaw so well for this campaign and that taught him much about the application of air power, especially how to work effectively with the army and Royal Navy. As Bechthold shows, these lessons learned altered the Allied approach to tactical air support and, ultimately, changed the course of the Second World War.
Download or read book Red Phoenix Rising written by Von Hardesty and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of the Soviet Air Force in World War II. Provides a fast-paced, riveting look at the air war on the Eastern Front as it has never been seen before.
Download or read book Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia written by Paul R. Josephson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aided by personal documents and institutional archives that were closed for decades, this book recounts the development of physics—or, more aptly, science under stress—in Soviet Russia up to World War II. Focusing on Leningrad, center of Soviet physics until the late 1930s, Josephson discusses the impact of scientific, cultural, and political revolution on physicists' research and professional aspirations. Political and social revolution in Russia threatened to confound the scientific revolution. Physicists eager to investigate new concepts of space, energy, light, and motion were forced to accommodate dialectical materialism and subordinate their interests to those of the state. They ultimately faced Stalinist purges and the shift of physics leadership to Moscow. This account of scientists cut off from their Western colleagues reveals a little-known part of the history of modern physics.
Download or read book The RAF s French Foreign Legion written by G H Bennett and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the relationship between the Royal Air Force and the French Fighter pilots who flew for the RAF during WWII.
Download or read book Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors written by Phil Tomaselli and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you are interested in the career of an individual air-man or woman, researching medals awarded to a pilot or crew member or just want to know more about a particular squadron or operation, this book will point you in the right direction. Assuming that the reader has no prior knowledge of the air force, its history or organization, Phil Tomaselli explains which records survive, where they can be found and how they can help you in your research. He also recommends resources available online as well as books and memoirs. Each era in air force history is described, from the pioneering days of early aviation and the formation of the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War to the creation of the Royal Air Force, its operations during the Second World War and its postwar development. The author explains the evolving organization of the air force in each period. He also provides pointers and examples which should help researchers find the records of units and bases that individuals served in.
Download or read book Ethnic Relations in Post Soviet Russia written by Andrew Foxall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the collapse of communism in Russia was relatively peaceful, ethnic relations have been deteriorating since then. This deterioration poses a threat to the functioning of the Russian state and is a major obstacle to its future development. Analysing ethnic relations in the North Caucasus, this book demonstrates how a myriad of processes that characterised post-Soviet transition, including demographic change, economic upheaval, geopolitical instability, and political re-structuring, have affected daily life for citizens. It raises important questions about ethnicity, identity, nationalism, sovereignty, and territoriality in the post-Soviet space.
Download or read book Soviet Fighters of the Second World War written by Jason Nicholas Moore and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Red Air Force had just started to re-equip with modern monoplane fighters when the Germans opened Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hundreds of fighters were destroyed in the first few days, but many of these were obsolete biplanes. Soviet Fighters of the Second World War details fighter development from the dark days of Barbarossa to eventual triumph over Berlin. Starting with outdated aircraft such as the Polikarpov Po-2 biplane and monoplane fighters, the Soviets then settled on two main lines of development: the inline-engine LaGG-3 and its radial-engine derivatives, the La-5 and La-7, and the inline-engine Yakovlev fighters, which were produced in greater numbers than any other series of fighters. Not only are these aircraft accurately described, but experimental fighters are also dealt with. In addition, colour profiles illustrate these aircraft in terms of design, camouflage and markings. From the I-15bis biplane of the late 1930s to the superb La-7 and Yak-3 fighters of the last year of the war, all Red Air Force fighters are covered in this comprehensive volume.
Download or read book Allied Convoys to Northern Russia 1941 1945 written by William Smith and published by Pen and Sword Maritime. This book was released on 2024-03-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the experiences of the men and ships who sailed in the Allied convoys to North Russia between August 1941 and May 1945 have been fully documented, the wider political, diplomatic and military factors which determined the campaign are less well known. The principal actors Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin each had their own agendas and expectations, influenced by advisers and competing national priorities. These inevitably gave rise to differences putting pressure in turn on the convoy program while the varying effectiveness of German counter-action was a significant and unpredictable factor. 1942 was dominated by pressure on Churchill from Roosevelt and Stalin to increase the size of convoys at a time when the Royal Navy lacked the necessary escorts. This deficiency was exacerbated by heavy merchant shipping losses and the demands of Operation TORCH. The temporary convoy suspension in 1943 followed the deployment of German heavy warships to Norway and the diversion of escorts to Operation HUSKY. A serious Anglo-Soviet rift, which led to Allied threats to discontinue the program, was only resolved by lengthy negotiations. It resumed until temporarily suspended due to the D-Day landings after which the increasing escort availability allowed operations to run uninterrupted until May 1945. This carefully researched work providing an overview of the strategic factors dominating the costly yet war-winning Arctic convoy program will be welcomed by experts and laymen alike.
Download or read book Last Train Over Rostov Bridge written by Marion Aten and published by Thin Red Line Books. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marion Aten's account of the little-known intervention by the RAF in aid of the White Armies during the Russian Civil War began in 1919.Originally published in 1961, this edition includes extensive annotations to the original text and previously unpublished photographs taken during the campaign.
Download or read book Sink the Tirpitz written by Geoffrey W Raebel and published by Air World. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war hung in the balance. In the Pacific, the Japanese had suffered their first major defeat at Midway and the German advance into the heart of Russia had stalled at Stalingrad. But if the Germans could break through into the Caucasus and capture its vital oil fields, the Soviets might be battered into bloody defeat. It was crucial that the convoys from the UK fought their way through the Arctic to Archangel and Murmansk to deliver the supplies which were so essential to the Russians. But lurking in the Norwegian fjords was Germany's last great battleship, Tirpitz.With its eight 15-inch guns, Tirpitz posed an ever-present threat to shipping in the northern waters, and when it was believed that the battleship was about to attack Convoy PQ 17, the convoy was ordered to scatter. This was a disastrous decision that led to the loss of twenty-four merchant ships. It was, therefore, of paramount importance that the next convoy - PQ 18 - reached Russia, and so the assembly of forty merchantmen was escorted by a veritable fleet of fifty-one warships. The latter included an anti-aircraft cruiser, twenty-one destroyers, two anti-aircraft ships, two submarines and an aircraft carrier. Air cover was provided by RAF Catalina flying boats and Handley Page Hampdens of RAF Coastal Command.The Hampden torpedo-bombers of 144 Squadron RAF and 455 Squadron RAAF were deployed from Scotland to the Red Air Force airfield at Vayenga near Murmansk. This placed the aircraft within range of Tirpitz's lair in Altafjord. On receiving the news that Tirpitz had left the protection of the fjord, the Hampdens took to the air. Though no contact was made with the battleship, the presence of the twenty-three bombers deterred the Germans from risking their prestigious warship. PQ 18 safely reached Archangel on 21 September 1942.With links to the Great Escape, the story of this unique operation is revealed here by Geoffrey W. Raebel, the son of the surviving senior engineer of 455 Squadron. This the result of thirty years of research and draws in great part on the personal accounts of the men who took part in that historic enterprise. It is supplemented with rarely seen Coastal Command photographs, German ones that have never been published before, and the full story of the discovery, and recovery, of one of the bombers involved.
Download or read book The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia written by Thomas Hubbard Vail Motter and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
