Download or read book The Battle of Britain Revisited written by John H. Spencer and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Battle Of Britain Revisited written by Group Captain John H. Spencer and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed as, and remains, a defensive alliance. It is axiomatic therefore, that in the event of a war in Europe, NATO forces would be initially on the defensive. It is also likely that the Warsaw Pact (WP) forces would use all the considerable means at their disposal to achieve their war aims, including air power, and in the past 50 years or so, air power has had a considerable, some would even say a decisive, role to play in the conduct of war. From the foregoing, it can be seen that NATO air defences would be a vital pillar in the overall defence of Western Europe and that should they fail, or be overcome, then the achievement of NATO war aims would be made very much more difficult. In this context, it would seem worthwhile to examine one of the very few air defence campaigns of the past that succeeded and to see what lessons can be learnt from it that have relevance for today. Arguably, the most notable example of a successful air defence campaign was the Battle of Britain, which took place in the summer and autumn of 1940. Many books articles, and reminiscences have been published about the struggle and this study does not intend to give a detailed blow-by-blow account but rather to analyse the campaign and highlight those aspects which seem of particular importance to the outcome of the battle. It may be that some of these illuminate the eternal verities of warfare and are therefore as important today as they ever were.

Download or read book The Battle of Britain written by Christer Bergström and published by Casemate / Vaktel Forlag. This book was released on 2015-09-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough look at this turning-point WWII aerial battle, with eyewitness accounts, maps, and rare photos: “incredibly well-researched” (Aircrew Book Review). By late summer 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered all its opponents on the continent, including the British Army itself, which was forced to scramble back aboard small boats to its shores. A non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in hand, Hitler had only one remaining object that season—the British Isles themselves. However, before he could invade, his Luftwaffe needed to wipe the Royal Air Force from the skies. History’s first strategic military campaign conducted in the air alone was about to take place. This book contains a large number of dramatic eyewitness accounts, even as it reveals new facts that will alter common perceptions of the battle. For example, the twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 was actually a good day fighter, and it performed at least as well in this role as the Bf 109 during the battle. The Luftwaffe’s commander, Hermann Göring, performed far better than has been believed. The British night bombers played a more decisive role than previously thought; in addition, this book disproves that the German 109 pilots were in any way superior to their Hurricane or Spitfire counterparts. The author has examined records from both sides and provides surprising statistics that shatter much conventional wisdom—laying out the Battle of Britain as seldom seen before. Includes color photos of the relevant aircraft.

Download or read book An Affluent Society written by Lawrence Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During an election speech in 1957 the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, famously remarked that 'most of our people have never had it so good'. Although taken out of context, this phrase soon came to epitomize the sense of increased affluence and social progress that was prevalent in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, despite the recognition that Britain had moved away from an era of rationing and scarcity, to a new age of choice and plenty, there was simultaneously a parallel feeling that the nation was in decline and being economically outstripped by its international competitors. Whilst the study of Britain's postwar history is a well-trodden path, and the paradox of absolute growth versus relative decline much debated, it is here approached in a fresh and rewarding way. Rather than highlighting economic and industrial 'decline', this volume emphasizes the tremendous impact of rising affluence and consumerism on British society. It explores various expressions of affluence: new consumer goods; shifting social and cultural values; changes in popular expectations of policy; shifting popular political behaviour; changing attitudes of politicians towards the electorate; and the representation of affluence in popular culture and advertising. By focusing on the widespread cultural consequences of increasing levels of consumerism, emphasizing growth over decline and recognizing the rising standards of living enjoyed by most Britons, a new and intriguing window is opened on the complexities of this 'golden age'. Contrasting growing consumer expectations and demands against the anxieties of politicians and economists, this book offers all students of the period a new perspective from which to view post-imperial Britain and to question many conventional historical assumptions.

Download or read book Nordic Narratives of the Second World War written by Mirja Österberg and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have the dramatic events of the Second World War been viewed in the Nordic countries? In this book leading Nordic historians analyse post-war memory and historiography. They explore the relationship between scholarly and public understandings of the war. How have national interpretations been shaped by official security-policy doctrines? And in what way has the end of the Cold War affected the Nordic narratives? The authors not only present the overarching themes that set the Nordic experience of the Second World War apart from other European narratives, but also describe the distinctive post-war characteristics of Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. Key concepts such as national identity, memory culture, and the moral turn are placed in their Nordic context. Bringing new nuance to the post-war history of Europe, this is the first work to focus on Nordic narratives of the war, and is valuable reading for students, academics, and all who have an interest in the historiography of the Second World War or modern European history.

Download or read book The War Puzzle Revisited written by John A. Vasquez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scientific explanation of the onset and expansion of war and the conditions of peace.

Download or read book Never Surrender written by John Kelly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “WWII scholar John Kelly triumphs again” (Vanity Fair) in this remarkably vivid account of a key moment in Western history: The critical six months in 1940 when Winston Churchill debated whether England should fight Nazi Germany—and then decided to “never surrender.” London in April, 1940, is a place of great fear and conflict. The Germans have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi war machine now menaces Britain, even as America remains uncommitted to providing military aid. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible. In Never Surrender, we feel we are alongside these complex and imperfect men, determining the fate of the British Empire, and perhaps, the world. Drawing on the War Cabinet papers, other government documents, private diaries, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, historian John Kelly tells the story of the summer of 1940. Kelly takes readers from the battlefield to Parliament, to the government ministries, to the British high command, to the desperate Anglo-French conference in Paris and London, to the American embassy in London, and to life with the ordinary Britons. We see Churchill seize the historical moment and ultimately inspire his government, military, and people to fight. Kelly brings to life one of the most heroic moments of the twentieth century and intimately portrays some of its largest players—Churchill, Lord Halifax, Hitler, FDR, Joe Kennedy, and others. Never Surrender is a fabulous, grand narrative of a crucial period in World War II and the men and women who shaped it. “For lovers of minute-by-minute history, it’s a feast” (Huffington Post).

Download or read book Analysis Of German Operation Art Failures The Battle Of Britain 1940 written by Lieutenant Colonel John Turner and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of Britain was the first major defeat for the Germans of WWII. The Battle of Britain was an air operation designed to give Germany air superiority over both the English Channel and England. Gaining air superiority was considered by the Germany Army and Navy as absolutely essential prior to “Operation Sea Lion,” the landing and invasion of England. Because the Luftwaffe was never able to establish the requisite air superiority, Sea Lion was cancelled. This paper examines the German Operational Art issues from a historical perspective. It concludes the failure of the Luftwaffe belongs to Reich-Marshall Goring, operational commander for the Battle of Britain. His main failure, as operational commander, was repeatedly making tactical decisions from the operational level rather than leaving this to on-the-scene tactical commanders. Secondly, he was never able to identify Fighter Command as the British Center of Gravity. Thirdly, he never understood the intelligence advantage gained by the British as a result of their newly invented radar early warning system. As a result, Germany lost the battle.

Download or read book Triumph Revisited written by Andrew Wiest and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than thirty years later, the Vietnam War still stands as one of the most controversial events in the history of the United States, and historians have so far failed to come up with a definitive narrative of the wartime experience. With competing viewpoints already in play, Mark Moyar’s recent revisionist approach in Triumph Forsaken has created heated debate over who "owns" the history of America’s war in Vietnam. Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War collects critiques of Triumph Forsaken from both sides of this debate, written by an array of Vietnam scholars, cataloguing arguments about how the war should be remembered, how history may be reconstructed, and by whom. A lively introduction and conclusion by editors Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge provide context and balance to the essays, as well as Moyar’s responses, giving students and scholars of the Vietnam era a glimpse into how history is constructed and reconstructed.

Download or read book The Scientific Revolution Revisited written by Mikuláš Teich and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. ??With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

Download or read book Winning the Next War written by Stephen Peter Rosen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and when do military innovations take place? Do they proceed differently during times of peace and times of war? In Winning the Next War, Stephen Peter Rosen argues that armies and navies are not forever doomed to "fight the last war." Rather, they are able to respond to shifts in the international strategic situation. He also discusses the changing relationship between the civilian innovator and the military bureaucrat. In peacetime, Rosen finds, innovation has been the product of analysis and the politics of military promotion, in a process that has slowly but successfully built military capabilities critical to American military success. In wartime, by contrast, innovation has been constrained by the fog of war and the urgency of combat needs. Rosen draws his principal evidence from U.S. military policy between 1905 and 1960, though he also discusses the British army's experience with the battle tank during World War I.

Download or read book History Revisited written by J. David Markham and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-02-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology collects seven of the top stories in the alternate military-history genre by writers Harry Turtledove, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Mina, William Saunders, Michael F. Flynn, and editor Mike Resnick and submits them to scrutiny by seven eminent historians to find out just how probable the events they describe really are. Addressing pivotal historical events—including the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, the Battle of New Orleans, radical politics and Southern strategy in the mid-20th century, the Napoleonic wars, Alcibiades's sack of Syracuse, the American Civil War, and Kenya's fight for independence from Britain—this book seeks to find out how different circumstances could have affected world history. Historians present intriguing questions about these events, such as: Could our atomic bomb policy really have been changed by one faulty screw? What if Napoleon had become emperor of the United States, leading such heroes as Crockett and Houston in the Battle of New Orleans? Would Admiral Nelson's defection to France really have altered the course of the Napoleonic wars? Would President Lincoln's assassination during the Gettysburg Address have left the Confederacy as a separate country? From one end of the historical spectrum to the other, this book looks at what didn't happen in military history to gain a richer understanding of all that did.

Download or read book The Battle of Britain written by James Holland and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on extensive new research from around the world, this is the first narrative history of the Battle of Britain to provide a complete picture of that fateful summer of 1940. Telling the story of the titanic clash between Britain and Germany from b

Download or read book How the Spitfire Won the Battle of Britain written by Dilip Sarkar and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally lays to rest the myth that the Hurricane won the Battle of Britain rather than the numerically inferior, yet more glamorous, Spitfire.

Download or read book The Battle of Britain on the Big Screen written by Dilip Sarkar and published by Air World. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, the British movie industry produced a number of films concerning the war, all of which were, by necessity, heavily myth-laden and propagandised. Foremost among these productions was The First of the Few, which was the biggest grossing film of 1942. In the immediate post-war period, to start with there were no British aviation war films. The first to be released was Angels One Five in 1952. It was well-received, confirming that the Battle of Britain was a commercial commodity. Over the next few years, many famous war heroes published their memoirs, or had books written about them, including the legless Group Captain Douglas Bader, whose story, Reach for the Sky, told by Paul Brickhill, became a best-seller in 1956. It was followed a year later by the film of the same name, which, starring Kenneth More, dominated that year’s box office. The early Battle of Britain films had tended to focus upon the story of individuals, not the bigger picture. That changed with the release of the star-studded epic Battle of Britain in 1969. Using real aircraft, the film, produced in color and on a far larger scale than had been seen on film before, was notable for its spectacular flying sequences. Between the release of Reach for the Sky and Battle of Britain, however, much had changed for modern Britain. For a variety of reasons many felt that the story of the nation’s pivotal moment in the Second World War was something best buried and forgotten. Indeed, the overall box office reaction to Battle of Britain reinforced this view – all of which might explain why it was the last big screen treatment of this topic for many years. It was during the Battle of Britain’s seventieth anniversary year that the subject returned to the nation's screens when Matthew Wightman’s docudrama First Light was first broadcast. Essentially a serialisation of Spitfire pilot Geoffrey Wellum’s best-selling memoir of the same title, Wightman cleverly combined clips of Wellum as an old man talking about the past with his new drama footage. The series is, in the opinion of the author, the best portrayal of an individual’s Battle of Britain experience to have been made. In this fascinating exploration of the Battle of Britain on the big screen, renowned historian and author Dilip Sarkar examines the popular memory and myths of each of these productions and delves into the arguments between historians and the filmmakers. Just how true to the events of the summer of 1940 are they, and how much have they added to the historical record of ‘The Finest Hour’?

Download or read book BRIDESHEAD REVISITED THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER written by Evelyn Waugh and published by Alien Ebooks. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book With Great Sacrifice and Bravery written by Glenn Knoblock and published by Merriam Press. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is presented to the reader with several ideas in mind. First, it is the author''s hope that, in some small way, it will help preserve the memory of a little known pilot who fought, not only for his own country, but also for France and England during the early, dark days of World War II. While Waclaw Lapkowski was an experienced pilot who became one of Poland''s aces during the war, his early demise, like that of so many others, has relegated his achievements to the back pages of history, making them nearly forgotten. However, in referring to pilots such as Lapkowski, the great British ace Robert Stanford-Tuck cites the many men "who were credited with six, seven, or eight victories", pilots that "formed the bulk and guts of our fighter force." The second reason for producing this work is the unique use of official combat and operations reports from the Royal Air Force (RAF). Many of those who are interested in World War II aviation and fighter aces have read the biographies, and first-hand accounts of air combat contained within, of such men as Douglas Bader, Witold Urbanowicz, Adolph Galland, and Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, to name just a few. But what of those "aces" that did not survive to tell their story? How are they to be remembered? In the case of those who served with the RAF, the answer is, in part, through the use of official combat reports and related documents. While these official RAF and Polish Air Force (PAF) records do not sound particularly exciting, a glance at the surviving records quickly proves otherwise. Indeed, the title of this book consists of a borrowed phrase from one such report, and is a small example of the many dramatic events recorded within, often in the pilot''s own words. While these reports have been an important source for many works on the RAF and PAF and its achievements during the war, never before, to the author''s knowledge, have official combat reports been presented to the reading public in their original form. Though not originally intended for public view, they nonetheless make for exciting and informative reading and will be of interest not only to those with a passing interest in World War II aviation, but to the serious student as well. While the author was unable to obtain combat reports for all of Lapkowski''s flights, those that were procured for September 1940 and June 1941 are of particular interest as they highlight all of the "kills" that he made while serving in the RAF. The final reason for choosing to write about Waclaw Lapkowski is due to the availability of wartime artifacts connected with his service in the RAF. About a year ago the author came in contact with a man who owned a portion of Lapkowski''s Hurricane fighter, which was legally excavated in 1979. The author subsequently obtained a small piece of the wreckage for his personal collection, while the collector retained the remains of its Merlin engine, the prop boss, its Browning machine guns, and other items formerly on display at an aviation museum. Once this artifact was in the author''s possession, he became interested in finding out about Lapkowski, his career, and his subsequent fate. While this work gives much information about 303 Squadron, it is not, however, a squadron history. While a book entitled Squadron 303 was published in London in 1942, written by Arkady Fiedler, it was not intended as an exacting history of the unit. Instead, it was a nice work of wartime public relations to help explain the Polish contribution in general terms during the Battle of Britain. Despite its shortcomings, Fiedler''s book deserves its own place in the annals of aviation history. Copies by the thousands were smuggled into Nazi-held Poland and served not only to show that those who had left Poland were still fighting for their country, but served as an inspiration to those left behind to continue their resistance. No definitive squadron history has yet been translated into English. What the author found out, from the official combat reports, and various published sources, uniquely combined with available archaeological artifacts, was fascinating. What emerged from the records is a story worth telling. Waclaw Lapkowski, though not famous like such other Polish aces as Stanislaw Skalski, Jan Zumbach, or Urbanowicz, had an interesting and distinguished career. He was in the thick of battle at the outset of the war, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and saw subsequent service during the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940. He achieved air victories in two out of three of these campaigns, and is one of only a handful of men, less than 150 in number, who served in all three campaigns. To borrow a phrase from the British, Waclaw Lapkowski truly was one of "The Few", men whose skill and bravery helped stem the tide of German aggression and made Allied victory possible, at the cost of their own lives.