Second World War

  • Operation Jubilee

    £8.99

    On the moonless night of 18 August 1942 a flotilla pushes out into the flat water of the Channel. They are to seize the German-held port of Dieppe and hold it for at least 24 hours, showing the Soviets the Allies were serious about a second front and to get experience ahead of a full-scale invasion.But confidence turned to carnage with nearly two thirds of the attackers dead, wounded or captured. Operation Jubilee – the Royal Air Force’s biggest battle since 1940 – has drama from start to finish, human folly and tragedy in spades and a fast, tight narrative with heroes at every level. The raid was both a disaster and a milestone in the narrative of the war – it had powerful lessons and far-reaching consequences that paved the way to D-Day. Patrick Bishop’s account of this gallant endeavour reveals the big picture and unearths telling details, establishing definitively Operation Jubilee’s place in history.

  • Going With the Boys

    £10.99

    From the bestselling author of The Unfinished Palazzo, the untold history of six groundbreaking women who fought to become front-line correspondents during World War II

  • The Flame of Resistance

    £20.00

    During WW2, Josephine Baker, the world’s richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. This is the story of her heroic personal resistance to Nazi Germany.

  • The Man With the Iron Heart

    £30.00

    A portrait of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the darkest figures of Hitler’s elite and the designer and executor of the Holocaust, featuring in-depth interviews with those who knew him best.

  • Berlin

    £20.00

    An almighty storm hit Berlin in the last days of April 1945. Enveloped by the unstoppable force of East and West, explosive shells pounded buildings while the inhabitants of a once glorious city sheltered in dark cellars – just like their Fuhrer in his bunker. The Battle of Berlin was a key moment in history; marking the end of a deathly regime, the defeated city was ripped in two by the competing superpowers of the Cold War. In this book, historian Sinclair McKay draws on never-before-seen first-person accounts to paint a picture of a city ravaged by ideology, war and grief. Yet to fully grasp the fall of Berlin, it is crucial to also explore in detail the years beforehand and to trace the city being rebuilt, as two cities, in the aftermath.

  • Victory in the West 1945

    £30.00

    March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany. Victory is finally within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final 100 days of the Second World War will prove to be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town. In this book, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams brings this closing stage of the Allies’ fight against Nazi Germany brilliantly to life. He explores the immense challenges they faced in crossing the Rhine on a 300-mile front. He tells stories of individual acts of resolve and heroism, of often exhausted troops pressing forward attacks in the face of ferocious resistance.

  • Operation Pedestal

    £9.99

    The Sunday Times bestseller

    ‘One of the most dramatic forgotten chapters of the war, as told in a new book by the incomparable Max Hastings’ DAILY MAIL

  • Brothers in Arms

    £9.99

    From the bestselling author of Normandy ’44 and Sicily ’43 comes the untold story of the Sherwood Rangers. It took a certain type of courage to serve in a tank in World War Two. Encased in steel, surrounded by highly explosive shells, a big and slow-moving target, every crew member was utterly vulnerable to enemy attack from all sides. Living – and dying – in a tank was a brutal way to fight a war. The Sherwood Rangers were one of the great tank regiments. They had learned their trade the hard way, under the burning sun of North Africa, on the battlefields of El Alamein and Alam el Halfa. By the time they landed on Gold Beach on D-Day, they were toughened by experience and ready for combat.

  • Barbarossa

    £12.99

    Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, was the largest military operation in history, its aim nothing less than ‘a war of extermination’ to annihilate Soviet communism, liquidate the Jews and create lebensraum for the so-called German master race. But it led to the destruction of the Third Reich, and was entirely cataclysmic; in six months of warfare no less than six million were killed, wounded or registered as missing in action, and soldiers on both sides committed heinous crimes behind the lines on a scale without parallel in the history of warfare. In ‘Barbarossa’, drawing on hitherto unseen archival material – including previously untranslated Russian sources – in his usual gripping style, Jonathan Dimbleby recounts not only the story of the military campaign, but the politics and diplomacy behind this epic clash of global titans.

  • Traitor King

    £10.99

    Here Andrea Lownie looks at the years following the abdication of Edward VIII when the former king was kept in exile, feuding with his family over status for his wife, Wallis Simpson, and denied any real job. Drawing on extensive research into hitherto unused archives and Freedom of Information requests, it makes the case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not the naïve dupes of the Germans but actively intrigued against Britain in both war and peace.

  • Winston Churchill

    £25.00

    The life and crimes of the last, great Imperialist

  • Battles of Conscience

    £22.00

    Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against the Nazi threat. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war with five of these individuals.