Second World War

After 70 years, a visual record of the liberation of Belsen has been restored.

Second-hand books don’t just tell the stories of their authors but of their former owners, too.

In the summer of 1944, when Paris was to be liberated, and how, became for the Western allies a problem not only of military but of deep political significance.

The Yugoslav coup of 1941 marked a turning-point in the Second World War. Although the country was quickly overrun by German arms, writes A.W. Palmer, Hitler’s timetable for the invasion of Russia was seriously thrown out.

Richard Freeman asks whether public hysteria in wartime Britain helped fend off an attack, while public apathy in America help to precipitate one.

Ronald Lewin offers his study of the German Commander as one of the ‘Great Captains’ of war.

At a discouraging time during the Second World War, writes Geoffrey Evans, British and Indian troops gained a spectacular victory over the Italian forces in East Africa.

According to western stereotype, the Japanese at the time of the Second World War were passive and obedient automatons. Yet the realities of daily life in imperial Japan were complex and politically charged.

Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the Lützow, a partly built German cruiser delivered to the Soviet Union in 1940 and renamed the Petropavlovsk, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

William Brooke Joyce took to the airwaves on 14 September 1939.