Sublime

Three years of fighting across arid parts of Egypt and Libya was now entering its final bloody phase among towns and fields. General Rommel had called the war in the desert Krieg ohne Hass – war without hate. Though dust and sand grimed and gritted everything, some people had still talked romantically of a ‘clean’ war, perhaps because civilians wer

Abwehr Enigma machine was different from the one used by the German armed services: it was smaller and had no Steckerbrett plug board at the front, so the code-breakers did not have to worry about cross-plugging, but its rotors ‘turned over’ far more often, not once every 26 letters, but 11, 15 and 19 times respectively on the three different wheel

As Pershing’s chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, Fox Conner directed the development and successful deployment of American combat forces in France. Pershing considered Conner to have been “a brilliant soldier” and “one of the finest characters our Army has ever produced.” Pershing paid tribute to Con

Home to some of the fittest and most mentally resilient humans on the planet, it’s a sacred place for many of Britain’s bravest soldiers.

In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed Briti

It might make things easier if he went down to London again and found Marlowe. Report in, like a good soldier. But he swore he wouldn’t work for Marlowe again. Not after Malaya.

The RND kept naval ranks, customs, language and traditions. They wore beards, drank to the King’s health seated, had battalions named after admirals such as Nelson, Drake, Hawke and Hood, and so on – differentiating them from the Army divisions in the BEF. Churchill, ever attuned to the warrior psychology, noted that it was ‘strange how men . . . c

Fifty miles north at Roi-Namur—two islands separated by a causeway as long as a hyphen—Marine Scouts took control of Koehler’s UDT 2 for a night reconnaissance of the lagoon reefs. Riding rubber boats through choppy water, they searched for mines and found none. The next day, UDT 2 attempted their own remote-controlled boat mission. This time the d