Did events justify Lloyd George's claim in 1914 that the Kaiser could fall `by knocking away the props'; isolating Germany by defeating her partners? When Italy joined the Allies who was propping up whom? Were sideshows in the Balkans, Iraq and Palestine integral to the war's general strategy, or were they simply old imperial rivalries resumed by other means? A hundred years on, that moment in November 1918 when the fighting ceased on the Western Front is still remembered across nations: that symbolic eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 'Victory 1918' examines the background to the Allied triumph and its aftermath. Might the Armistice in the forest of Compiegne have come sooner? Did American intervention have won the war and compromised the peace? How near did Germany come to denouncing the Armistice and resuming fighting in 1919? But 'Victory 1918' is not only concerned with what happened in France and Flanders. There were four armistices that autumn. The Great War was a global conflict, with battlefronts on three continents. Retracing the path to Compiegne through the four-year struggle allows the reader to consider if a broader strategic vision might have brought an earlier victory. 'Victory 1918' is a masterful survey of one of history's great turning points, and offers a fresh interpretation of the war which, more than any other, determined the character of the twentieth century. ALAN PALMER was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research. He has written some thirty narrative histories, historical reference books or biographies. In 1980 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

    AN ELITE BRITISH ARMY UNIT IS ON A DEADLY MISSION. Autumn, 1942: Hitler's legions have swept across Europe. Soviet Russia reels under the German onslaught while across the channel, Britain struggles on.And in North Africa, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps have routed the 8th Army, threatening the oil fields of the Middle East. The war hangs in the balance...Out of this, the British hatch a desperate plan - to send a small, highly mobile fighting force behind enemy lines to strike a blow that will stop Rommel's army in its tracks. It is to be called the Long Range Desert Group and its exploits will become the stuff of legend.Based on real events, Steven Pressfield's bold novel brings to pulse-racing life the ingenuity and daring of this maverick commando unit - a disparate, dedicated 'band of brothers' who sacrificed so much for the sake of freedom...

    He was wounded three times. He finished the war as one of the most experienced and resourceful of British tank commanders, and in later life, he set down his wartime experiences in graphic detail. His book is not only an extraordinary memoir; it is also a compelling account of the exploits of the Royal Tank Regiment throughout the conflict. As a record of the day-to-day experience of the tank crew of seventy-five years ago--of the conditions they faced and the battles they fought--it has rarely been equaled.

    It's the first in the series to describe their events in the bloodthirsty combat of Indochina. Following the myths and legends about Nazis recruited by the French Foreign Legion to fight in Indochina, Eric Meyer's new book is based on the real story of one such former Waffen-SS man who lived to tell the tale. The Legion recruited widely from soldiers left unemployed and homeless by the defeat of Germany in 1945. They offered a new identity and passport to men who could bring their fighting abilities to the jungles and rice paddies of what was to become Vietnam. These were ruthless, trained killers, brutalised by the war on the Eastern Front, their killing skills honed to a razor's edge. They found their true home in Indochina, where they fought and became a byword for brutal military efficiency.

    There have been other books on Dr Morell's cocktail of treatments for Hitler and Goering's reliance on drugs, but Ohler's book is the first to show how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940. Ohler is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants. This chemical euphoria changes how we should think about the Nazi high command and its ability to understand the situation it found itself in by 1944-45. As such Blitzed will force a wider reinterpretation of several key events during the Second World War.

    One of this platoon’s section commanders was a 20-year old regular soldier called Bob Kearney, who led a series of deadly patrols, operating in isolation and extreme danger ahead of the main Australian forces.

    In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.