The huge, multi-national Austro-Hungarian army was a major factor in mid-19th century European politics. Sharing borders with ramshackle Ottoman Turkey and volatile Italy, the Empire was threatened both internally - by growing nationalist esentments - and externally by the ambitions of France and Pr[...]

In 1870 Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia, engineered a war with France that would result in the fall of the Second Empire. It was the first modern European war and saw the use of bolt action rifles, machine guns, railway transport and professional general staffs. This war led to Germany's unifica[...]

There have been few military formations in history which have elicited such mixed reactions as the U-Boat Waffe of Hitler's Kriegsmarine. Often seen by those seamen who suffered the predations of Grossadmiral Donitz's "Grey Wolfs" as some sort of sadistic monsters, the men of the U-boat arm in fact [...]

The Austro-Hungarian forces were of central importance in World War I; it was Austria's crisis in the Balkans that began the war. Austria put huge armies into the field against the Russians, and against Italy on the Alpine front, leading to some of the greatest battles of the war (Caporetto, the Iso[...]

German daylight raids on Britain began in the summer of 1940. They were expected and the country had been preparing for quite some time. Searchlights were in place, Fighter Command had been expanded, and anti-aircraft guns were being manufactured. It was from these first preparations that Britain de[...]