LAST LAURELS: THE GERMAN
DEFENCE OF
UPPER SILESIA JANUARY-MAY 1945
by Georg Gunter
By January
1945, Upper Silesia had become Germany's key industrial
region, with its coal mines, blast furnaces, arms factories
and hydrogenation plants. Not surprisingly, when the Soviets
launched a series of powerful offensives aimed at capturing
the region, the German defence was bitter, bordering on the
suicidal. Soviet reactions were brutal, the Red Army
committing widespread atrocities, which have received little
coverage until now. In this readable and fast-paced
translation from the German edition, the author presents a
penetrating description of the events which occurred in
Silesia during the first five months of 1945 - from the
massive Soviet offensive on 12th January, through to the
final German defensive actions around Ratibor five months
later.
Fine in
illustrated boards - Large Format, 309pp, illustrations,
maps
Throughout most of the classical
period, Persia was one of the great superpowers, placing a
limit on the expansion of Western powers. It was the most
formidable rival to the Roman empire for centuries, until
Persia, by then under the Sassanians, was overwhelmed by the
Islamic conquests in the seventh century AD. The Sassanians,
the native Iranian dynasty that ousted their Parthian
overlords in AD 226, developed a highly sophisticated army
that was able for centuries to hold off all comers. They
continued the Parthian's famous winning combination of swift
horse archers with heavily-armoured cataphract cavalry, also
making much use of war elephants
New in d/w - 466pp, 41 colour & b/w
photos, 11 maps, 10 b/w illustrations
A beautifully illustrated history
of Northrop's amazing Stealth Bomber, the batlike B-2
Spirit. Developed using many of Jack Northrop's Flying Wing
theories (and looking remarkably similar to the
revolutionary XB-35 and YB-49 bombers of the 'forties) the
Spirit has truly revolutionised the USAF's ability to
project strategic power on a global scale. Four stealthy
B-2s can deliver the same bombing power as thirty two
standard attack aircraft backed up by twenty eight escort
and defence suppression aircraft and fifteen tankers!
New in card cover
- 76pp, 117 colour & 29 b/w illustrations, tables,
diagrams
The
authentic account of the work of GCHQ at Bletchley Park in
WWII. By 1942 some 4,000 German, Italian and Japanese
signals were being broken and translated by the remarkable
team. The book includes accounts by the men and women who
worked there, telling of their recruitment, training,
successes and failures.
New in card cover - xxi + 321pp, 10 illustrations, 23
figures
A compulsively readable and vivid
account of life as a young soldier in Russia's Chechen wars,
it takes the raw and mundane reality of days amid guns and
grenades and twists it into compelling, chilling, and eerily
elegant prose. Babchenko traces his journey from innocence
to experience, beginning with his teenage arrival in the
transit camp just north of Chechnya and harsh treatment by
his seniors as a naive and scared new recruit, through to
his period of active duty at the front, by which time he has
become a brutalized and hardened soldier.
