The history of Poland is a fascinating story of a people struggling to achieve nationhood in the face of internal and external conflict. Poland became a unified Christian state in AD 966 and by the 12th century a knightly class had emerged a force that was integral to the defence of Poland against increasingly frequent foreign invasions. Intent on crushing rival Christian states, the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights all mounted attacks but were beaten back by the Poles, as were invading Mongols and Turks. This book reveals the organisation, equipment and battle histories of the medieval Polish armies as they developed and modernised to emerge as one of the dominant powers of Eastern Europe.

This book draws on original regimental records to give by far the most detailed account ever published in English of the organization and personalities of the most renowned of the foreign units that served in the Emperor's armies. Unlike most of his foreign troops, these Polish horsemen were true volunteers, who owed their honoured place in his Imperial Guard to their proven courage and dash on battlefields from Spain to Russia. The text is illustrated with rare portraits and photographs, and with detailed colour plates of the Lancers' magnificent uniforms.

The 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was almost as varied as modern America. Alongside Slavs lived Lithuanians and other Balts, Germans, Tatars, Armenian merchants, Jewish traders, and even a remarkably large populations of Scots. This variety of cultures had a strong influence on the Polish army. Along with the predominantly Polish and Lithuanian 'winged' hussars served numerous foreigners from both within and outside the Commonwealth: Tatars and Cossacks, Wallachians, Transylvanians, Moldavians, Hungarians, Serbians and Albanians; and from the West, French, Italians, Dutch, Walloons, Swedes and Scots. Richard Brzezinski's companion volume to Men-at-Arms 184 completes his fascinating examination of Polish armies from 1569-1696.

In 1917 Poland was recognised as a state by Russia, but the Bolshevik coup threatened this. The Polish leader Marshal Pilsudski hurried to build an army around Polish World War I veterans, and in 1918 war broke out for Poland's independence, involving the the Poles, the Red and White Russian armies, at least two different Ukrainian forces, and Allied intervention troops. The armies that fought these campaigns were extraordinarily varied in their uniforms and insignia, equipment and weapons, and when peace was signed in 1921, Poland had achieved recognised nationhood for the first time since 1794. Featuring specially commissioned full-colour artwork, this engaging study explains and illustrates the armies that fought in the epic struggle for the rebirth of the independent Polish nation, in the bitter aftermath of World War I.

The Polish Campaign of 1939 was the first violent demonstration of the effectiveness of the Blitzkrief tactics of the German Army. This book takes little-known Polish documentary sources to provide a look at the battles from the perspective of the Polish Army.

The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Established in 1966, SIPRI provides data, analysis and recommendations, based on open sources, to policymakers, researchers, media and the interested public. Book jacket.