A lavishly illustrated military and social history of the forces in Germany, published to coincide with the winding down of the operation in 2019-20. The book is split into decades and covers important military strategy, political events such as the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Wall, but also the experiences of British soldiers and the increasing integration of British troops and the German population, and their domestic and family lives.

A study of major military innovations in the 1920s and 1930s.

Nine-and-a-half months after D-Day, 30,000 British troops crossed the Rhine as part of the Allied assault on Germany. Two years earlier, work had already started on a guide to assist them in negotiating everyday life in what then was still enemy territory.This extraordinary document was intended to educate soldiers on a range of topics, including German history, the national character, politics, culture, food and drink, currency, and to explain the current situation, including the effect of war on Germany and the German attitudes to the British. It was also intended to condition them to resist the effect of German propaganda by means of a healthy dose of British propaganda.The result is a remarkable booklet, often unintentionally humorous and sometimes crudely stereotypical, it reads by turns like a travel guide (advising on the excellence of German sausages and beer - 'one of the pleasantest in Europe') and a crash course in psychological warfare. It is very much a document of the period, revealing as much about British wartime attitudes towards Germany as it does about British hopes and fears.'If you have to give orders to German civilians, give them in a firm, military manner. The German civilian is used to it and expects it.''The Germans are not good at controlling their feelings. They have a streak of hysteria. You will find that Germans may often fly into a passion if some little thing goes wrong.''Don't be too ready to listen to stories told by attractive women. They may be acting under orders.'

An innovative study revealing how both sides adapted to the changing realities of the final months on the Western Front.

The nervous geopolitical tension between East and West, the Cold War, emerged before the end of the Second World War and lasted until 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The British Army of the Rhine was born in 1945 out of the British Liberation Army at the close of the war as the military government of the British zone of occupied Germany. As the Soviet threat increased, so BAOR became less of an occupational army and assumed the role of defender of Western Europe, and as a major contributor to NATO after 1949.This book traces and examines the changing role of BAOR from 1945 to its demise in the 1993 Options for Change defence cuts. It looks at the part it played in the defence of West Germany, its effectiveness as a Cold War deterrent, the garrisons and capabilities, logistics and infrastructure, its arms and armour, the nuclear option and the lives of the thousands of families living on the front line.

Historian John Buckley offers a radical reappraisal of Great Britain’s fighting forces during World War Two, challenging the common belief that the British Army was no match for the forces of Hitler’s Germany. Following Britain’s military commanders and troops across the battlefields of Europe, from D-Day to VE-Day, from the Normandy beaches to Arnhem and the Rhine, and, ultimately, to the Baltic, Buckley’s provocative history demonstrates that the British Army was more than a match for the vaunted Nazi war machine.div /DIVdivThis fascinating revisionist study of the campaign to liberate Northern Europe in the war’s final years features a large cast of colorful unknowns and grand historical personages alike, including Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and the prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill. By integrating detailed military history with personal accounts, it evokes the vivid reality of men at war while putting long-held misconceptions finally to rest./DIV

"When the First World War ended, British troops crossed the Rhine into Germany and entetred a country torn apart by violence and unrest, where revolution was a constant threat, and civil war seemed more likely every day. There was also the risk of the war resuming if Germany refused to accept Allied terms. The British forces were plunged into the turmoil of a defeated country, facing political unrest and the expectations of a hostile German public, who were facing the victorious Allied forces taking over their country. The British troops were also disillusioned with their continued service as the majority of them has expected to be demobbed as soon as the war was won."--Back cover.

This book examines the partnerships between Britain's famed redcoats and the foreign corps that were a consistent and valuable part of Britain's military endeavors in the eighteenth century. While most histories have portrayed these associations as fraught with discord, a study of eyewitness accounts tells a different story.

Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II. Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "storm troop tactics" by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "Commando-style" trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war--the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.