Operations
AVALANCHE in Italy I
Unmolested and apparently undetected, Kent Hewitt’s armada of 642 ships steamed north in a thousand-square-mile swatch of the Mediterranean, bound for HARPSICHORD, as the Gulf of Salerno was now code-named. If the sea remained calm, the sun was searing. Little ventilation penetrated the packed troop holds, and few were as lucky as those aboard the converted Polish liner Sobieski, which…
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The Seven Days II
On June 24 McClellan ordered the first move of his intended battle for Richmond. Taking the lesson of Casey at Seven Pines, for the advance on Old Tavern he put his most experienced lieutenant, Sam Heintzelman, and his best troops, on the firing line. “It will be chiefly an Artillery…
The Seven Days III
On the northern front, facing Jackson, George Sykes posted his veteran regulars as a steadying second line, but soon they too were fully committed. Sykes’s left, Gouverneur Warren’s volunteer brigade, was subject to repeated assaults. “Oh I wish you could have seen that fight,” Colonel Warren wrote his fiancée-to-be, “when…
The Seven Days IV
Battle of Malvern Hill; Confederate forces are indicated in red, and Union forces are indicated in blue. To the Federals’ great good fortune, Lee’s battle plan fell to pieces just as it had at Mechanicsville four days earlier. Jackson applied only artillery to his task, leaving his powerful infantry force…
Germany under Pressure 1943 Part I
The repulse in December of Hoth’s attempt to break through to Stalingrad enabled the Soviet command to reactivate one of the original elements of ‘Saturn’, the attempt to cut off the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus. The General Staff recommended that the Southern (formerly Stalingrad) Front, while…
Germany under Pressure 1943 Part II
Hitler had already summoned the leaders of Hungary, Romania and Slovakia to meetings to pull them into line, and Bluecher demanded that President Ryti, re-elected on 15 February 1943, make the same journey, but Ryti refused. Germany showed its displeasure by temporarily recalling Bluecher, then, from the beginning of June,…
Germany under Pressure 1943 Part III
Battle of Kursk – Aviation Art by Nicolas Trudgian. All the members of the ‘Red Orchestra’ networks of Soviet agents in Germany and occupied Europe had been executed, imprisoned or ‘turned’ to work for the Abwehr between August 1942 and January 1943, so none of them could have provided any…