The 1930s were a time of growing tension for the smaller states of Eastern Europe. Since the end of the First World War they had enjoyed an independence which most of them had not known for centuries, but this was now threatened by the growing power of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Instead of combining for self defence, they were bitterly divided. The Munich crisis of 1938, which served as the prelude to World War II, showed how little reliance could be placed on the Western democracies, whose power to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe was negligible. In effect this left the smaller...

This book will help you get a vivid picture of the uniforms and general appearance of the men fighting between 1950-53 during the Korean War.

Osprey's study of NATO armies of the post-World War II period. The defeat of Hitler on 8 May 1945 left Western Europe militarily vulnerable and economically exhausted. The Soviet Union, however, had since 1940 annexed 180,000 square miles of Eastern Europe, occupied a further 390,000 square miles, and now seemed poised to advance still further westwards with its six-million strong forces. The increasing Soviet threat brought forth demands for a permanent Western Military alliance, and on 4 April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington DC. This book explores the history,...

The Baltic nations - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - enjoyed a brief independence between the World Wars before being annexed by the USSR in 1940 during World War II. The grim experience of Soviet occupation made it inevitable that after the German invasion of Russia in 1941 they would fight beside the Wehrmacht as allies against the Red Army while always hoping for restored independence. That hope was crushed again in 1944-45; yet 'Forest Brother' guerrillas continued to fight against hopeless odds for years after the second Soviet occupation. This extraordinary story is illustrated here...

Recent history should remind us that it was events in the Balkans which sparked off World War I (1914-1918), with the assassination of the Austrian heir Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and the consequent invasion of Serbia by Austro-Hungarian armies on 2 August 1914. Nevertheless, the subsequent four-year war in that theatre is always overshadowed by the simultaneous campaigns on the Western Front. For the first time this book offers a concise account of these complex campaigns, the organisation, orders of battle, and the uniforms and insignia of the armies involved: Austro-Hungarian,...

In August 1914 the mobilization of Imperial Germany's 800,000-strong army ushered in the first great war of the modern age - a war which still stands as the greatest slaughter of soldiers in history. That German Army is also the best example of a particular period of military thought, when virtually the whole manpower of the European nations was integrated into mass conscript armies, supported by several age categories of reservists and by dedicated industrial and transport systems. In this first of three volumes the author offers an extraordinary mass of information, in text and tables,...

The years 1915 17 of World War I saw the Imperial German Army forced to adapt to the new realities of static trench warfare. Prewar uniforms and equipment had to be modified, for both utility and economy; on battlefields ruled by machine guns and artillery the steel helmet reappeared, as well as masks to protect against poison gas. The fashionable cavalry regiments soon proved irrelevant on the Western Front; many were dismounted to join the infantry, while new types of unit usurped their prestige assault battalions, and the air corps. This second volume in a three-part sequence offers a mass...

This third volume of a mini-series covering the German forces in World War I (1914-1918) examines the troops that fought during the climax of the war on all fronts: the last great battles of attrition in the West (Arras, Messines, 3rd Ypres - Passchendaele/Langemarck - and Cambrai, 1917) and the collapse of Russia in the East. The 'Kaiserschlacht' campaign is covered, as are the German operations in Italy, the Balkans, and in support of Turkey in the Middle East. Uniform changes during this period reflected the introduction of new tactics and weapons and new types of troops, such as tanks and...

Osprey's examination of Slovenia and Croatia's armies' involvement in the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1995). Following the death of the Yugoslavian strongman President Tito in 1980, the several semi-autonomous republics and provinces that he had welded into a nation in 1945 moved inexorably towards separation. After a deceptively clean break for independence by Slovenia in 1991, the world watched a series of other wars rip through this modern European state. In this first of two volumes, experts on the Balkan region give an unprecedentedly clear, concise explanation of the Slovene, Croatian and...

On 1 September 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, the Wehrmacht numbered 3,180,000 men. It eventually expanded to 9,500,000, and on 8-9 May 1945, the date of its unconditional surrender on the Western and Eastern Fronts, it still numbered 7,800,000. The Blitzkrieg period, from 1 September 1939 to 25 June 1940, was 10 months of almost total triumph for the Wehrmacht, as it defeated every country, except Great Britain, that took the field against it. In this first of five volumes examining the German Army of World War II (1939-1945), Nigel Thomas examines the uniforms and insignia of Hitler's...