The April/May 2023 issue of Military History Matters, the British military history magazine, is out now.
The best way to access the magazine is to subscribe. Click here to find out more. To read the digital archive, click here. You can also access the magazine online (as well as exclusive extra content) at our new website, The Past.
IN THIS ISSUE:
The Peloponnesian War
According to Thucydides, it was bound to happen. ‘The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [as ancient Sparta was known], made war inevitable,’ wrote the 5th-century BC Athenian historian in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In our special this time, Paul Rahe offers his own account of the epic conflict, explaining how tensions between the two rival city-states slowly built, and how power would eventually shift in Sparta’s favour, ushering in the period of decline that marked an end to Greece’s fabled ‘Golden Age’.
Imperial Firefighters: Roberts and Kitchener
Graham Goodlad explains how late Victorian Britain’s most prominent commanders forged a war-winning partnership in South Africa
Cover story: Churchill’s American arsenal
Larrie D Ferreiro reveals how collaboration between British and US combat scientists produced the innovations that won WWII
How the Scots saved France: the Battle of Baugé, 1421
One of the bloodiest encounters between Scottish and English armies actually took place in France, as William E Welsh describes
Vietnam: the end, 1973
Fifty years ago this spring, the last American troops left Vietnam. Taylor Downing looks back on the end of the long-running conflict
Also in this issue:
The latest in our series on classic military history books, War Culture, Book Reviews, Museum Review, Back to the Drawing Board, Listings, Competitions, and more.
To subscribe to the magazine, click here. To subscribe to the digital archive, click here. You can also access the magazine online (as well as exclusive extra content) at our new website, The Past. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
From the acting editor
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the detonation of devastating new weapons above the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 brought an end to World War II.
What may be less well remembered, however, is that the ground-breaking technology behind the atomic bomb – along with that of a host of other Allied wartime innovations, from airborne radar to the codebreaking ‘bombe’ – was actually the product of an extraordinary and long-running collaboration, between British scientific inventiveness and American industrial might.
In our cover story, Larrie D Ferreiro explains how this ‘special relationship’ between British and American combat scientists and engineers was rooted in strategy laid out by Winston Churchill in the war’s earliest days, and how it produced many of the advances that enabled the Allies to achieve final victory.
Elsewhere, in our latest two-part special, Paul Rahe examines the history of the Peloponnesian War, the epic contest between Athens and Sparta during the 5th century BC that signalled the end of the ‘Golden Age’ of ancient Greece.
Also in this issue, Graham Goodlad reveals how the partnership forged by the late-Victorian commanders Roberts and Kitchener helped to win the Anglo-Boer War, but brought controversy in its wake; and William E Welsh describes the events that led to the Battle of Baugé, the bloody encounter in 1421 that saw Scottish forces achieve a notable victory in the Hundred Years War.
And, finally, to mark the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, Taylor Downing looks back at the end of a conflict that had stretched across almost 30 years.
We hope you enjoy the issue!
Laurence Earle
To subscribe to the magazine, click here. To subscribe to the digital archive, click here. You can also access the magazine online (as well as exclusive extra content) at our new website, The Past. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.