Military

The Bamburgh sword, a unique pattern-welded weapon found in Northumbria, has helped shed new light on a critical period of Anglo-Saxon. 

The American soldiers who fought their way through the islands of the Pacific during the Second World War encountered fierce Japanese resistance but few local people. That all changed with the invasion of the Mariana Islands, says Matthew Hughes.

Richard Overy looks behind the myth of a vulnerable island defended by a small band of fighter pilots to give due credit to the courage of the redoubtable civilian population.

Richard Cavendish describes the attack, on August 24th 410, that signalled the beginning of the end of the Western Roman empire 

The Teutonic Knights were defeated at the Battle of Grunwald, on July 15th, 1410.

Louise de Bettignies assisted the Allies in the Great War by establishing a vital information network in northern France. Patricia Stoughton recounts her extraordinary bravery.

Before the First World War, Irish Unionists and Nationalists were poised to fight each other over the imposition of Home Rule by the British. Then, remarkably, they fought and died side by side, writes Richard S. Grayson.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

The Wars of the Roses were no clear-cut dynastic conflict, but rather a series of struggles between the magnates of the age and the retinues they maintained by Alan Rogers. Anthony Pollard offered his own separate historiographical analysis in 2010.

Anthony Pollard visits the History Today archive to examine Alan Rogers’ claim that a lack of principle among rival lords resulted in the great conflagration of 15th-century England.