Thirteen years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Battle of Actium put an end to a long period of internal strife in the Roman Republic. It involved some of the most famous leaders in history: Octavius, who went on to become the first Roman emperor, Mark Antony, a firm supporter of Julius Caesar, and his lover Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. The...
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The Battle of Austerlitz, also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was a crucial episode of the Napoleonic Wars and is widely seen as one of Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest successes. On 2 December 1805, Napoleon's Grande Armée showed its tactical and technological superiority over its enemies, inflicting a crushing defeat on the forces of the Russian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. However, the battle...
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The Battle of Kursk was one of the major clashes between German and Soviet troops during the Second World War and one of the most important tank battles in history. Having launched Operation Barbarossa to invade the USSR in 1941, the Nazis sought to regain the initiative on the Eastern Front with this new offensive in the summer of 1943. However, the Red Army was...
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The Battle of Marathon in 490 BC brought the first Greco-Persian War to a close and put a stop to the Persian king Darius I's attempt to extend his hegemony to the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece. Thanks to the courage and fighting skills of the Greek hoplites, who risked their lives to defend their land and maintain their independence, the Persian...
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The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the major battles of the Second World War, and saw the German Wehrmacht and Stalin's Red Army fight savagely, often in close quarters, for control of the city. The combat also involved civilians and was unprecedented in its scale; the Battle of Stalingrad is now widely regarded as one of the largest and bloodiest battles in history. It marked...
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The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War, and mobilized extraordinary numbers of men and material on both the Allied and Axis sides. The battle was of major strategic significance: control of the seas would have allowed the Germans to bring Britain to its knees by preventing it from receiving supplies from the USA and its...
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The Battle of the Bulge began in late 1944 with the last major German offensive of the Second World War. Following the Normandy landings earlier that year, the German army was in a weakened state, so this offensive was an attempt to cripple the Allied armies by dividing them and cutting off their supplies. Although the Allies were initially caught by...
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The Battle of Verdun was one of the most significant engagements of the First World War, and is widely recognized as one of the most brutal and costly battles in history. Like many of the battles in the four-year war of attrition, it was fought largely through trench warfare, with devastating human and material losses. Indeed, many historians now agree that...
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The decisive victory of the forces of the Seventh Coalition at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 put a stop to Napoleon Bonaparte's military ambitions, marked the end of the Hundred Days and saw the French emperor exiled to the island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. The battle had major consequences across Europe: it marked a significant decline of French...
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World War I, which lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918, was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, and led to massive upheaval in international politics: new states were established and several empires fell. This book explores the beginnings of the war, including the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the influence of fear on the sudden outbreak of fighting. In just...
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In the winter of 1915, Europe was in a stalemate. There was a general sense of surprise that World War I was still raging - everyone had expected the fighting to be over quickly. However, the war had expanded and taken on a scale beyond all expectations, having already caused around a million casualties. As time went on, there was...
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