S. Zaloga

First seen during the American Civil War and later appearing in the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer Wars, the military use of the armoured train only came to the fore during World War I, reigning sup...

In 1942, with Germany's gradual loss of the strategic initiative to the Allies, Hitler was forced to construct an impenetrable wall of fortifications along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast. Howeve...

Germany's Atlantic Wall was the most ambitious military fortification program of World War II. Following its conquest of Western Europe, Germany had to defend some 5,000km of Atlantic coastline from t...

Panzer warfare is synonymous with the Wehrmacht of World War II. This book examines the story of the Panzer's more mysterious ancestors, the little-known panzers of the Great War. Germany was very slo...

Designed to change the course of the war, the V weapons required ambitious plans to defend their expensive and complicated launch sites. Steven J Zaloga describes the configuration and planned deploym...

Named after Klimenti Voroshilov, the People?s Commissar for Defence, the KVs proved a nasty surprise for German tank crews during the early days of Operation Barbarossa. Although slow, they were extre...

The North African campaign of November 1942-May 1943 was a baptism of fire for the US Army. After relatively straightforward landings, the US II Corps advanced into Tunisia to support operations by th...

In July 1944, Operation Cobra broke the stalemate in Normandy and sent the Allies racing across France. The Allied commanders ignored Paris in their planning for this campaign, considering that the ri...

In the wake of the defeat in Normandy in the summer of 1944, Hitler planned to stymie the Allied advance by cutting off Patton's Third Army in the Lorraine with a great Panzer offensive. But Patton's ...

From the moment that the M4 Sherman had been matched against German Panther and Tiger tanks, the American tank crews had known that their vehicles were outclassed by the opposition. What was needed wa...

One of the weaknesses of airmobile forces has always been their vulnerability to enemy armor. Since the 1940s, there have been numerous schemes to field light tanks that could be deployed by parachute...

The Sherman was the most widely used Allied tank of World War II and was built in larger numbers than all German tanks combined. There was also a huge number of variants, powered by different engines,...

One of the most decisive months of World War II was the 30 days between 25 July and 25 August 1944. After the success of the D-Day landings, the Allied forces found themselves bogged down in a bloody ...

In this book Steven J Zaloga offers a fascinating comparison of the combat performance of the two most important tanks involved in the crucial fighting of 1944, the Sherman and the Panther. Examining ...

The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 began World War II in Europe. The outcome of the campaign was a foregone conclusion. It pitted the newly modernized army of Europe's great industrial ...

Poland was the first of the Allied nations to succumb to German aggression in the Second World War, but by the most tortuous of routes her army managed to remain in the field through all five years of...

The German invasion in 1941 led to a series of staggering defeats for the Russians. In the first five months of fighting, the Soviets lost about four million men, amounting to 80 per cent of the total...

In the aftermath of the battle of the Ardennes in February 1945, the Allies began steps for the final assault into Germany. The Rhine represented the last major geographical barrier to the Allied adva...

A history of the mainstay of Allied armoured units in World War II, the Sherman tank, whose simplicity, reliability and manoeuverability made it the most widely used tank of the war.

The Soviet T-80 Standard Tank was the last tank fielded before the Soviet collapse, and the most controversial. Like the US M1 Abrams tank, the T-80 used a turbine power plant rather than a convention...

Determined to learn from the lessons of World War I where it was unprepared and heavily reliant on British and French guns, the US Army developed a new generation of field artillery weapons and tactic...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the most dynamic field of aerospace technology, and potentially the harbingers of new aviation technology and tactics. They have only emerged from the shadows in re...

The Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) saw the first operational deployment of US armoured divisions in World War II, and the experience proved chastening for the 1st Armored Division when it s...