’The Hill narrates the battle for Hill 107 in May 1941, which will decide the outcome for the entire campaign to capture the strategic island of Crete by the Germans from the air alone. The story is told through the eyes of the primary decision makers and takers in defence and attack. The New Zealanders are on the summit, the Germans scaling the heights.
An original approach that reads like a play, based on meticulous research of diaries, letters and post combat accounts.’
The ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ is lauded in British history and folklore as a victory of human endeavor, celebrated each year with a profusion of TV documentary veteran accounts and memorial services. German soldiers constantly referred to the wunder or miracle of reaching Dunkirk in wartime letters back home. There the resemblance ends. For the British it was a miracle of survival and deliverance, for the Germans it was one of achievement. They had reached the sea in May 1940 in less weeks than it took years for their fathers not to succeed in 1914-18.
The name Borodino Field resonates with patriotism and Mother Russia for Russians. The battle in September 1812 is known to most as one of the epic climaxes in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Napoleon’s pyrrhic victory there took the French Grande Armée to the gates of Moscow and on to catastrophe during the subsequent winter. Another lesser known, but equally bitter battle was fought at Borodino Field in October 1941.
This tour covers the Market-Garden Operation in September 1944, which was an attempt to lay an airborne carpet of parachute and glider landings across the last major remaining waterways barring access to the Germany’s industrialized Ruhr.
This tour deals with the human story of D-Day on 6 June 1944 and the Paris insurrection and liberation the following August. It explores what it was like to parachute in the night skies over Normandy, land by glider behind enemy lines, climb the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and wade ashore on the British and American beaches under fire.
Balaclava was the cavalry battle, and this book deals with the three cavalry actions that took place that day. Russian, Turkish and British individuals are followed throughout the 24-hour period, from the siege lines around Sevastopol, Russians suddenly emerging from the dawn mist of the Crimea, to eight minutes of ‘cut and slash’ by the Heavy Brigade and the Light Brigade running a two-way horrific gauntlet of fire through the Valley of Death. New material has been extracted from letters, diaries and after action accounts from all sides.
This tour forms part of The Cultural Experience The Invasions of Belarus tour, covering Napoleons invasion in 1812 and Hitler in 1941.
This tour is about the battles that occurred along the famous Raate road from the Russian border to Suomussalmi, and follows another Soviet invasion route to Kuhmo further south.
This is an epic tour, covering the three turning points of the Second World War: Hitler’s failed winter offensive against Moscow in 1941, the defeat and loss of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, now Volgograd, in 1942-3 and the climactic clash of armor around the Kursk salient in 1943.
This book covers the near abortive American landings at Omaha Beach on D-Day 6th June 1944, utilizing the ’24 Hours’ format of the experience through sight, sound and smell of the American and German adversaries with helpless French civilians caught up in between. This is perhaps the first time all three perspectives have been juxtaposed together. Tracking individuals from midnight to midnight exposes new ground and disentangles many previously held myths about what happened on that fateful day.