Second World War

‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That the history of war is the same as military history.’

National security during the Second World War was threatened by the ‘enemy within’ – working-class women, suspected of betraying their country by taking in deserters and escapees.

November 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first passenger trains between London and Paris. What does the history of the Channel Tunnel tell us about Britain’s relationship with its neighbours?

Where fraught national histories are concerned, do policies of remembrance and education work, or is it better to wipe the slate clean?

In The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr discovers that it wasn’t just the men in the dock who had scandalous social lives and hidden agendas.

The French Resistance sought liberation above all else. But what should the postwar nation look like? The question was as old as the Fall of France itself.

What happened to the French airmen in the Second World War who bombed France to help liberate it?

Shipwrecks are an easily overlooked material legacy of the Second World War, but they are rising to the surface as diplomatic issues.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans asks what manner of men made themselves the Führer’s ‘paladins’.

The devastation and chaos inflicted on London by wartime bombing raids provided an opportunity for murderers to conceal their crimes.