Wars That Shaped The World

The Crimean War had become a conflict of cruel attrition. Who was prepared to sacrifice the most men? The British and French attacked, the Russians resisted. Thousands were killed, many thousands more maimed and scarred...

As winter swept over the Russians in Sevastopol and their French and British besiegers huddled on the surrounding heights, the Crimean War settled into a deadly pattern – this was modern warfare, trenches, artillery and...

’Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die…’ Few moments in Britain’s long history have been celebrated and mythologised like the Charge of the Light Brigade, six hundred and sixty one men riding gloriously into...

The Crimean War began in 1854 and changed the course of European history. This gruelling conflict, with the British and French alarmed by the rising threat of Russia, marked the changing face of war – the beginning of...

The war is at a tipping point. Retreats, secret meetings, religious reasoning… conventional warfare develops into vicious guerilla warfare tactics and struggle. British reprisals will utterly change the face of South...

Kimberley, the diamond mining capital of South Africa and the heart of the De Beers diamond empire is surrounded by the Boers. Cecil John Rhodes - politician, businessman, imperialist and believer implicitly in white...

The conflict had now begun and was expected to result in a swift decisive victory for the British, the world’s most powerful Empire. The butchery of Spion Kop to the resistance of Mafeking however were stops on a...

A death at police hands is the final ingredient added to a toxic brew of British grievances against their Afrikaner rulers. For the Boers the British are little more than foreigners, and both see the tens of thousands...

After being stunned by China’s Red Army, Douglas MacArthur wanted payback – MacArthur demanded President Truman allow him to use the US military’s deadliest weapon, the nuclear bomb. MacArthur wanted to drop 50. The...

They came out of the gloom of the Manchurian winter, bugles blowing, and swept all before them – the Chinese had arrived and once again the Korean War took a dramatic turn. The threat of China’s Red Army had been...

Douglas MacArthur had no military equal, at least in his own mind. The veteran and hero of the victory over Japan believed he could do the same in Korea and with an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon turned the war...

At 4am on June 25th, 1950, the Land of the Morning Calm was shattered by the sound of artillery firing across the 38th parallel dividing Korea into north and south. Soon the growl of tank engines, Soviet-made T-34s...

‘It looked like what you’d always imagine hell would.’ General Norman Schwarzkopf masterminded the US-led coalition’s crushing victory. Afterwards Stormin Norman flew along the Highway of Death, the road out of Kuwait...

In the early hours of Sunday, 24 February, 1991, the still of the desert night was disturbed by the sound of helicopters, packed with paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, rising into the dark. The land war to...

Welcome to the first 24-hour news war. Saddam called it the ‘mother of all battles’. American jets, he proclaimed, would be blasted from Iraqi skies. The world was glued to rolling news channels as a very different...