After the Allied successes of 8 August 1918 there was a series of hammer blows against the retreating Germans. However, by the end of that month the assaulting forces were weakened themselves and decidedly footsore. Ahead lay the brooding hill of Mont St Quentin which commanded views of Peronne town and the Somme river valley. General John Monash, pushing […]
We welcome back Dr Spencer Jones who will talk to us about one of the early battles of the First World War. The British Expeditionary Force faced disaster in August 1914. Driven from Belgium after the Battle of Mons, it found itself isolated from its French allies and closely pursued by numerically superior German forces. […]
In the last of three lectures, Patrick Mercer will demonstrate how Irish troops were at the centre of every attempt to defeat the French and their allies in the last campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars. He will take us through more Irish triumphs than there’s room to write about. He has one last twist in this […]
March 1945. A handful of young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island’s indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most have barely encountered Asian or indigenous people before, speak next to no Borneo languages, and know little […]