Kumla Bibliotek

Ted Stocker lived a charmed life. Trained at RAF Halton as one of Trenchard’s ‘Brats’, a posting to Boscombe Down saw him fly in both the prototype Stirling and Halifax just as wa ...

'If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did. I don't believe it is realized how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgment and his skill, did to save not ...

Volume Two of this fascinating study of an airfield and its pilots starts just after the Battle of Britain when Hornchurch was at the forefront in taking the fight to the enemy, be ...

Established in 1917 to train Royal Flying Corps aircrew, during WWI Duxford was also the base for two United States Aero Squadrons, 137 and 159, and by the end was a mobilization a ...

Ten years ago Manuel Queiroz declared his intention to fly solo around the world. Having just beaten cancer, he was buoyed by the recent brush with mortality and ready to take on a ...

‘The Germans had watched our arrival on radar and that afternoon all Hell broke loose over the Maltese airfields. In spite of strenuous efforts by the fighters and antiaircraft gun ...

Originally built as an airliner that could carry passengers across the Atlantic for Deutsche Lufthansa, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor developed into the Luftwaffe’s principal long-r ...

The Sturm Abteilung der NSDAP (SA, assault battalion of the Nazi party) – created in August 1920 – were squads of strong arms intended to protect the Nazis’ meetings, to provoke di ...

On the night of 5/6 June 1944, D-Day, a Lockheed Hudson dropped a small group of parachutists into the mountainous Morvan area of central France. Their mission was to operate as an ...

Considered to be the best known German bomber of the Second Wold War, the Heinkel He 111 served in every military front in the European theater, having first being deployed in the ...

The most iconic German aircraft of the Second World War, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was the Luftwaffe’s principal fighter from 1939 until 1942 when the superior Focke-Wulf Fw 190 ca ...

Designed as a fast bomber that could outrun the fighters of the era, the twin-engine Junkers Ju 88 became one of the most versatile aircraft of the Second World War. Such was the s ...

Colditz Castle was one of the most famous Prisoner of War camps of the Second World War. It was there that the Germans interred their most troublesome or important prisoners. Hundr ...

Naval VCs have been won in places as far apart in time and distance as the Baltic in 1854 and Japan in 1945, in the trenches from the Crimea to the Western Front, in harbours from ...

In August 1909, a kindly, balding, figure named Mansfield Smith-Cumming was summoned to London by Admiral Alexander Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. He was to assume the in ...

The Luftwaffe over Germany tells the story of one of the longest and most intense air battles in history. The daylight air struggles over Germany during World War II involved thous ...

From jet planes and high altitude aircraft to radar-equipped fighters configured to deliver chemical weapons, numerous Luftwaffe planes were designed and reached prototype stage bu ...

This selection of accounts – written the men who did the flying and the fighting – lifts the lid on how the Luftwaffe operated and carried out its missions. Collected by the US Arm ...

The Special Operations Executive developed a vast network of agents across Occupied Europe which played a vital role in developing and sustaining Resistance movements that persiste ...

Following the declaration of war by the United States, more than 200 American men, unwilling to wait until US squadrons could be raised, volunteered to join the Royal Flying Corps ...

We visualize dashing and daring young men as the epitome of the pilots of the Second World War, yet amongst that elite corps was one person who flew no less than 400 Spitfires and ...

"Hitler's Ardennes Offensive - known to the Germans as Wacht am Rhein and to the Allies as the Battle of the Bulge - was intended to turn the course of the war in Germany’s favor. ...

Very little has been written about the U-boat war in the Indian Ocean, where almost forty German submarines were assigned to operate from the Malaysian port of Georgetown alongside ...

War is a deadly game of chance where a single detail or decision can have far-reaching consequences. What if Hitlers generals had captured the cream of the British Expeditionary Fo ...

Renowned German aviation specialist Manfred Griehl has collected a unique and valuable selection of photographs of Luftwaffe projects that never made it into battle. They remained ...