When Wales Went To War 1939 45

Beginning with a vivid account of the blitz in Wales, and ending with more than fifty personal stories from Welsh people who were touched by the war both at home and abroad, John O'Sullivan's book is a portrait of the principality between 1939 and 1945. He has collected the accounts of those in action overseas and on the Home Front during more than forty years as a journalist in South Wales.This book brings together many remarkable wartime accounts of Welsh men and women, including the stories of Arthur Felix Williams from Barry who led a guerrilla army in Burma; the Catholic priest from Newport who helped run the Vatican escape line and the football, rugby and cricket heroes of the Cardiff-based Sportsmen's Battalion who spend three years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.Also featured here are a wealth of historic images conveying the massive impact the Second World War had on both the landscape of Wales and its people. John O'Sullivan's fascinating picture of life in Wales during the war years will be essential reading for all those who lived through the conflict, and a valuable historical resource for those who want to find out what happened When Wales Went to War.

The first of two volumes on the social history of Wales in the period 1870–1948, People, Places and Passions concentrates on the social events and changes which created and forged Wales into the mid-twentieth century. This volume considers a range of social changes little considered elsewhere by studies in Welsh history, accounting for the role played by the people of Wales in times of war and the age of the British Empire, and in technological change and innovation, as they travelled the developing capitalist and consumerist world in search of fame and fortune.

A comprehensive account of the part played by Wales in WWII and the conflict's impact on every area of the country and all involved: civilians, factory workers, children (those evacuated to and those from Wales), national and regional politicians, soldiers, pacifists, writers, filmmakers and artists.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Cardiff and its surroundings, like every other city, town, hamlet and village in the country, sent forth large numbers of young men to fight against the oppression of Hitler and the Nazis. This is a story not only of the war itself, but of the way war affected those far away from the battlefields, and of how a nation stood together in the face of a seemingly unstoppable force. The book pays particular attention to the way Welsh society changed during the war years, far reaching changes that are still felt in the country today. The book details the enormity of the human sacrifice paid by the people of Cardiff and its surrounding areas, but also contains many examples of the way ordinary people stood proud, defiant in their determination to bring about the downfall of the Nazis. Lavishly illustrated with over fifty original and modern-day photographs, this book is essential reading for anyone interest in military and social history.

What is often held to be Britain's 'finest hour' – the Second World War – was not experienced so uniformly across the British Isles. On the margins, the war was endured in profoundly different ways. While D-Day or Dunkirk is embedded in British collective memory, how many Britons can recall that Finns were interned on the Isle of Man, that enemy soldiers developed British infrastructure in Orkney, or that British subjects were sent to concentration camps from Guernsey? Such experiences, tangential to the dominant British war narrative, are commemorated elsewhere in the 'other British Isles'. In this remarkable contribution to British Island Studies, Daniel Travers pursues these histories and their commemoration across numerous local sites of memory: museums, heritage sites and public spaces. He examines the way these island identities assert their own distinctiveness over the British wartime story, and ultimately the way they fit into the ongoing discourse about how the memory of the Second World War has been constructed since 1945.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Cardiff and its surroundings, like every other city, town, hamlet and village in the country, sent forth large numbers of young men to fight against the oppression of Hitler and the Nazis. This is a story not only of the war itself, but of the way war affected those far away from the battlefields, and of how a nation stood together in the face of a seemingly unstoppable force.The book pays particular attention to the way Welsh society changed during the war years, far reaching changes that are still felt in the country today. The book details the enormity of the human sacrifice paid by the people of Cardiff and its surrounding areas, but also contains many examples of the way ordinary people stood proud, defiant in their determination to bring about the downfall of the Nazis. Lavishly illustrated with over fifty original and modern-day photographs, this book is essential reading for anyone interest in military and social history.

The Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, across five sectors of the French coast - Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword - constituted the largest amphibious invasion in history. This study analyses in depth the preparations and implementation of the D-Day landing on Gold Beach by XXX Corps. Historians have tended to dismiss the landing on Gold Beach as straightforward but the evidence points to a different reality. Armour supported the infantry landing and prior bombing was intended to weaken German defences; however, the bulk of the bombing landed too far inland, and many craft foundered in difficult conditions at sea. It was the tenacity of the assault units and the flexibility of the follow up units which enabled the Gold landing to secure the right flank of the British Army in Normandy. Using detailed primary evidence from The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, this volume provides a substantial assessment of the background to the landing on Gold, and analyses the events of D-Day in the wider context of the Normandy Campaign.