KEN FORD

The last great heave of war, according to Churchill, took place with the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. No invading army had crossed this great river since Napoleons in 1805 and the task fell to Field Marshal Montgomerys 21st Army Group. Opposing them

England has been a land of rich and poor from time immemorial, with a pyramid of privilege that reaches down from the monarch to the lowest individual, each with their own station in life. The great and good always manage to leave their mark, but the poor live and die in anonymity. Throughout Englands recorded history there have been many whose labouring existence marks them out as the lowest of the low, insignificant paupers whose were forced to work without due reward. Amongst these inconsequential beings were those who worked on the land - not the landowners or farmers for they have always been well provided, no, the least regarded man in the countryside was the agricultural labourer.One of those poor men of history was Richard Ford. He lived in the time of Victoria and spent almost all his life in the quiet English village of Warnford along the Meon Valley in southern Hampshire. Like those millions before him in the nineteenth century, and indeed after him, he lived and died in obscurity. No memorial marks his resting place, save a slight depression in a country churchyard. Richard Ford was, however, a poor man of some significance, for he left a tangible legacy of his existence. But by a fortuitous twist of fate, there exists a record of an interview with him taken by government inspectors who were investigating the life of the poor in 1837. My research has found that Richard Ford did not remain completely anonymous to history. He left some small smudge of his existence in an obscure administration document filed in the records of the Houses of Parliament. But to me Richard Ford was a special man, for he was my great-great grandfather. Without his four-score and seven years of poverty in this world, I would not be here

Lisbon 1941. Britain and Germany are at war inside a neutral country. The conflict between them has been reduced to a cat and mouse game of espionage, dirty tricks and informants, as each side strives to gain the upper hand without upsetting their Portuguese hosts. Colonel Hulse, chief of Britains MI6 station in the city believes he has a German mole in his organisation. The German Abwehr chief, Stenzel, has someone close to him who is ready to defect. An agent of the Portuguese secret service, the PVDE, has something of value he wishes to sell. They were all playing a very dangerous game.

Hitler had very definite views on the role of women in Nazi Germany; they were all destined to be wives and mothers. It was their duty to marry and produce lots of children for the future of the Third Reich. Set apart from these ordinary women were a select group of others who were particularly close to him. They lived within his inner circle. They spent their lives in a cocoon, closeted amongst the elite of the nation far removed from the bestiality that Hitler wrought upon many of his own people. To them Hitler was a kindly figure: gentle, considerate, and often very generous. He treated these women with great tenderness appearing to them as the perfect gentleman. They loved and respected him to an extent that it is now hard to believe possible. Many of these women, such as Eva Braun, Geli Raubal and Unity Mitford are now quite well known, but there were many, many more women - mistresses, confidantes and companions - that also managed to get close to Hitler.

At 0016hrs on 6 June 1944 a Horsa glider ground to a halt a mere 60 yards from the Orne Canal bridge at Bénouville in Normandy. A small group of British paratroopers burst from it and stormed the bridge within minutes. The Allied liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe had begun. Within a few hours landing craft would swarm towards Ouistreham as British 3rd Division stormed ashore at Sword Beach. The battle would then begin to break through to relieve the paratroopers. In the third of the D-Day volumes Ken Ford details the assault by British 6th Airborne Division and the British landings on Sword Beach that secured the vital left flank of the invasion.

The battle for Cassino was probably the most bitter struggle of the entire Italian campaign. The dominating peak of Montecassino crowned by its magnificent but doomed medieval monastery was the key to the entire Gustav Line, a formidable system of defences that stretched right across the Italian peninsula. This position completely dominated the Liri valley and Route 6, the strategically vital road to Rome. Between January and May 1944 the Allies struggled amid inhospitable terrain and dreadful weather to dislodge the German paratroops that tenaciously defended the vital mountaintop. Ken Ford's book details the dramatic events of the battle to break the Gustav Line.

The battle around Falaise in Normandy during August 1944 saw the destruction of the German Seventh army. This book details the chain of events which led to the German retreat and the ensuing liberation of France. The British and American breakout battles had released motorised units to wage a more mobile war against the German static defensive tactics. At Falaise, the armoured units of US Third Army encircled the German Seventh Army, squeezed them into an ever-smaller cauldron of chaos and crushed them against the advancing British Second Army. The results were devastating: those troops able to escape the disaster fled, those who remained were killed or captured and vast quantities of armour and equipment were lost.

Known as the last great 'stand-up fight' of the Second World War the battle for the Rhineland was brutal in the extreme. Eisenhower's 'broad front' policy called for the whole of the Rhineland to be taken before pushing his troops across the Rhine and into Germany itself. The Germans opened the Roer dams in a vain bid to temper this massive Allied offensive and this called for a drastic change in tactics. The ensuing battle was characterised by amphibious assaults on the fortified villages of the flooded Rhine lowlands, frontal assaults on the much vaunted Siegfried Line and the grim fighting for the Reichswald Forest. It was to be 'the last great killing ground in the west'. Campaigns 5, 24, 74 and 75 are also available in a single volume special edition as 'Into the Reich'.

One of the key objectives of British forces on D-Day was the capture of the strategically vital city of Caen. General Montgomery saw Caen as the key to Normandy and the springboard for the Allied breakout, but so did the Germans and the city did not fall. It took three major offensives and more than 30 bloody days of struggle to finally take Caen. In the process the city was controversially devastated and its civilian population decimated. The Allies paid a high price for Caen but the horrific German casualties bled their forces in Normandy white and helped open the way for the American breakout in Operation Cobra.

On the night of 9/10 July 1943, an Allied armada of 2,590 vessels launched one of the largest combined operations of the Second World War - the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky. Over the next thirty-eight days, half a million British, Canadian, American and French soldiers, sailors, and airmen grappled with their German and Italian counterparts for control of this rocky outcrop of Hitlers Fortress Europe. The Allied assault on Sicily featured airborne and amphibious landings; mountain warfare; international rivalry; poorly performing troops; tenacious German resistance; and, improvements in tactical air support and the ultimate Allied victory on the island. Almost the whole of the progress of the Second World War is illustrated by this one campaign. It was the only action where the whole Allied war effort was brought to bear on a single objective, with one army commanded by Patton and one army commanded by Montgomery. Both men were insufferable egoists and insubordinate commanders; they always chose to do their own thing, regardless of others sensibilities and always with one eye on how history would see them.The seeds of rivalry between these two key Allied commanders that were sown in the Sicily campaign eventually grew to fruition in the battles for Normandy and the Ardennes.

La batalla de El Alamein marcó un punto de inflexión en la suerte de Gran Bretaña en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Entre julio y novembre de 1942 tuvieron lugar tres batallas, todas ellas destinadas a d

Desde los tiempos de Napoleón, en 1805, ningún ejército invasor había logrado atravesar el Rin. La últimagran maniobra de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, según Winston Churchill, fue el cruce de este gran rio por los Aliados enmarzo de 1945. La tarea recayo sobre los hombros del 21 Grupo de Ejercitos del mariscal de campo Montgomery. Seenfrentaban a el las fuerzas de un regimen nacionalsocialista en decadencia, formado por batallones de niños y ancianos,reforzado por diversas formaciones de tropas de elite, incluyendo a los paracaidistas y a los Granaderos Panzer.Mediante precisas descripciones del ataque de los Aliados, solo menor en envergadura a la invasion de Normandia, estaobra narra la historia de la ultima gran batalla de la guerra que acerco a los Aliados a la victoria final sobre elnacionalsocialismo del III Reich de Hitler.