Curated playlist
Campaigns, operations and battles of World War II involving the United Kingdom
- North African campaignThe North African campaign of World War II began on the 11th of June 1940 and did not end until the 13th of May 1943 - nearly three years of brutal fighting across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Desert, heat, and vast…
- Malayan campaignThe Malayan campaign began at 04:00 on the 8th of December 1941, when seventeen Japanese bombers struck Singapore in the colony's first ever air raid. Within ten weeks, more than 130,000 Allied soldiers would be dead, wounded, or captured.…
- Tunisian campaignThe Tunisian campaign ended on the 13th of May 1943 with a surrender so total it prompted Joseph Goebbels to reach for a comparison with Stalingrad. More than a quarter of a million German and Italian troops marched into captivity,…
- Western Desert campaignThe Western Desert campaign was one of the longest and most grueling struggles of the Second World War, fought across hundreds of miles of Egyptian and Libyan desert from June 1940 to early 1943. A scorching, featureless landscape where…
- Anglo-Iraqi WarThe Anglo-Iraqi War began in earnest at 05:00 on the 2nd of May 1941, when 33 aircraft lifted off from RAF Habbaniya into the pre-dawn dark. Below them, surrounding the base on a plateau to the south, sat roughly 9,000 Iraqi troops with 50…
- Guadalcanal campaignThe Guadalcanal campaign began on the 7th of August 1942 with 11,000 U.S. Marines wading ashore between Koli Point and Lunga Point on a remote jungle island most Americans had never heard of. By 16:00 the following day, they had seized a…
- Syria–Lebanon campaignThe Syria-Lebanon campaign of 1941 was a war fought between Allied and French forces - but the French on the other side of the line were not fighting for Hitler. They were fighting for Vichy France, a government that had made itself a…
- Dutch East Indies campaignThe Dutch East Indies campaign of 1941-1942 is the reason Pearl Harbor happened. Japan needed oil. Its armed forces and economy together could not produce even 10% of their domestic oil needs. The islands of what is now Indonesia were the…
- Battle of the AtlanticThe Battle of the Atlantic was, by Winston Churchill's own admission, the thing that frightened him most during the entire Second World War. "I was even more anxious about this battle," he later wrote, "than I had been about the glorious…
- Balkans campaign (World War II)On the 28th of October 1940, Italian troops crossed into Greece, setting off a chain of events that would consume the entire Balkan peninsula within seven months. That single act of aggression did not unfold as Benito Mussolini planned.…
- East African campaign (World War II)On the 9th of May 1936, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaimed the formation of Italian East Africa from Ethiopia after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. This new colony combined the colonies of Italian Eritrea and Italian…
- Greco-Italian WarThe Greco-Italian War began on the 28th of October 1940, when Italy's ambassador in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, delivered an ultimatum to the Greek prime minister in the small hours of the morning. Mussolini demanded free passage for his…