Curated playlist
Land battles and operations of World War II involving the United Kingdom
- Operation CrusaderOperation Crusader began on the 18th of November 1941, and its target did not even know it was happening. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, commanding the Axis forces in North Africa, was away from the front when the British Eighth Army…
- Operation CompassOperation Compass began on the night of the 9th of December 1940 with a force of about 31,000 soldiers, 120 guns, 275 tanks, and sixty armoured cars advancing through the Egyptian desert toward an Italian army more than twice its size.…
- Operation SonnenblumeOperation Sonnenblume, which translates to Operation Sunflower, began in February 1941 with a question no British commander had seriously asked: what if the Germans moved before anyone expected them to? The Italian 10th Army had just been…
- Siegfried Line campaignThe Siegfried Line campaign, a phase of the Western European war, began in the shadow of one of history's most dramatic reversals. German forces had been routed during the Allied breakout from Normandy, and Allied armies swept across…
- Fall of SingaporeOn the afternoon of the 15th of February 1942, British Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival walked toward the Ford Motor Factory in Singapore bearing a white flag of truce and a Union Jack. He was about to hand over 85,000 soldiers to a…
- Anglo-Soviet invasion of IranThe Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran began before dawn on the 25th of August, 1941, when Royal Air Force aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped bombs on Tehran and Qazvin. The attack had a name: Operation Countenance. It would be…
- Operation TorchOperation Torch began at dawn on the 8th of November 1942, when Allied forces waded ashore on three separate coastlines across French North Africa at the same moment. The question hanging over every planner in London and Washington was not…
- Battle of ImphalThe Battle of Imphal began in March 1944 with a Japanese army crossing the Chindwin River, convinced it could destroy the Allied forces in northeast India and reshape the entire war. The city of Imphal, capital of Manipur, sat at the heart…
- Battle of KohimaThe Battle of Kohima came down, at one point, to a tennis court. In April 1944, British and Japanese soldiers occupied trenches on opposite sides of a small rectangle of flat ground beside a colonial administrator's bungalow in the Naga…
- Operation U-GoOperation U-Go began on the 6th of March, 1944, when Japanese forces crossed into northeast India on one of the most audacious bets of the Second World War. The man behind it, Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, had once called this same…
- Battle of MadagascarThe Battle of Madagascar began on the 5th of May 1942, when British forces landed on a remote island in the Indian Ocean that most people had never given a second thought. Madagascar was Vichy French territory, officially neutral in the…
- Japanese invasion of BurmaThe Japanese invasion of Burma began on the 22nd of December 1941, when the 55th Division crossed the Burma frontier. What followed was one of the most consequential campaigns of the Pacific war, a struggle for a colony the British had…
- Battle of CreteThe Battle of Crete began at 08:00 on the 20th of May 1941, when dozens of Junkers Ju 52 aircraft disgorged German paratroopers into the skies above Maleme Airfield. Within hours, the invaders were being cut down before they could reach…