Bringing up the rations

How the Red Army pushed back German forces and what they discovered in their wake as WWII turned

Three months after German forces captured Fort Douaumont in February 1916 (see issue 1 of Iron Cross) a calamity befell the occupiers, predominantly comprising troops from the Prussian Brandenburg reg

On a beautiful summer’s morning almost 110 years ago, men of the British Army stepped out into no-man’s land at 7.30am. It was 1 July 1916, and the start of what was then called ‘The Big Push’. With h

As the Soviet Red Army stubbornly resisted German advances on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1942, the total ammunition consumption of the Wehrmacht’s ground forces in-theatre dramatically increas

In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bott

On a frosty New Year’s Day in 1944, a young soldier from Newcastle married the love of his life with barely four hours to spare. My father, Corporal George Bell, a conscript with the Royal Electrical