The Helion & Co. Military Book Blog

Merchants played a powerful role in the Baltic region, as well as on the Continent. Most powerful was the Hanseatic League, which was a multinational business concern divided into three subsidiaries, each known as a Drittel (‘Third’). These were the Wendish-Saxon Drittel, under Lübeck; the Go...

Italy’s brief campaign against France in June 1940 has long been treated as an historical footnote: a symbolic gesture by Mussolini, overshadowed by Germany’s Blitzkrieg and dismissed as an opportunistic sideshow. In The Italian Army in the Battle of the Alps 1940, Massimiliano Afiero challenges that caricature head-on, offering the first modern, full-scale operation...

There is no shortage of books on the British Army in the Second World War. Many recount campaigns; others revisit familiar debates about generalship, doctrine, and performance. What Tanks in Unexpected Places does—quietly but decisively—is shift the lens. Rather than asking what happened, Jonny Briggs asks a more demanding question: why did some formations consis...

There is a particular challenge in writing the history of intelligence. By its very nature, it resists narrative. It obscures, fragments, and erases itself. Yet, every so often, a figure emerges who forces us to reconsider what we think we know—not through grand proclamations, but through quiet, sustained influence. Codename: Grand Duchess is one such work.

Now that The Nine Years War, 1593-1603: The turning point at Kinsale 1598-1603 is out, I can’t stop myself addressing one of the bugbears that has plagued the history of their conflict: guerrilla war.  I have been researching this particular conflict for well over twenty years (on and off, I have a life, for God’s sake). As I...