SORRY - SOLD OUT
No less than two major battlefields on opposite sides of the earth are explored in this bound volume — number 20 — of After the Battle. In issue 77 we featured Operation 'Husky'. Sicily was to be the setting for the first invasion by the Allies, after the defeat of the Axis forces in North Africa. Across on the other side of the world, in September 1944 the US Marines of the 1st Marine Division landed on the beaches of Peleliu island (one of the Palau Islands in the south-west Pacific). The bitter fighting which raged across the island for two and a half months was to effectively destroy the offensive capabilities of the 1st Marine Division — it suffered the highiest casualties of any Marine unit in the Pacific. The battle and the relics it left behind are explored in depth in issue 78. One of the most famous bombing operations by RAF Bomber Command carried out by its most famous squadron — No. 617 — is examined in issue 79. The destruction of the Bielefeld Viaduct by a Grand Slam bomb (a 10-ton earthquake-producing weapon designed by Sir Barnes Wallis) was only overshadowed by his previous invention, the bouncing bomb — the star of the 'Dambusters' raid in 1943. In the same issue we investigate a little publicised raid by the Luftwaffe in December 1943 on Bari on the Adriatic coast in Italy which was to trigger the release of mustard gas from a ship in the harbour. It was the worst shipping disaster suffered by the Allies since Pearl Harbor, overshadowed by the detonation of 100 tons of mustard gas bombs resulting in the deaths of over a thousand people. In the same issue we examine the British manufacture of poison gas in the UK, identifying and exploring the major sites of production, storage and destruction. Our 20th Anniversary edition includes the enthralling and tragic story of the death of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel - an enforced suicide in the tumultuous wake of the July 20 bomb plot against Hitler. Additional stories in this volume cover German commando-style operations in Poland at the outset of World War II, the preservation of a 280mm German railway gun and its transportation across France to its new home at Calais and a fascinating account of the disposal of Hitler's body, together with that of his wife and Joseph Goebbels and his family, as related by the Russian SMERSH officers who carried it out.
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