Little known battles in the Alps and the Arctic feature in this, the 25th volume in the After the Battle series. In 1944-45, German and French forces struggled in the snows of the French Alps to capture and recapture mountain-top forts in some of the highest battles fought in the Second World War. In 1997, Jean Paul Pallud flew by helicopter to photograph the crumbling blockhouses and fortresses. The countryside around Murmansk in northern Russia saw a violent Soviet offensive in October 1944 against German forces in one of the largest yet least known battles of the war. Dubbed the Petsamo-Kirkenes offensive, 150,000 men fought a 24-day campaign in the tenth strategic Soviet offensive that year in the only large-scale combined-arms operation conducted on Arctic terrain. To contrast these two European campaigns, Professor Ronnie Day visits the New Georgia group of the Solomons in the Pacific where American forces landed to capture the Japanese-held islands in 1943. Sunken ships and aircraft wrecks still lie off the shores while abandoned armaments lie rusting in the jungle. Then David List journeys into the Western Sahara desert to explore Siwa oasis, a strategic watering hole close to the Egyptian-Libyan frontier which saw service in both World Wars by both sides. Several other features update stories covered in earlier issues. The circumstances surrounding the death of Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory were first detailed by Denis Bateman in 1983 (issue 39 in Volume 10); now the story is told of the project to memorialise the crash site in 1996. In issue 3 (Volume 1) we recounted the attack with 'bouncing' bombs by the Dam Busters on the Ruhr Dams and now we describe the recovery of several of the practice bombs from the range used to test the devices back in 1943. Then in issue 6 (Volume 2) we visited the sites on the Continent constructed by the Germans to launch their V-weapons against Britain. One huge underground construction at Wizernes was never finished . . . that is until the French authorities spent 69 million francs on the workings to open them to the public in May 1997. Other features cover the capture of the renowned German divisional commander, Kurt Meyer; the discovery of a Spitfire complete with its RAF pilot in Belgium and a Mustang with its US pilot off Southend; the history of HMS Collingwood, the Royal Navy's shore-based training establishment in Hampshire; the massive accidental explosion at IJzendijke in Holland which killed over 40 men in October 1944; and the efforts of the German War Graves Association to cope with the tens of thousands of casualties in Eastern Europe. Finally, a special issue (No. 100) covers the stories behind the stories over the last 100 issues of After the Battle.
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