During the Second World War five brutal battles were fought in and around Warsaw. Each proved to be dramatic, decisive and bloody, and in this volume of the Images of War series Anthony Tucker-Jones records them all in graphic detail. The first occurred in 1939 when the Polish army was defeated by the German invaders, and five years of occupation followed. The second was sparked by the Jewish Ghetto Uprising in 1943 which was ruthlessly suppressed by 1,200 SS troops and led to the deaths of 13,000 people. In the third the Red Army’s advance was beaten back at the gates of the city in the summer of 1944 and the fourth was fought at the same time when the Nazis crushed the rising of the Polish Home Army and sought to destroy the city in an act of revenge. The failure of the rising consigned the country to decades of communist rule. The photographs and the detailed narrative give the reader a powerful impression of the experience of the people of Warsaw during this tragic period in their history and document the widespread devastation the fighting left in its wake. AUTHOR: Anthony Tucker-Jones is a former defence intelligence officer and a widely published expert on regional conflicts, counter-terrorism and armoured and aerial warfare. He is the author of numerous books including Falaise: The Flawed Victory, Operation Dragoon: The Liberation of Southern France 1944, Armoured Warfare on the Eastern Front, Tiger I & Tiger II, T-34: The Red Army’s Legendary Medium Tank, The Panther Tank: Hitler’s T-34 Killer, The Battle for Budapest 1944-1945, The Panzer IV: Hitler’s Rock, Armoured Warfare and the Waffen-SS 1944-1945, T-54/55: The Soviet Army’s Cold War Main Battle Tank, The Battle for the Caucasus 1942-1943, Panzer I & II: The Birth of Hitler’s Panzerwaffe and The Battle of the Bulge.
160 b/w illustrations