The story of the photographic intelligence work undertaken from a country house at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, is one of the great lost stories of the Second World War . At its peak in 1944, almost 2,000 British and American men and women worked at the top-secret Danesfield House, interpreting photographs - the majority stereoscopic so they could be viewed in 3D - to unlock secrets of German military activity and weapons development. Millions of aerial photographs were taken by Allied pilots, flying unarmed modified Spitfires and Mosquitos on missions over Nazi Europe. it was said that an aircraft could land, the photographs be developed and initial interpretation completed within two hours - marking the culmination of years of experiments in aerial intelligence techniques. Their finest hour began in 1943, during the planning stages of the Allied invasion of Europe, when Douglas Kendall, who masterminded the interpretation work at Medmenham, led the hunt for Hitler's secret weapons. Operation Crossbow would grow from a handful of photographic interpreters to the creation of a hand-picked team, and came to involve interpreters from across the Medmenham spectrum, including the team of aircraft specialists led by the redoubtable Constance Babington Smith. In November that year, whilst analysing photographs of Peenemunde in northern Germany, they spotted a small stunted aircraft on a ramp. This intelligence breakthrough linked the Nazi research station with a growing network of sites in northern France, where ramps were being constructed aligned not only with London, but targets throughout southern Britain. Through the combined skill and dedication of the Crossbow team and the heroism of the Allied pilots, throughout late 1943 and 1944 V-weapon launch sites were located and through countermeasures destroyed, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and changing the course of the war. Operation Crossbow is a wonderful story of human endeavour and derring-do, told for the first time.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in the words of those who were there New Year's Day 1945 was not a day for rest or rejoicing on the embattled continent of Europe. Hard winter gripped the land, from the Channel coast to the distant Urals. Only the thought of victory warmed the frozen soldiers huddled in tanks and foxholes as the New Year dawned and they faced the prospect of battling onwards toward Berlin. This is the story of the last five months of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, from New Year's Day to VE Day, May 8, 1945. It is a story told not in the words of historians or scholars, but in the words of the people who lived through it, who fought and endured: soldier and civilian, American infantryman and British paratrooper, Canadian gunner and Australian pilot, New Zealand POW and German civilian. With his unrivaled gift for popular history, Robin Neillands, in his follow-up to the enormously successful D-Day 1944, recreates in engaging narrative fashion the most dramatic and bloody months of the war. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, letters, and inside eyewitness testimony from veterans about such subjects as the esprit de corps in the Allied and Axis armies, the discovery of the concentration camps, the dissension in the Allied command, and the meeting of Russians and Americans at the Elbe, the book recounts the effects of many of the most crucial events of the conflict on soldier and citizen alike. The Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Auschwitz, the Malmedy Massacres, the fall of Warsaw to the Red Army, the destruction of Dresden, the lynching of Allied aircrews, Yalta, Hitler's Scorched Earth directive, the massive parachutes drops by the Allied forces, the death of Roosevelt, the last days of Hitler, and, finally, the surrender of Germany—it's all here, rendered in engrossing and rich detail in this example of military history at its finest. For a comprehensive and thrilling account of the end of World War II, The Conquest of the Reich will stand as the definitive people's history for years to come.

Fighters of World War II is packed with the personal testimonies of the American pilots and their German adversaries, and various ground personnel. Their stories mesh with amazingly lucid photographs to allow an uncommon glimpse into the war from the skies, from combat to USO shows to everyday life at the base.