Napoleon's 1807 campaign against the Russians came close to being his first defeat. At Eylau the Emperor was outnumbered by the army of the Russian commander Bennigsen, yet he accepted battle. His reputation was saved by the flamboyant Murat, who led one of the greatest cavalry charges in history. Christopher Summerville's gripping account of this bitterly fought clash and of Napoleon's subsequent triumph at Friedland is the first extensive study of the campaign to be published for a century. The story is told in the concise, clear Campaign Chronicles format which records the action in vivid detail, day by day, hour by hour. Included are full orders of battle showing the chain of command and the fighting capabilities of the opposing armies.

Napoleon's 1807 campaign against the Russians came close to being his first defeat. At Eylau the Emperor was outnumbered by the army of the Russian commander Bennigsen, yet he accepted battle. His reputation was saved by the flamboyant Murat, who led one of the greatest cavalry charges in history. Christopher Summerville's gripping account of this bitterly fought clash and of Napoleon's subsequent triumph at Friedland is the first extensive study of the campaign to be published for a century. The story is told in the concise, clear Campaign Chronicles format which records the action in vivid detail, day by day, hour by hour. Included are full orders of battle showing the chain of command and the fighting capabilities of the opposing armies.

The Polish partisan army, the largest in Europe, fought with extraordinary tenacity against the Wehrmacht during the Warsaw Uprising. This was the most famous manifestation of organized, large-scale, armed resistance to Hitler's rule. Yet the wider story of the Polish underground movement, which fought the Nazi and Soviet occupying powers, has rarely been told. As David Williamson demonstrates in this concise and authoritative new study, a reassessment of the actions, the impact and the legacy of Polish resistance is long overdue. He tells a fascinating, often tragic story. The resistance movement sprang up rapidly after the shock of defeat of 1939, and the network grew and adapted as the war progressed. It took many forms – propaganda, spying, assassination, disruption, sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Many different groups – some with conflicting aims and loyalties - were involved. There were isolated partisan bands, the Jewish resistance which fought defiantly against deportation to the death camps, and the Home Army which confronted the Germans in Warsaw with such disastrous consequences in 1944. The scale and intensity of the resistance movement, which was fighting against overwhelming odds, were quite remarkable. David Williamson's graphic account goes beyond the formal end of the Second World War, for Poland remained in a state of flux as a clandestine civil war was waged between the Communists and former members of the Home Army until the Communist regime took power in 1947. His study offers an absorbing insight into the plight of Poland during the war and into its immediate post-war history.

An in-depth history of the attack that began World War II, and one country’s courageous fight against two unstoppable forces. Hitler’s military offensive against Poland on September 1, 1939 was the brutal act that triggered the start of World War II, wreaking six years of death and bloodshed around the world. But the campaign is often overshadowed by the momentous struggle that followed across the rest of Europe. In this thought-provoking study, each stage of the battle is reconstructed in graphic detail. The author examines the precarious situation Poland was in, caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He also reconsiders the pre-war policies of the other European powers—particularly France and Britain—and assesses the evolving scenario in a vivid, fast-moving narrative. Included throughout are first-hand accounts of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the war as well as the Polish capitulation and its tragic aftermath.

In Napoleon and the Operational Art of War, the leading scholars of Napoleonic military history provide the most authoritative analysis of Napoleon’s battlefield success and ultimate failure in a work that features the very best of campaign military history.

After his crushing defeat of Prussia in 1806, Napoleon marched into Poland to forestall any Russian attempts to come to the aid of their ally. There then followed the bloody battle in a blizzard at Eylau on 8 February 1807, which decimated both armies. Operations resumed in the spring and on 14 June Napoleon wrecked the Russian field army at Friedland. Napoleon and Emperor Alexander met at Tiltsit, and French mastery of north-west Europe was confirmed.??This is the first book to bring together dozens of Russian letters, memoirs and diaries, with authors ranging from the commander-in-chief (Benningsen) to NCOs. We see the brutal conditions of the winter campaign at first hand, and gain fresh insight into the infamous Treaty of Tiltsit and the diplomatic manoeuvring that followed it.

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War—winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times. Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century. An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.