Winston Ramsey – författare

When German forces occupied the coastline of the English Channel in 1940, one of the measures undertaken to give early warning of attacks from the sea or air was to set up a line of radar stations. Although this invisible screen was a passive defence, it was a serious 'barrier' that had to be neutralised for the Allied invasion to be launched in 1944.Planners at RAF Medmenham had established there the Central Interpretation Unit (CIU) to examine the results of aerialphotography over the Continent and the unit prepared plans of every enemy radar site ready for briefing pilots undertaking preinvasion attacks. Those once-secret plans are now reproduced in this book, alongside the wartime photography, with comparison views of the sites today. Where farmland has now reclaimed the sites little remains to beseen, but on others there are still significant traces of a oncepowerful weapon in the German armoury.To set the scene, Professor R. V. Jones, the Assistant Director of Intelligence at the Air Ministry, recounts the events leading up to the proposal to mount a raid on the radar site at Bruneval. The site had what became known as a 'Wurzburg' and the idea was to dismantle and remove the critical parts of the unit to bring then back to Britain and, hopefully, at the same time capture the operators for interrogation. The operation in February 1942 achieved all its aims, and over the following two years, the CIU built up a Target List with folders including detailed descriptions of all 66 sites in Belgium and France that would have a bearing on the invasion area in Normandy. Undoubtedly the information - now reproduced in this book - was of inestimable value in assuring the success of Operation 'Overlord' in June 1944.

During the 1960s swarms of motorcyclists roamed along London's North Circular Road in nightly burn ups. Their pit stop was the Ace Cafe at Stonebridge Park. This is their story as told by the boys who raced and the policemen who chased, woven against a background of contemporary reports.

In his 1945 report to the Combined Chiefs-of-Staff on the success of Operation `Overlord', the Supreme Commander General Eisenhower wrote that `on the morning of June 9 I was able to announce that for the first time since 1940, Allied air forces were operating from France, and that within three weeks of D-Day, 31 Allied squadrons were operating from the beach-head bases'.In their forecasts for the first three months following D-Day, the planners plotted the number of the advanced landing grounds that would be required in Normandy to support the Allied air forces up to September 1944. Using maps andaerial photographs, individual sites were surveyed and plans drawn up so that when each location was captured, eitherUS Aviation Engineers, the Royal Engineers or RAF Airfield Construction Wings, could move in without delay to begin work to build them.This book tells the story of every airfield that became operational by D+90, explaining the methods used to construct them and the units that flew from them. The vast majority of the temporary airstrips have now been returned to the farmland from which they came, but by using engineers' plans from the period and modern aerial photographs, we have portrayed the sites in true After the Battle fashion: as they were then and as they are today.

It was nearly half a century ago that After the Battle first began visiting the battlefields of the Second World War, matching up photographs of the period with their present-day comparisons. Our 'then and now' theme caught on with like-minded readers around the world, all interested to know what the places looked like today - as we say 'keeping history alive'. Searching for the locations where the wartime captions were imprecise, took much time, and there were occasions when a whole day might be spent in pin-pointing where a particular photograph had been taken. No stone was left unturned if a particular comparison was important to illustrate the story, even if it meant a special visit to take one photo. Most of the battlefields have changed over the years so it has been our intention where possible to illustrate many of the places with new colour comparisons rather than use those in the original story, many of which were taken in the old black and white days. Since we launched our first edition in August 1973, After the Battle has travelled around the globe and has covered hundreds of battles - over 750 at the last count – and taken thousands of photographs, covering major operations down to individual exploits. Selecting a cross-section of just a few from the stories that we have covered has not been easy, but we hope that you will find some of your favourites within the pages of this volume, covering the best of After the Battle. 750 illustrations