Helion & Company – förlag

How a reluctant soldier and ranger, excelling in reconnaissance, intelligence, and covert operations, details his journey post-Cold War training to the War on Terror.I am a soldier and a ranger – a specialist in reconnaissance, intelligence, and covert operations. I never wanted to be a soldier, but I found that I excelled at it. I have fired my weapons in anger, infiltrated terrorist groups, and made and burnt sources. Number 788 is my story.Being good at doing bad things is not always a blessing. You can’t be the judge, only the executioner. The concept of ‘for the greater good’ always has a flip side. You are moving and living in the shadows. The ones in control grant you the ultimate power of life, but a life lived in the shadows is never your own.My development was slow and meticulous; it was improvised and innovative. Now, I write about what it was like to be pushed past the brink of what I thought was humanly possible. I aim to share my flawed path, lessons learned, relationships forged, revelations of self and the workings of others, with the very small hope of inspiring a few new generation warriors.I was trained at a unique time, as I joined the forces after the Cold War but just before the attacks of 9-11. During my formation, the lack of controls and regulation came with tremendous risks but also significant opportunities – I seized them. I am the product of brave officers who took action with great personal risk to save a regiment without permission and by asking for forgiveness later. Officers who believed in the saying, ‘Who Dares Wins’. I share my small place as a silent mediator between the light and shadows in the long and flawed history of Western and Nordic fighters.The end of the Cold War and subsequent peacekeeping missions caught the Swedish military flatfooted when the War on Terror came around. The need for special operations forces was in high demand, but for the most part, Sweden lacked this niche capability. While still in its conceptual form, the International Ranger Platoon, an elite force that became a Special Purpose Unit within the Ranger Battalion, was used to fill the gap. Newly recruited, I was drawn to the challenge and adventure of it all; I took on the tough selection course – the reward was to be part of something new – the Special Purpose Units.

Whatever name the historians gave to the conflicts fought by Sweden and Denmark-Norway, and despite all of the battles, sieges, winter campaigns, and guerrillas, in a wider perspective these events have been often considered a theater of war on the periphery. The struggle for predominance in Europe was not formed up in some hyperborean outlying land, but down in Flanders, Rhineland and Mediterranean. However, even in Northern European countries, the war set its mark on the masses, involving economy, domestic policy and diplomacy throughout the conflicts. After the devastating war against Poland, and Russia, and later The German Empire, Brandenburg and the Netherlands, Sweden was a major Louis XIV’s ally. Both France and Sweden were interested in reducing the Dutch leading roll as a seafaring, commerce nation. Denmark-Norway faced this scenario always in the opposite side. The Swedish army was still regarded as a role model by the contemporaries, and even after the reforms introduced by Gustavus Adolphus, Swedish generals did not cease to develop new military theories, while the state provided itself with an administrative structure capable of supporting the war effort. No less important was the political and military trajectory of Denmark, the nation that more than any other in these years was on the front line against the Lion of the North. The history, organisation, equipment, uniforms and ensigns of the two armies are brought together in a single volume, together with an appendix dealing with the Duchy of Courland.

Before dawn on June 24, 1859, near the small northern Italian town of Solferino, the largest battle on the European continent since the Napoleonic Wars was fought. The crucial encounter of the Second War of Italian Unification raged all day and into the evening, across an 18-kilometer front. This underappreciated battle featured nearly 300,000 men of all arms, led for the last time by their three sovereigns. Today, the Battle of Solferino-San Martino is known as the birthplace of the Red Cross, but the events of that day encapsulated much more. This work is translated from the original Italian and has been updated with new and never seen before maps and images. This work will inform historians, military enthusiasts and wargamers alike who will welcome the impressive detail of the combat between Austrian, French and Piedmontese armies.This lucid and accurate analysis highlighting aspects never revealed before about events and people.It describes in detail the long-range reconnaissance that led the Emperor of Austria Franz Joseph I to resume the offensive against the allied armies of France and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The deadly series of encounter battles that took place by the three belligerent armies in as many main sectors geographically delimited by the plateau of San Martino to the north, from the hilly strip of Solferino in the center and from the plain of Medole-Guidizzolo to the south were all carried out autonomously with little coordination.The fight immediately ignited furiously first in Medole, then along the hilly ridge that from the Grole passes through Solferino arriving in Cavriana and beyond to Volta Mantovana.All the individual clashes are analyzed, described and commented and some unpublished aspects revealed from the comparison of the reports of the commanders in suborder preserved in the State and War archives, with particular regard to the Austrian "Alte Feldakten" traced in the kilometer-long Viennese depots.Finally, also a dutiful reconstruction of the events that saw protagonists in the imperial ranks the Venetian soldiers of the Wernhardt regiment, recruited in the districts of the provinces of Treviso and Venice, so far completely forgotten by history.

on 12 July. The combat on this day receives particular scrutiny, as Zamulin works to clarify the relative size of the contending forces, the actual area of this battle, and the costs suffered by both sides. The costs to General P. A. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army and General A. S. Zhadov's 5th Guards Army as they slammed into 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Totenkopf and a portion of 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Das Reich were particularly devastating, and Zamulin examinesA groundbreaking book when first published in Russia in 2005, now Valeriy Zamulin's study of the crucible of combat during the titanic clash at Kursk - the fighting at Prokhorovka - is available in English. A former staff member of the Prokhorovka Battlefield State Museum, Zamulin has dedicated years of his life to the study of the battle of Kursk, and especially the fighting on its southern flank involving the famous attack of the II SS Panzer Corps into the teeth of deeply-echeloned Red Army defenses. A product of five years of intense research into the once-secret Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Zamulin lays out in enormous detail the plans and tactics of both sides, culminating in the famous and controversial clash at Prokhorovka on 12 July 1943. Zamulin skillfully weaves reminiscences of Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers and officers into the narrative of the fighting, using in part files belonging to the Prokhorovka Battlefield State Museum. Zamulin has the advantage of living in Prokhorovka, so he has walked the ground of the battlefield many times and has an intimate knowledge of the terrain.Examining the battle from primarily the Soviet side, Zamulin reveals the real costs and real achievements of the Red Army at Kursk, and especially Prokhorovka. He examines mistaken deployments and faulty decisions that hampered the Voronezh Front's efforts to contain the Fourth Panzer Army's assault, and the valiant, self-sacrificial fighting of the Red Army's soldiers and junior officers as they sought to slow the German advance, and then crush the II SS Panzer Corps with a heavy counterattack at Prokhorovka the nuts and bolts of the counteroffensive to see why this was so. Zamulin does not exclude the oft-overlooked efforts of Army Group Kempf's III Panzer Corps on the right-wing of the Fourth Panzer Army, as it sought to keep pace with the II SS Panzer Corps advance, and then breach the line of the Northern Donets River in order to link up with its left-hand neighbor in the region of Prokhorovka. Zamulin describes how the Soviet High Command and the Voronezh Front had to cobble together quickly a defense of this line with already battered units, but needed to reinforce it with fresh formations at the expense of the counterstroke at Prokhorovka. Illustrated with numerous maps and photographs (including present-day views of the battlefield), and supplemented with extensive tables of data, Zamulin's book is an outstanding contribution to the growing literature on the battle of Kursk, and further demolishes many of the myths and legends that grew up around this battle.EPUB3: Reflowable

Explores Early Modern Southeast Asian warfare, blending war elephants, firearms, sieges, and cultural traditions.Elephants and Gunpowder presents for the first time a chronological, detailed and richly illustrated account of the development of warfare in mainland Southeast Asia during the Early Modern Period. It begins by describing the region’s medieval military inheritance that was dominated by the use of war elephants. Firearms began to appear during the late fourteenth century and would be used alongside elephants and cavalry in a long series of wars between Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand). Exciting sieges and dramatic naval combat are also discussed along with much fascinating material about beliefs in omens and divination and the impact of foreign mercenaries. While cannons re around them elephants act as mounts for noble hand-to-hand combat, as living battering rams to use against city gates and, in the form of the precious and much coveted white elephant, as both an excuse and a pretext for war itself. The text is complemented by a large number of carefully selected photographs, maps and specially commissioned artwork that present the arms and armaments of the Southeast Asian warrior and his elephants in a way never seen before.

The year 2012 marks the centenary of Eva Braun's birth. This is the strange-but-true saga of her life, richly illustrated from her own personal photograph albums, as well as from other captured German archives. She married German dictator Adolf Hitler but 36 hours before their joint suicides in Berlin on April 30 1945, in the last week of the Second World War in Europe. This exciting pictorial biography tells the full story of a Catholic convent-bred young woman - not only as the secret mistress, as many historians have painted her since her voluntary death at age 33 - but also as Hitler's lawfully wedded wife, even though she is still largely referred to today by her maiden name. They met at a Munich photography shop in 1929 when she was but 17, and he was already 40. The true nature of their long relationship is fully explained in detail for the very first time: she was heterosexual and he bisexual, but the author concludes Eva most likely remained a virgin until the day she died. Although many reports after the war claimed that he shot himself and that she took poison, the official Russian autopsy of their partially-burnt bodies asserted that both died by cyanide capsules, despite the postwar testimony of all Hitler's closest aides, lending even their deaths an air of mystery. Who was she, really? The answers are here. This fascinating, gripping, and tragic story of a pretty, well-liked, middle-class shop girl is of a life mainly lived in the iron shadow of history. In death Eva Braun Hitler became - and remains today, a hundred years after her birth - one of the most famous women in all of world history, alongside such female luminaries as Joan of Arc, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Princess Diana. Eva has been a figure shrouded in controversy, misinformation, myth, and legend, until now. At long last the veil is lifted, with over 300 photographs providing an extensive collection of imagery, including a number of contemporary color shots. Eva Braun had a lifelong passion for photography - her close friends nicknamed her the 'Rolleiflex girl' after a camera model - and this is reflected in the array of imagery featured in this groundbreaking book.