Osprey Publishing Ltd

With the launch of the Spanish Armada in 1588, England suffered its greatest threat since the Norman invasion some 500 years before. The Spanish King, Philip II had devised a complex plan where by the armada would sail up the English Channel, pick up the Spanish Army of Flanders on the French coast and ferry them across to England. In response,...

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain was the undisputed master of the seas, owing to the power and strength of the Royal Navy. Its fleets, comprising ships of the line, frigates, and gunboats, had doubled in size since the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, totalling almost a thousand capital vessels. This book...

The Gulf War of 1991 heralded a new type of warfare that was characterised by astonishing speed and high technology with remarkably low numbers of casualties amongst the coalition forces. Just under a million coalition personnel were deployed to the Gulf region to face a variety of threats from extreme temperatures to weapons of mass destruction...

They 'fought like young Nelsons.' The words of a schoolmaster, writing from aboard the Mars after the battle of Trafalgar, describing the valour of his pupils in the heat of battle. Made immortal by the novels of Patrick O'Brian, C. S. Forester and Alexander Kent, these boy sailors, alongside those of every other Royal Navy ship, had entered the...

The common image of the Confederate Army during the Civil War is dominated by a limited number of early photographs of troops wearing the gray and butternut of the CS regulations and quartermaster issues. By contrast, this book examines the variety of uniforms worn by the Tennessee and North Carolina militia and volunteers brought together in the...

Unquestionably the most successful dive-bomber ever to see frontline service with any air arm, the Douglas SBD Dauntless was the scourge of the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the crucial years of the Pacific War. The revolutionary all-metal stressed-skin design of the SBD exhibited airframe strength that made it an ideal dive-bomber, its broad wing,...