When the German battleship Bismarck put to sea on 19 May 1941 on her one and only offensive mission, ‘Operation Rheinubung’, she carried a boosted complement of sailors to provide prize crews for the many Allied merchant ships she was expected to capture. The naval action that followed, the most momentous of the war against Nazi Germany, is remembered for the relentless determination of the Royal Navy to pursue and sink Bismarck at whatever cost ...
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Click here to read my blog on the Macmillan website comparing the Hun advance of the 5th century AD with the Nazi blitzkrieg of the Second World War.
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This is my fourth blog on the British assault ship Empire Elaine and my grandfather’s experience as her Second Officer under Combined Operations, the British naval command responsible for seaborne landings during the Second World War. Empire Elaine had been designed for the Ministry of War Transport (M/T) as an L.S.C. (Landing Ship Carrier), one of few heavy-lift ships purpose-built to carry L.C.M.s (Landing Craft Mechanised). Despite her military role, the crew of Empire Elaine ...
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Here's the complete series of CD Audiobooks of my novels from Atlantis to Pharaoh, read by James Langton. All are available from Amazon.com.
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This blog, revised on 21 January 2024, is one of several detailing the experiences of my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, while he was Second Officer of the British assault ship MV Empire Elaine between November 1942 and November 1944 …
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'Operation Dragoon' was the codename for the Allied landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944, a massive naval and airborne assault that served as the counterpart to the Normandy landings a little over two months earlier. The assault was primarily a US operation, with most of the troops landed around Cavalaire Bay being from three US divisions, but many of the assault and supply ships and their escorts were British ...
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Read a FREE PREVIEW SAMPLER of my latest novel PYRAMID!
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The official history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In Danger’s Hour by Gordon Holman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), contains many accounts of courage and loss among the Merchant Navy crews who provided a lifeline for Britain as well as support for Allied military operations in every theatre of the war. We are used to images of ships on Atlantic convoys, their crews enduring the constant threat of U-boat attack, but an oft-overlooked role of merchant seamen was the huge part they played in seaborne assaults and the dangers they faced there as well. Just what this involved is shown in the remarkable voyage of one of these ships ...
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This two-page feature by Marcus Dunk on my first novel Atlantis appeared in The Daily Express on 23 July 2005. Since then Atlantis has sold well over a million copies and been published in thirty languages.
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Here's the brilliant new cover for the UK paperback edition of Destroy Carthage, published by Macmillan on 14 April.
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For details of this offer see the timeline on my Facebook page.
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A few posts back I wrote of the First World War death of one of my great-great uncles in France in 1914. Another death on the other side of my family is recounted in the press release opposite, from July 1915. Two Muslim sowars – cavalry troopers – went on a murderous rampage in Jhansi in central India and killed four of their British officers, including my grandfather’s first cou sin Marmaduke Gale. Their regiment, the 8th Cavalry, had been kept in India for internal security duties ...
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The video in this blog shows me shooting an 1882 Martini-Henry rifle, the weapon used in my novel Pharaoh by British troops against the forces of the Mahdi during the 1884 expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. That war was one of the last major conflicts fought using black powder, though with fast-action breech-loading rifles far superior to the muzzle-loading weapons that had been the mainstay of armies only twenty years previously. With reloading now taking only seconds, these new rifles allowed a disciplined force to lay down a withering fire almost as devastating as machine-gun fire was to be in wars to come; their accuracy also meant that sniping, or ‘sharpshooting’ as it was called, was now possible at ranges that were previously impossible, allowing my protagonist Major Mayne to use one of these rifles to pick off a dervish rifleman across the Nile more than 600 yards distant ...
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This magnificent painting by Carle Venet depicts the triumph of Aemilius Paullus, the Roman general who defeated the Macedonians at the battle of Pydna in 168 BC. At that date, mid-way between the Second and the Third Punic Wars, Rome’s conflict with Carthage was still unresolved, but at Pydna she smashed the last remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire and opened the way for conquest of the East. A little over twenty years later Roman legionaries stood astride the towering crags of AcroCorinth and proclaimed rule over all Greece, and in the same year Paullus’ son Scipio Aemilianus took Carthage and secured Roman control over the west Mediterranean. Without Pydna it’s unlikely that either of those victories in 146 BC would have taken place as they did, so this painting represents one of the pivotal events of ancient history ...
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Voici l’èdition française de mon roman Pharaon, publiée par Éditions Les Escales.
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