HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-06-05T08:25:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
items: Britain’s Russian fiasco: Allied intervention in the Russian civil war
items: How the battle for Norway in 1940 saved Britain

The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
type: item
date: 2025-06-05T08:24:32.000Z
creator: Nick Hewitt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: Ferrying troops to the beaches wasn’t the only contribution sailors made during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Nick Hewitt reveals how the Allied navies ended up fighting one of the most overlooked campaigns of the Second World War
encoded: On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.” Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men. Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944. Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians. Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-…

GettyImages-959149180webready-3942a2f.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Britain’s Russian fiasco: Allied intervention in the Russian civil war
type: item
date: 2023-06-26T15:39:42.000Z
creator: Nick Hewitt
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: More than a century ago, British troops were engaged in the maelstrom of the Russian civil war. Their campaign against the Bolsheviks, writes Nick Hewitt, was a bloody debacle that enraged a restive public back home
encoded: In 2018, the world marked the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War. But for thousands of British soldiers, the fighting went on. On 11 November 1918, Thomas Dunlop, from Newton Heath, was part of a 400-strong garrison shivering in improvised trenches around Tulgas, north Russia. As Dunlop’s comrades-in-arms on the western front laid down their weapons, the 19-year-old private in 2/10th Battalion, the Royal Scots, was in a vicious firefight with 2,500 Bolsheviks, supported by gunboats. For four days Dunlop’s company, alongside American riflemen and a few Canadian field guns, defended their nondescript piece of Russia. The Bolsheviks finally withdrew, leaving hundreds of dead behind, but victory came at a price. US sergeant Silver Parrish recalled how “we licked the Bolo [Bolshevik] good and hard but lost seven killed and 14 wounded, and the Canadians lost quite a few and the Royal Scots lost 36 men”. In context: The Russian civil war The Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November 1917 was followed by a wave of armed insurrections across the former Russian empire by anti-Bolshevik factions loosely characterised as ‘White’ Russians. At the height of the civil war the Whites appeared to surround the Bolshevik strongholds of Moscow and Petrograd, but in reality they were a disparate group of moderate socialists, ethnic nationalists, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and bandits, and never really formed an effective opposition. In Siberia the Whites were led by their self-proclaimed ‘supreme leader’, the former tsarist naval officer Admiral Alexander Kolchak. The Allied intervention in north Russia was partly intended to link up with Kolchak, but his regime was corrupt and unpopular and he lost the support of his most formidable force of 40,000 former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and deserters, known as ‘the Czechoslovak Legion’. Kolchak was captured by the Bolsheviks and executed. Around the Baltic coast, Estonians and Latvians were fighting for indepe…

GettyImages-588227462-20d0d74.jpg
width: 4611
height: 3028

How the battle for Norway in 1940 saved Britain
type: item
date: 2023-01-27T09:10:30.000Z
creator: Nick Hewitt
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: The RAF’s Battle of Britain heroics are credited with saving the nation. But, argues Nick Hewitt, it was the Royal Navy’s savaging of the German fleet in the battle of Norway in the spring of 1940 that scuttled Hitler’s grand invasion plans
encoded: We’re all familiar with the story. In the summer of 1940, Royal Air Force pilots defeated Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe over the skies of southern England and saved Britain from invasion. “Our fate,” Winston Churchill wrote years later, “depended on victory in the air.” The Battle of Britain was a humiliation for the Luftwaffe, which may have lost almost 2,000 aircraft and well over 4,000 airmen killed, wounded, missing, and captured – undoubtedly far more than the British, although figures vary. It was a propaganda triumph for a beleaguered island, with strategic implications, in particular in the US, where Americans considered anew the UK’s will to resist. It was an important victory, and the pilots’ courage was undeniable. But, in truth, there’s little chance that Germany could have invaded England, even if the RAF had been defeated in the Battle of Britain. That’s because, some weeks earlier, Britain had already, in effect, been saved. It had been saved in the battle of Norway, a now widely forgotten land, air and sea campaign fought between 9 April and 10 June 1940. And Britain’s saviour, as so many times before in what Churchill called its “long island story”, was the Royal Navy. Supported by French, Norwegian and Polish allies, the British fleet wrought terrible damage on its German counterpart, the Kriegsmarine, in the icy waters of Scandinavia. So sizeable was that damage, it convinced Germany’s naval leaders that the Kriegsmarine was totally inadequate to play a significant role in an invasion of Britain. Why was Narvik important in WW2? At the start of 1940, Norway was neutral and almost defenceless. Unfortunately, through its economic activities, it was also incapable of staying quietly ‘beneath the radar’ of the belligerents. That’s because, in winter, the ice-free northern port of Narvik provided the only window on the world for Swedish iron ore – a vital resource for Germany. So, while Hitler conquered Poland and the Allies prepared themselves for a German…

1295665-03bdc75.jpg
width: 4959
height: 3766