England’s King Edward III was one of the greatest military innovators of the Middle Ages. His son, the Black Prince, became one of the period’s most renowned commanders. Our special this issue takes a look at this extraordinary partnership.
Edward implemented a series of radical reforms in English military organisation that turned his country into an armed camp and a launch-pad for successive attempts to make good the English monarchy’s claim to the French crown. Central to this was a new tactical system of defensive linear warfare that combined ‘bill and bow’ – a system that delivered the extraordinarily one-sided victory at Crécy in August 1346.
Also in this issue, we revisit General Wolfe’s capture of Quebec in 1759. Sam Allison and Jon Bradley offer a forensic analysis of Wolfe’s underestimated brilliance. We then have two very different WWII stories. Richard Selcer offers a detailed account of the greatest naval disaster of all time – the sinking of the German passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic on the night of 30 January 1945 – while James Morningstar discusses the Philippine resistance to the Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945.
Finally, William Stroock recounts the decisive Battle of Chinese Farm in the Sinai Desert in October 1973 – the armoured clash between Egyptian and Israeli forces that determined the outcome of the Yom Kippur War.