AFTER THE BATTLE BOUND VOLUME 35

This, the 35th bound volume of After the Battle (Nos. 137-140), again features a mix of battles from around the globe. We begin with an epic chapter from the Pacific war: the jungle campaign along the Kokoda Trail. Between July and November 1942, Australian army units fought a series of difficult battles against advancing Japanese units along this narrow, mountainous, jungle-enveloped pathway across the Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea. Throwing everything into the fray, the Australians managed to finally halt and then drive back the Japanese, thus saving Australia from enemy invasion. Turning to the European theatre, we present three battles for strategically important cities - two French and one German - during the 1944-1945 campaign. First, Phillip Bradley describes the battle for Saint-Lô, captured by the Americans on July 18, 1944, after six weeks of costly fighting in the hedgerow country of Normandy. Next, Karel Margry tells the story of the capture of Le Havre, the French ocean port considered vital for the supply of the Allied armies. Assaulted by two British divisions on September 10, 1944 in a classic example of a set-piece attack, the city fell within 48 hours. The third city battle, recounted in equal detail, is that for Geilenkirchen. A key position in the German Siegfried Line, the town was attacked in a joint Anglo-American operation on November 18, 1944. However, the fighting beyond the town soon bogged down in the murderous fire of Westwall bunkers and the mud and rain of that harsh autumn. Another battle featured is that for the Italian city of Rimini in September 1944. An outpost of the German Gothic Line, it was seized by a little-known Allied outfit, the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, supported by New Zealand armoured units. From the Eastern Front comes the story of the so-called Carpatho-Dukla Operation. Practically unknown in the West, it deals with the ferocious battles to gain the Dukla Pass, a strategic mountain passage on the border between Poland and Slovakia, in September-October 1944. Free Czechoslovak forces gained the pass but a German-Russian tank battle on the Slovak side of it ended in a Soviet rebuff. Two stories deal with the fate of Allied prisoners of war in wartime Germany. First, we chronicle the history of Milag-Marlag, an unusual complex of POW camps at Westertimke in northern Germany - Milag being a special camp for merchant navy personnel and Marlag a camp reserved for Royal Navy servicemen. Next, our French author Jean Paul Pallud follows the footsteps of his father Sylvain, who was taken prisoner in June 1940 and spent the next five years in German captivity, surviving various POW camps en being set to work on German farms. Wartime Britain is covered by two stories. Andrew Emmerson recounts the fantastic tale of the underground aircraft factory that was set up by the Plessey Company in five miles of unused tunnels of the London Tube in north-east London, and Gail Parker tells the story of the PDSA Animal Cemetery at Ilford, and of the animals awarded the Dickin Medal for meritorious war service, 13 of which lie buried at the cemetery.