Collections
The archive, retold by campaign: curated sets of vehicles that fought the same battle, hunted the same prey, or crossed the same desert.
19 collections
The Battle of the Atlantic
The longest continuous campaign of the war, fought over six years for the sea lanes on which Britain lived — and the only campaign Churchill admitted had frightened him. · 20 machines
The Battle of France, 1940
Six weeks in 1940, in which an army with fewer tanks and lighter ones destroyed the largest land force in Western Europe. · 26 machines
The Battle of Britain
The first battle fought entirely in the air — and the first defeat of the war for Germany. · 11 machines
The Naval War in the Mediterranean
Two fleets and one sea: everything that reached North Africa, on either side, had to cross it — and both navies spent three years trying to make sure the other’s cargoes did not. · 29 machines
The Desert War
Three years of advance and retreat across two thousand kilometres of Libya and Egypt — a war of machines, fought in a landscape with nowhere to hide. · 47 machines
The Hunt for the Bismarck
Six days, two thousand miles of ocean, and the largest naval pursuit in history — told here through every machine that took part. · 9 machines
The Eastern Front
The largest land war ever fought — four years, two thousand kilometres of front, and machines built in their tens of thousands to survive it. · 65 machines
Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941
The morning that brought America into the war — and missed the ships that would win it. · 13 machines
Midway, June 1942
Five minutes on the morning of 4 June 1942 decided the Pacific war. These are the machines that were there. · 17 machines
The Island War
The Pacific war is remembered as carriers and battleships. It was decided, island by island, by infantry who had to be delivered onto a beach and then dig an enemy out of coral. · 16 machines
The Battle of Kursk, 1943
Operation Citadel met a defence built in depth; fifty days later the Red Army had seized the initiative and the Wehrmacht was retreating west. · 16 machines
Operation Husky: Sicily, 1943
The largest amphibious assault yet mounted — the invasion that carried the war onto Axis home soil and toppled Mussolini within a fortnight. · 33 machines
Fall Achse
In forty-eight hours an entire armed forces changed hands. What the Germans could reach they took; what could move made for Malta. · 29 machines
The Italian Campaign, 1943–1945
From the armistice and Salerno to the surrender in the Alps — the slow, brutal climb up the peninsula, and the only front where Italians fought on both sides. · 46 machines
D-Day and Normandy, Summer 1944
The largest amphibious invasion ever mounted — five beaches, three airborne divisions, and eleven weeks of battle that destroyed a German army. · 38 machines
Leyte Gulf, October 1944
The largest naval battle in history — four engagements in three days, the last sortie of the battleships, and the first organized kamikazes. · 14 machines
The Fall of Germany, 1944–1945
Hitler’s last gamble in the West, and the five months of fighting that ended the Third Reich — from the snow of the Ardennes to the Rhine and the Elbe. · 31 machines
The Battle of Berlin, 1945
The Red Army’s final offensive in Europe — from the Oder and Seelow Heights to the encirclement, street fighting and fall of the Nazi capital. · 18 machines
The Fall of Japan, 1944–1945
The last year, when the Imperial Navy sortied to die, the submarines cut the islands off from their empire, and the bombers finished what the blockade had started. · 21 machines