Featured battle : Bayonne

Part of The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Date : 26 February 1814 - 26 April 1814

General Hope's Corps [ two British Divisions and two independent brigades] was detached from the main army to besiege the town of Bayonne. Soult had left General Thouvenot in command of 14,000 troops to hold the city. On the 13th April word reach the area that Napoleon had fallen. The relaxed atmosphere of the allied camp was shattered when on the 14th April Thouvenot, with 6,000 men, launched an attack on the allied lines. Outposts and front lines quickly fell but determined resistance and then a counter-attack drove the French back into the city. The seige continued and Thouvenot finally surrendered the city on the 26th April, twenty days after Napoleon's abdication. This ended the Peninsular Campaign.

The Shetland 'Bus'

Stephen Wynn
The regular small boat journeys between Norway and the Shetland Islands during the German occupation of Norway in WW2 is a fascinating and often forgotten aspect of the war in northern Europe. This book goes some way to addressing this. An interesting and slightly unexpected book, I was expecting a narrative of the journeys etc, but this book is more useful and of a slightly wider scope than that. It begins with chapters giving overviews of the Shetland Islands during the war and the creation of the Shetland 'Bus' service. These were semi-regular small-boat journeys between the islands and Norway, carrying refugees one way, and agents, weapons and equipment the other, initially using Norwegian fishing vessels, later using specially purposed boats. The book also gives useful overviews of occupied Norway and the Special Operations Executive (the clandestine organisation created to carry out acts of intelligence gathering and sabotage on mainland Europe). What then follows are detailed gazetteer-like entries of the Norwegian Agents who took part in operations, Allied military operations, and finally the boats and crews of the Shetland Bus service itself. A book that is both an interesting read and a valuable reference work for anyone studying 1940's Norway and it's close relation to the Shetlands.
Pen & Sword Military, 2021