ROYAL HAMPSHIRE REGIMENT. 1918-1954

This is the third volume of the official history of the Hampshire Regiment from the end of the Great War to the mid-1950s. Though covering the unit’s inter-war service in Ireland – where it was deployed against the IRA – India and Palestine, the bulk of the book concentrates on the Second World War in which the Hampshires fought in almost every theatre in which British troops were engaged. The Regiment fielded six battalions and lost more than 2,000 men and officers in fierce fighting stretching from Dunkirk to North Africa, via Malta, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, Holland, and the end of the war in Germany. Perhaps the regiment’s hardest battles came in Italy, where one battalion formed the assualt brigade of the 46th DIvision in the initial attack on the beaches of Salerno, subsequently taking part in the fighting for Monte Cassino and the breaching of the Gothic LIne. With a forward by Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, and with a full list of the Regiment’s awards and decorations this is a book that no serious student of Britain’s fighting role in the Second Wolrld War will want to be without.