Against the wishes of Hitler, German forces under Erich von Manstein were forced to retreat following the failure of the Kursk offensive of July 1943. The race to the natural defensive line was on, with the Soviets launching one of their largest offensives of the war – with over 2 million men on the move. Robert Forczyk describes the dramatic four-month campaign that saw the Red Army not only succeed in crossing the Dnepr at multiple points, but also liberate Kiev, capital of the Ukraine.

In the summer of 1944, plans began for a complex operation to seize a Rhine river bridge at Arnhem in the Netherlands. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions succeeded in their tasks of capturing the vital bridges at Eindhoven and Nijmegen in the face of fierce German resistance. However, the delays caused to the British armored advance, combined with stronger than expected fighting at Arnhem led to the withdrawal of the remnants of the British 1st Airborne Division in one of the Western Allies' most costly defeats of World War II.

With Germany being pushed back across Europe the Allied forces looked to press their advantage with Operation Market-Garden, a massive airborne assault that, if successful, could have shortened the war in the west considerably. The ground advance consisted of an armoured thrust by the British XXX Corps, while the US 82nd and 101st US Airborne Divisions secured the bridges at Eindhoven and Nijmegen and the British 1st Airborne Division and Polish 1st Airborne Brigade were tasked with seizing the final bridge at Arnhem to secure the route. What they did not realise was that the 9. SS and 10.

Field Marshal Montgomery's plan to get Second British Army behind the fortifications of the German Siegfried Line in 1944 led to the hugely ambitious Operation Market-Garden. Part of this plan called for a rapid advance from Belgium through Holland up to and across the lower Rhine by the British XXX Corps along a single road already dominated by airborne troops. Their objective along this road was the bridge at Arnhem, the target of British and Polish airborne troops. Once XXX Corps had reached this bridge it would then make for the German industrial area of the Ruhr.

As the final month of fighting in Europe in 1945 dawned the Allies embarked upon a series of mopping up operations, destroying the last centres of German resistance as the essentially defeated Wehrmacht fought on in increasingly desperate conditions, driven on by the explicit no surrender order issued by Hitler. Yet at the same time, the Allied alliance was already on shaky ground, as German resistance was crushed the Allies began to eye each other nervously across a battle-torn Europe, with the politically driven military decisions to have a huge impact on the future of the continent.

In late 1953, the seventh year of France's war against the Viet Minh insurgency in its colony of Vietnam, the C-in-C, General Navarre, was encouraged to plant an 'air-ground base' in the Thai Highlands at Dien Bien Phu, to distract General Giap's Vietnamese People's Army from both Annam and the French northern heartland in the Red River Delta, and to protect the Laotian border. Elite French paratroopers captured Dien Bien Phu, which was reinforced between December 1953 and February 1954 with infantry and artillery, a squadron of tanks and one of fighter-bombers, to a strength of 10,000 men.