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15th August, 2025 in Military
By Peter Deleuran
In June 2020, Danish author and archivist Peter Deleuran acquired almost 300 Second World War glass negatives and photos – nearly 200 of which were from the Planet News archive, owned by Topfoto since the 1970s – long presumed lost in the Blitz. Peter painstakingly researched each image, digitised and restored the files and sent them to Topfoto to reunite them with the rest of the collection. In return, Topfoto gave Peter permission to reproduce the images in a book, the powerful and extraordinary Reflections of War.
In this exclusive gallery, which showcases images from the collection, discover the Second World War like you have never seen before…
A defending tank passes some nuns by the roadside. Members of a tank crew pause on a country road to chat with a group of nuns, out for a walk with their dog, during a break in manoeuvres held in England.
U.S. troops manhandle a jeep along a muddy cutting through a forest on the Western Front, 8 November 1944.
A view in the engine store at an airbase ‘somewhere in Britain’, April 1944.
Mr. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, leaving for the House of Commons, 1 May 1945. In the evening hours of 1 May 1945, Hamburg Radio announced the death of Hitler. It was later to be made known that it had in fact been suicide. Things moved rapidly after this. Many high-ranking Nazis committed suicide the following day and a domino effect of surrender struck the rapidly sinking German ship.
VE Day in London: Whitehall crowds wait to acclaim Prime Minister. Photo shows: The enormous crowd which assembled in Whitehall and Parliament-square to acclaim the Prime Minister as he appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health.
14th August, 2025 in Military, Women in History Bletchley Park is perceived as a world of male intellectuals supported by a vast staff of women in menial roles – a place where men helped sway the course of the Second World War. But women were not just typists and clerks. They had serious, full-on codebreaking roles. And not ju… 2nd June, 2025 in Local & Family History, Military Tens of thousands of men and women performed heroic acts on the Home Front during the Second World War. Most were not recognised by the authorities, nor would the heroines and heroes have wished to be so commemorated – the real reward was successfully saving a person’s life.. The… 29th May, 2025 in Maritime, Military Since the mid 1800s a number of Cunard ships have been requisitioned to support Britain during wartime. Several Cunarders were requisitioned to support Britain during the Crimean War (1853–56). A total of fourteen Cunard ships served in the campaign. Of those, Arabia transported… 16th April, 2025 in History, Military, Society & Culture In his book Under Fire, Stephen Bourne draws on first-hand testimonies to tell the whole story of Britain’s black community during the Second World War, shedding light on an oft neglected area of history. Drawing on a wealth of experiences from evacuees to entertainers, gove… 20th January, 2025 in Biography & Memoir, Military ‘Before leaving, we were issued with rations for about two and half days. The weather was terrible, and very, very cold. We arrived at a place called Winterveldt. We had covered a distance of about twenty miles and our resting place was a barn with cold floors, with just a bit of… 5th December, 2024 in Local & Family History, Military, Women in History John Lander author of new book Don’t Delay – Enrol Today highlights the importance of the women’s land army in Hampshire during both World Wars. World War I The Women’s Land Army was established by the British government to recruit women and girls to work in Britain’s agriculture… 19th September, 2024 in Aviation, Biography & Memoir, Military In 1934, aged just 16, Louis Hagen was sent to Lichtenberg concentration camp after being betrayed for an off-hand joke by a Nazi-sympathising family maid. Mercifully, his time there was cut short thanks to the intervention of a school friend’s father, and he escaped to the UK so… 10th September, 2024 in Local & Family History, Military The Royal Hospital Chelsea as a home for old soldiers has always been associated with warfare. The Second World War however represents a unique chapter in the history of the institution as the Hospital itself was in the line of fire for a sustained period. Casualties amongst the… 2nd September, 2024 in Military, Society & Culture Eighty-five years ago, the outbreak of the Second World War was confirmed. Author Victoria Panton Bacon asks, what have we learnt? Colin Bell, now 103, recollects the announcement of the Second World War. Colin was 18 years old at the time, living with his family in East Molesey… 5th June, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Military ‘Good God!’ I thought after being shown a map with a small area on it that we had taken back, ‘We’ve just taken part in D-Day!’ Flight Lieutenant Noble Frankland (DFC CB CBE) is one of those for whom 6th June 1944 might have been just another ‘ordinary day’ in the operational c… 5th June, 2024 in Military, Women in History ‘I remember one particularly badly injured pilot amongst the others being brought in. Because of his multiple injuries he was taken straight to the consultant surgeon for examination and treatment, but he was still conscious as he was taken to surgery. There was nothing anyone co… 22nd April, 2024 in Military, Society & Culture The thought arrived as I was hovering inside a crowded coffee shop directly opposite the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. Tables and bars pulsed with suited, brief cased, device-bashing professionals; the buzz from conversation being shouted and spoken into phones and faces… 3rd April, 2024 in Military And so, in the early morning of 11 May, 973 heavy bombers took off in fine weather from airfields across East Anglia. Their mission was Operation 350: to fly 500 miles across France to attack railway marshalling yards in Mulhouse, Épinal, Belfort and Chaumont, and an airfield at… 15th January, 2024 in Military, Women in History Author of Remarkable Women of the Second World War, Victoria Panton Bacon, remembers Pat Rorke. Pat died on 9th December 2023, aged 100 years and five weeks. ‘After the war, you have to learn to live together, remember that you are all human … behind all the bare recounted facts… 18th October, 2023 in Biography & Memoir, Military This memoir is a gripping and unusual account of a survivor of the Shoah in Holland. With impressively clear recall of his childhood and early teens – he was 11 at the outbreak of the war – Lex Lesgever writes of his years on the run and in hiding in Amsterdam and beyond. It is u… 15th August, 2023 in History, Military In the medieval era, pitched battles were risky affairs; the work of years could be undone in a single day thanks to the vagaries of weather, terrain or simple bad luck. C.B. Hanley author of the Mediaeval Mystery series, including the latest addition Blessed… 12th July, 2023 in Biography & Memoir, Military, True Crime Until I began researching the story of the teenager who risked his life to bring the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ to justice, I knew little of the atrocities committed in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during the Second World War. I learned that I am far from alone. Most people I s… 23rd September, 2022 in Military Dedicated chronicler of Black British history, Stephen Bourne explores the many and extraordinary ways in which black people helped Britain fight the Great War, on the battlefield and at home in this new illustrated edition of Black Poppies for children. ‘Publishers in Britain ar… 29th July, 2022 in Maritime, Military Just six weeks into the First World War, three British armoured cruisers, HMS Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy, patrolling in the southern North Sea, were sunk by a single German U-boat. The defeat made front page news across Europe. It was the biggest story from the war to date; it sho… 22nd June, 2022 in Biography & Memoir, Military, Women in History If I may say so myself, as author of the twelve stories (and epilogue) about the Second World War contained in Remarkable Women of the Second World War, anyone with an insatiable appetite for knowledge about World War Two must read this book. It does not have to be read in… 19th May, 2022 in Military As news spread of the Allied landings in Normandy, and thoughts turned to the liberation of their country, few throughout France could have predicted the fate of Oradour-sur-Glane, a community in Haute-Vienne, near the city of Limoges. On 10 June 1944 the inhabitants of the large… 13th April, 2022 in Military, Women in History “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”attributed to oscar wilde That honey traps remain among the most widely known and least understood category of intelligence operations is not surprising. Pop culture is filled with images of the irresistible fe… 25th March, 2022 in Local & Family History, Military A knife, a diary, a recipe book, a string instrument, and a cotton pouch. Each belonged to an individual in their twenties during the Second World War: I talked to elderly family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances – people drawn from everyday life – asking them the s… 26th January, 2022 in Local & Family History, Military Neil R. Storey author of Norwich in the Second World War tells the story of the city and its people, as far as possible, in the words of those who were actually there. When the acclaimed Norfolk author George Borrow described Norwich as ‘a fine old city’ in the nineteenth century… 18th November, 2021 in Biography & Memoir, Military My father’s clergywoman called his now almost-gone generation of Germany’s World War II war children ‘sad’ when I told her about the publication of my book Boy Soldiers: A Personal Story of Nazi Elite Schooling and its Legacy of Trauma. After his retirement, my father had activel… 27th October, 2021 in Military On 10 October 1941 a black locomotive, emblazoned with a distinctive Soviet red star, puffed into the busy station siding encased in swirling steam. As it came to a squealing, grinding halt, the flatcars behind clanked and buffeted each other to a standstill. It was becoming dark… 9th June, 2021 in Military 10 June marks the anniversary of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. These identity documents were retrieved from the fire-ravaged remains of a home there. They were found by two Jewish sisters who miraculously survived the tragedy and belonged to their parents Robert and Carmen Pinè… 30th April, 2021 in History, Military The Wars of the Roses were complicated; roughly forty years of political instability and outright fighting across England, interspersed with family feuds and encroaching foreign rulers. The Battle of Tewkesbury falls in the middle, but it was very nearly the end. The seeds of Tew… 22nd April, 2021 in History, Local & Family History, Military During the Irish War of Independence‚ the fort on Spike Island in County Cork was the largest British military run prison for republican prisoners and internees in the Martial Law area. During 1921‚ approximately 300 prisoners and 900 internees were imprisoned there. Most of… 11th November, 2020 in Military, Transport & Industry 11 November 2020 marked the centenary of the burial within Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Warrior. This was a British soldier who was killed in the First World War, someone who was originally buried in or near one of the many battlefields of the Western Front. The idea of comme…
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