After the Battle

After the Battle was a British military history magazine published quarterly in Harlow, Essex, between 1973 and 2022 by Battle of Britain International Limited. It dealt principally with the Second World War in a distinctive then-and-now format, in which historical photographs were matched with modern photographs of the identical scene to show how much, or how little, had changed. Edited throughout its life by Winston Ramsey, it appeared four times a year for almost half a century, built a reported circulation of 12,000, and generated an extensive series of Then and Now books. Pen & Sword Books took over the title, but no new issues were produced after issue number 195, labelled the final issue.

Founding in 1973

After the Battle was first published in 1973 and appeared on 15 February, May, August and November each year, a quarterly rhythm it kept for the whole of its life. The editor-in-chief from 1973 was Winston Ramsey, assisted by his co-author Gail Parker Ramsey and by editor Karel Margry. That continuity of editorship was itself remarkable: the magazine was essentially the life's work of one editorial team, which researched, travelled to, photographed and wrote up battlefields across the world for forty-nine years. When Winston and Gail Ramsey's retirement was announced in 2021, readers who had collected the magazine since the 1970s and 1980s marked the end of a personal as well as publishing era.

The then-and-now method

The magazine's defining idea was comparison across time. Articles were illustrated by historical photographs matched with a modern-day photograph of the identical scene, taken from the same spot, so readers could see precisely what had survived, what had been rebuilt and what had vanished. Achieving those matches required detective work: identifying the exact location of a wartime photograph from buildings, roads, signs and terrain, then standing where the original photographer stood. The format was much imitated but rarely bettered, and it changed how military history could be written, turning photographs from illustrations into evidence and making the modern battlefield landscape itself a primary source.

Contents of an issue

Most issues featured a major article on a specific subject, with several smaller articles around it. All areas of the world were written about, wherever the Second World War had been fought, from Europe and North Africa to the Pacific and Asia. There were also occasional features on related subjects such as war films, vehicle preservation and war memorials. Coverage might move between a famous battle, an airfield, a headquarters, a prison camp, a memorial or a single building, and the magazine's bound volumes show the range in their contents, from Enigma and the Battle of the Bulge to Iwo Jima, the Dams Raid, Katyn and the London Blitz.

Books: the Then and Now library

The magazine's approach generated more than a hundred books, published under the After the Battle name, many of them expanding magazine research into large-format volumes. The best known include The Battle of the Bulge: Then and Now by Jean Paul Pallud, first published in 1984, which paired hundreds of carefully identified wartime photographs of the Ardennes fighting with photographs of the same places taken decades later, with orders of battle and maps, and The Battle of Britain Then and Now. Similar volumes treated the Battle of France, the desert war, airfields, invasions and campaigns across Europe and beyond. These books remain standard references on library shelves of military historians and battlefield visitors.

Publisher and production

The publisher was Battle of Britain International Limited, earlier associated with the name Battle of Britain Prints International, based in Harlow, Essex. The operation combined magazine publishing, book publishing and direct sales to readers, and for many years the magazine was stocked in WHSmith; readers recalled that it left that retailer's shelves in 2013 after the retailer demanded too high a fee for continued shelf space, thereafter relying more heavily on subscription and direct sale. The publisher also sold bound volumes collecting groups of magazine issues in hard covers, a format valued by collectors and libraries for preserving the quarterly parts as durable reference works.

Readership and circulation

Reference listings give the magazine's circulation as 12,000. Its readers were military history enthusiasts, veterans and their families, battlefield travellers, re-enactors, vehicle preservers, local historians and researchers. The magazine served them in a practical way its imitators acknowledged: readers used its matched photographs to stand in the exact places where events had happened, on self-guided battlefield visits across Europe and further afield. Its approachable presentation, rigorous captioning, which identified units, vehicles, tactical numbers and locations rather than offering generic descriptions, and its refusal to sensationalise gave it an authority trusted by both hobbyists and specialists.

Writing and contributors

Under Winston Ramsey's editorship, the magazine drew on a stable of specialist authors, among them Jean Paul Pallud on the Ardennes and France, Peter Cornwell on the Battle of France and the air war, and Karel Margry, who combined editorial work with his own research and photography. Contributors were expected to work to the house standard: locate the place, verify the photograph, tell the story of what happened there, and show it now. The result was a body of work of unusual consistency across nearly fifty years, in which a reader opening any issue, from any decade, encountered the same disciplined format applied to a new subject.

Retirement of the Ramseys and transfer to Pen & Sword

In October 2021 it was announced that Winston and Gail Ramsey were to retire, after running the magazine since 1973, and that After the Battle would be handed over to the publisher Pen & Sword Books, the Barnsley-based military history publisher. At the time it was not clear whether the new owner would continue the magazine or concentrate on keeping the books in print. In the event, Pen & Sword took over the title but produced no new issues after number 195, which was labelled the final issue. The magazine's run is therefore generally dated 1973 to 2022, ending one short of its fiftieth year but with its backlist secured under a specialist publisher.

Related media and continuing presence

The title maintained a website at afterthebattle.com, through which its magazines and books were sold and its catalogue presented, and it worked with partners in military history media, including War History Online, sharing news and features and supporting the popular Ghosts of History concept of overlaying wartime imagery on modern scenes, a digital descendant of the magazine's own method. Social media allowed its then-and-now comparisons to reach audiences far beyond its print circulation, introducing younger readers to a format created decades before such sharing existed and demonstrating how naturally the magazine's idea suited the image-driven internet.

Influence on battlefield history

After the Battle changed the practice of battlefield visiting. Before such matched photography became common, visitors relied on maps, memorials and imagination; the magazine taught a generation to read a landscape photographically, aligning a wartime image with hedgerows, church towers and road junctions that still exist. Battlefield tour companies, local museums and other publishers adopted then-and-now presentation as a standard tool, and the magazine's volumes remain the benchmark against which such work is judged. Its influence extends to television documentaries and online history projects that use the same comparative device to make the past visible in the present.

Significance

After the Battle was significant because it invented and sustained, for 195 issues over forty-nine years, a new form of historical evidence. By matching wartime photographs to the modern world with meticulous precision, Winston Ramsey's magazine connected readers physically to the Second World War's landscapes at the moment those landscapes were themselves changing beyond recognition. It was at once a quarterly magazine, a library of Then and Now books, a guide for battlefield travellers and a memorial in print. Its closure under Pen & Sword ended new issues, but its backlist endures as one of the most distinctive achievements in British military publishing.