Mark Felton

Mark Felton (born 1974) is an English author, historian, and YouTuber. Felton has written over a dozen non-fiction books. He runs several channels on YouTube covering different historical subjects of the 20th and 21st century, mainly related to World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Felton has been a lecturer at the University of Essex and at various universities in China. He has also been featured on television as a military history expert. In 2014, he published Zero Night, a book about the 1942 mass allied escape from the German prisoner-of-war camp Oflag VI-B.

Early life and education
Felton was born in 1974 in Colchester, Essex. He attended Philip Morant School. Felton sat for a BA in history and English at Anglia Polytechnic University; he also holds a postgraduate certificate in political science, an MA in Native American studies, and a PhD in history, all from the University of Essex. Felton's PhD thesis, titled "Resistance in exile: Sitting Bull and the Teton Sioux in Canada, 1876-1881", was in the field of Native American studies.

Career
Felton taught at the University of Essex before moving to China for nine years, where he taught at various locations including Shanghai University and Fudan University. He was a volunteer for the Royal British Legion in Shanghai, organising the annual Poppy Appeal in Eastern China, from 2010 to 2014. He assisted the British Consulate Shanghai in the rediscovery of the graves of four British soldiers killed by the Japanese in 1937.

Felton has appeared on television as a military history expert, including in the series Combat Trains (History Channel), and Evolution of Evil (American Heroes Channel). His book Zero Night, about an escape from a German prison camp, received much critical attention,  and was the subject of the BBC Radio documentary Three Minutes of Mayhem. Zero Night has been highlighted to Essential Media for feature film development.

In 2016, Felton's book Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini's Colditz, which concerns the escape of British generals from Vincigliata Castle near Florence in 1943, was identified for feature film development by Entertainment One. In 2017, he became a member of the Naval Order of the United States.

In October 2017, Felton started his first YouTube channel, titled Mark Felton Productions, which explores a variety of historical subjects in terms of the 20th century (including material outside of the First World War and Second World War context, such as releases about the Cold War). For example, he has covered the German Wehrmacht's use of captured U.S. M4 Sherman tanks during the Second World War. In April 2022, Felton published a video identifying an abandoned tank found in an English field as a rare Canadian Ram tank, designed and built during WWII. In November 2019, Felton created a second channel, titled War Stories with Mark Felton, on which he posts recordings of himself reading from books that he has written.

In 2022, Felton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Felton's most recently published work is Operation Swallow: American Soldiers' Remarkable Escape From Berga Concentration Camp, which details the illegal mistreatment by Germans of U.S. prisoners of war under Nazi captivity in the context of the Battle of the Bulge. It was published by Center Street in October 2019. When creating the book, Felton analysed official documents as well as eyewitness accounts.

In January 2022, the German Tank Museum issued a statement responding to a YouTube video Felton had posted, refuting a claim that they had "recently sold a Tiger I to a private collector and replaced it with a 1:1 plastic model." The Museum accused Felton of "...just want[ing] a maximum degree of sensation and emotion in his video, regardless of facts and with minimum workload."

Personal life
Felton lives in Norwich with his wife and son.