The Blizkrieg from Nazi Germany that opened the Second War in 1939 showed that apart from tank power, air power was a vital component of…
Category: History of Czechoslovakia
The Treaty of Trianon (1920) and its effect on Hungary
This treaty is another good example of the collateral damage to be expected when states join in wars with the express intention of gaining territory, though the war…
Appeasement
A bit of a dirty word since 1938 but it shouldn’t be. There is enough appeasement going on now over the disgusting situation in Syria to fill the…
1936: The Remilitarization of the Rhineland
The ill-prepared and unfortunate Treaty of Versailles (q.v.) had left the left bank of the Rhine plus an area 50 kilometres deep on its right bank permanently demilitarized…
The Thirty Years War
The British were involved in this nasty episode, though only on the margins. All wars are horribly wasting, but this one could be taken as the best example….
Heydrich and the massacre at Lidice
My new wife and I settled into our new home in a country lane at Santa Úrsula on the island of Tenerife in 1980. In a small cottage…
The Final Solution
Researchers have tried to find cogent reasons for Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews. Nothing in his childhood in Austria happened which might have sown the…
The battle of Austerlitz
Map of the Battle of Austerlitz Anyone living at the beginning of the nineteenth century might have thought that the battle of Trafalgar, fought in October 1805…
The League of Nations
This preamble to the United Nations has vanished without trace. It was one of the oddest disasters waiting to happen the world has ever seen. It appeared after…