This treaty has been blamed by many historians as a more than indirect cause of the Second World War. It was supposed to be a treaty made between…
Author: Dean Swift
‘Dean Swift’ is a pen name: the author has been a soldier; he has worked in sales, TV, the making of films, as a teacher of English and history and a journalist. He is married with three grown-up children. They live in Spain.
Caustic Conferences
Wars are expensive, brutal and finally useless, as long as human beings will kill others in an argument over territory or sovereignty. The longer they last the worse,…
Erich Ludendorff
Germany is a country of tradition, contrast and discipline mixed with a craving for modernity and change. The actual Chancellor is a lady from the Centre/Right…
Sparta and things Spartan
Sparta as the English call this spectacular place in the southern Peloponnese (Greece) was a city/state, and the capital of the state of Laconia. This small country was…
The campaign in North-West Europe (September 1944 – May 1945)
This campaign was the advance of the Allies through France following the successful invasion of D-Day. It is important because it contains the blindest and most incomprehensible…
Some naval mutinies
The very nature of living together in ships sailing sometimes alone in a thousand square miles of ocean used to mean discomfort, hard discipline and rigid…
The foundations of modern Socialism
Socialism has many names and faces: Marxism, Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism and Social Democracy all mean Socialism, which is a political theory of social re-organisation, putting limits…
The first Empire upon which the sun never set
Four hundred years before the British Empire never enjoyed the setting sun, the Spanish Empire rose, flourished, dwindled and vanished. From the late fifteenth century, Spain, a fraction…
The Malayan Campaign and Emergency
The campaign was a military action in South-East Asia between December 1941 and August, 1945 during the Second World War. General Tomoyuki secured free passage…