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: Czech History
The Czechoslovakian Crisis
Many years before The Czech Republic and Slovakia freed themselves from the yoke of being simply Czechoslovakia, this crisis evolved from territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler. One…
Some notes on the 2000 Scarlet Pimpernel series
Some notes on the 2000 TV series ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ I have in my possession a box set of this production, the material contained in four DVD discs….
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…
The tragedy of Lidice
Lidice was a Czechoslovak mining village not far from Prague. As a community it had no importance, but the Nazis needed to make an example of somewhere, following…
The defenestration of Prague
This is a difficult word to find in many otherwise excellent dictionaries; its source is the French word fenêtre meaning window. The act of defenestration means the throwing…
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…