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,…
Category: History of the Low Countries
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…
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 (disastrous) Peace of Amiens
The months of February and March, 1802 encouraged a fairly peaceful interlude in the Napoleonic Wars between France and (principally) Britain. The British people were sick to…
The Kaiser (Wilhelm II of Germany)
The future King of Prussia and German Emperor was born in 1859, the eldest son of the then Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (he later became Emperor…
The first European Community (failed)
The EEC as we know it today bears no resemblance to this first attempt, but at least enough initiative was shown by its inventors to make it last…
The Stuart Dynasty
Stuart, originally Stewart, is the family name of Scottish kings and queens from nearly the end of the fourteenth century until 1714 – English monarchs as well…
Post-War poverty in Socialist Britain (1945 – 51)
It was a surrealist time to be British. Six years of total war had left the people with their men and womenfolk dead, wounded and crippled as…
The Nine Years War
Of all the wars known by duration in years, the least well-known is the Nine Years War (1688 – 97). Nevertheless this conflict has its important side,…