In our last post (No. 300) we took a brief look at the Finnish-Russian War of 1939/40. This war was incalculably important in the history of the twentieth…
The Finnish-Russian War: David & Goliath?
Not really, because this war was not won by ‘David’. Otherwise, the similarities are notable. In November, 1939, only a couple of months after the beginning of World…
Hiroshima and later
Hiroshima had a population of roughly 300,000 in 1945. It was a military base, port, and popular seaside resort in the western part of Honshu Island, Japan. The…
The Continental System (Blockade)
When I was a schoolboy (the Punic Wars q.v.), Bonaparte’s genial idea was called ‘The Continental System’, a good name but implying a kind of applied plan to…
What is Isolationism?
Well, very soon we will know what it is. And I might add it is a great pity there is not more of it around. Loss of it…
The Blogger Kite
I have been forced to reach the conclusion that this planet is full of persons whose self-appointed task it is to find errors, large or small, in the…
Ernst Rohm & the Night of the Long Knives: the end of the SA
Rohm was born in 1887. By twenty-six he was an Army captain, thrice wounded in the First World War. His views on the old bougeoisie of the Weimar…
Alexander I, Tsar of Russia
The future Tsar was born in 1777, a son of the supposedly mad Tsar Paul. Contemporary chroniclers have it that young Alexander was implicated in the murder of…
Evelyn Waugh’s ear-trumpet
I am sure there are Waugh-fans, or, better, Waugh-wolves who can answer a simple question: In their respective biographies of Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes (Evelyn Waugh: a biography)…
The Gestapo: a brief history
With movies made about the Second World War as popular as ever, the name ‘Gestapo’ is familiar to almost everyone. Exactly what it was and its functions are…