Great piece
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The Normandy war sites are impressive places. Really brings home the reality of it.
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Travellers in the Third Reich is a good book about now it creeped up on people.
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Yes it’s a great book. A book I pick up time and again.
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It surprised me that “normal people” went on holidays to Europe from UK then - shop workers and clerical staff.
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Yes they are. I was up around the Somme yesterday and there were little graveyards everywhere. Very well kept - the Commonwealth Graves Commission are to be commended for this. The overriding emotion though is wasted young lives.
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I’ll have to check it out
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You can find interesting periods of history at every turn yet there is something special about Weimar period Germany. So much going on and no one really knows anything about it as it was overshadowed by the two world wars
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Passed them several times over the years but always rushing to a ferry or a border, real would like to visit
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Yeah it’s fascinating. I know very little about it but Russia under Stalin is something I must learn more about.
I love watching WWII in colour on Netflix, no special effects or narratives just the most amazing historical story telling itself in pictures.
I remember watching a WWI documentary in colour, they did a piece on a French soldier who had half his face shot off, showed him, and read out a piece he had written after. To put it mildly it would open your eyes on war. I wish it was played in every high school in America when the vultures come recruiting.
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Myself and a group of friends cycled around the somme a few years back, we did about 200kms and initially were stopping at all those graveyards before we realised how many we were going to come across. The ages of all those buried was frightening.
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This should be recommended reading in every school
Dulce et Decorum Est
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BY WILFRED OWEN
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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I studied that in school
Great series, Apocalypse - Second World War Documentary - WW2 Documentary - YouTube this one has different footage, I used to habitually watch this stuff when I was stoned and got through plenty of it
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The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer is one of the best war books you could read. It’s a young member if the Wermacht’s diary of life on the Eastern Front.
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I have never heard of it, not many books from the Eastern front in English
Well worth it. Compelling and sobering all at the same time. Just the gravestones with names and dates of birth etc personalises it
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I visited German war dead in Romania, and a local one on Weibersbrun( 59/69 km from Frankfurt)
Broke down there for a few days whilst travelling to Romania one time
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All school kids should be encouraged to do likewise, and obviously any future teachers of modern European history