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Bouncing Bazooka's
About two months ago I mentioned, on my Facebook page, a friend in the US by the name of Harold Biondo. Now he's a lucky bloke, and gets to spend his time leafing through the US Archives. He recently...
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Operation Gutesholz
At 1400, on 27th June 1944 the guns around Rauray, almost due west of Caen, fell silent. Both the Germans and British forces had agreed a local truce to allow recovery of the wounded. The village of...
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Scanlon's Knock-Out Punch
There is a constant problem in doing these articles. Sources can conflict quite badly. Sometimes you need to glue snippets together from multiple sources, other times they seem contradictory, so let’s...
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Sabres in Hand
On September 1st 1940, A Polish cavalry regiment spotted some Germans loitering in a clearing near Krojanty. The 18th Pomeranian Uhlans launched a charge at these invaders. The infantry regiment was...
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The CIA's Air to Air
In 1965 the US launched Operation Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam. Things went poorly for the US at first, with organisational and equipment issues, compounded by political interference. To make...
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New Arivals
Before the Second World War El Alamein was little more than a railway halt, during the War it became the furthest the Germans reached into Egypt. The first battle held there had the Allies on the...
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Destruction of History
US Residents, please read this to save your history. I did have a nice article planed out for today, however, a story broke in the week that I felt needed more coverage, so we’re doing that today. For...
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The Firsts
At the outbreak of the First World War the Austro-Hungarians immediately attacked their neighbours. The attack went badly. There is a story that the Austro-Hungarians by accident ended up charging...
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Happy Birthday
Those of you whom have read my articles for a long time will have spotted a trend not to cover German forces in the Second World War too much. There is a reason for this. Most simply, German forces...
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U-boat Safari (Part one)
On the morning of 9th of August 1941 a 65 ton Brixham trawler named Maid Honour chugged slowly out of Poole harbour. Its destination was the west coast of Africa, to target the U-boats that were...
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Grand Theft Pig
Part one can be found here.On the evening of the 14th of January 1942 the mission, codenamed Operation Postmaster, began and it soon went wrong. The operation was timed perfectly to start at 2330, as...
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Miss Fit Mavis
On 23 October 1942 a PBY-5a Catalina was flying over the Solomon Sea. Around lunch time she became embroiled in a vicious gun battle with a Japanese H6K4 "Mavis" flying boat, the flying boats battered...
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The MBT-70 story (part two)
A few weeks ago, you'll remember me putting up an article on how TACOM scrapped the MBT-70 prototype. Well there has been some movement to the story, but not one that ends with someone getting double...
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Plans
In the run up to Christmas, getting some building work done, and fervently hunting for a new job I completely failed to get an article done for this week.However, while leafing through my documents...
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The Tiny Erinyes
Last week I posted a collection of plans I had found lurking on my hard drive. Well I didn't post them all, as I wanted to use the last ones to add to this week’s article. That's because the subject of...
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Making Makin
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (remember the date line, so this event happened on the 9th of December), the Japanese took control of Butaritari Island. The Japanese troops would...
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Deaths Halifax
Close to midnight on the night of the 5th/6th of September 1943 a young German girl in the village of Waldsee borrowed the key to the Church steeple from her mother. She climbed the stairs to the top,...
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Tank Hell
On the 16th of January 1991 the Coalition began operation Desert Storm, which resulted in one of the most comprehensive defeats in modern times. It was later said that as most of the forces and...
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Ramming speed
Today, I'm going to take one of my periodical voyages into the depths of history, or at least slightly outside the scope of the normal date range of subjects I cover on here. The catalyst for this was...
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The White Ships
On the 27th of June 1942 Convoy PQ-17 left Iceland, where it had assembled, bound for Arkhangelsk. It consisted of thirty-five merchantmen and was extremely heavily escorted with both a close in...
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