Last night I watched a Russian film called ‘The Brest Fortress’ about the German storming of the fortress at Brest Litovsk on the Bug River on June 22 1941. This was the first day of the Barbarossa invasion and the attack came as a complete surprise to the defenders. This film shows, better than any I’ve […]
As well as board games (see earlier blog) I’ve also taken an unhealthy interest in computer games along the way, and seen some of the things we could only dream about as teenagers come to fruition. This includes brilliant strategy games like Panzer General, Heroes of Might & Magic and of course, Civilization. This is […]
If you’re a fan of war fiction, there’s plenty to choose from, but this genre falls into a pretty broad range of sub-categories and it can get rather confusing. For example, while both in essence ‘war books’, a serious biographical work like All quiet on the Western Front can’t be considered in the same breath […]
I consider myself an extremely fortunate person for a number of reasons, mostly to do with choosing my parents well and being born in Australia in the 20th century, the greatest Golden Age of peace and prosperity ever known in history probably. I had the good fortune to go to university and do a Bachelor […]
72 years ago today, the German army invaded Russia in what was termed ‘Operation Barbarossa’, named after Frederick Barbarossa, a mediaeval Holy Roman Emperor. This was the biggest invasion ever seen in history, before or since. They started more than a month later than originally planned, because Hitler had spent most of April invading Yugoslavia. […]
I’ve read Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-book Aubrey-Maturin series (better known as the Master and Commander series since the film) four times, and now I’m listening to it again through Audible.com. This isn’t a product endorsement, but until I tried Audible on the recommendation of a friend, I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed being read to. Hearing […]
When I was a child, nay a teenager, and ‘old people’ (my parents’ friends) saw me playing wargames like Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader or Russian Campaign, or worse, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (this was the early 1980s we’re talking here), they would almost invariably say “You’ll soon grow out of that nonsense.” In […]
And of course, let’s not forget that today is the 69th anniversary of D-Day, the biggest seaborne invasion of all time and the start of the liberation of France by British, Canadian, Free French and of course, American forces.
If you’ve read Blood and Blitzkrieg you’ll be familiar with what happened in a farmyard in the town of Le Paradis in France on 27 May 1940. Before I started researching for that book I was totally unaware that the Germans had massacred British soldiers during the invasion of France. In fact it happened several […]
In a previous post I included the Biggles series in my top 10 favourite military fiction books. Well, according to this article in the Daily Mail, Captain Bigglesworth may have been a real person, as apparently, “A 1918 combat report by a pilot called Major James Bigglesworth has been found at the RAF Museum in a collection […]