Category Archives: MILITARY HISTORY
Spanish volunteers for Nazi Germany: The Blue Division
On the beginning of World War II Franco’s Spain just went through the civil war that lasted long enough to drain country’s resources, so General Francisco Franco, though he supported Axis cause, was reluctant to bring Spain officially into the war conflict. But General Franco allowed number of volunteers to serve under German’s command, and, in the same time, he continued to maintain Spain’s neutrality. Shortly after the operation Barbarossa and invasion of the Russia, Joachim von Ribbentrop received Spanish offer for help, and also Adolf Hitler agreed with it.
World War II: Aftermath Facts
The cost of World War II is uncalculable in human or financial terms. estimates indicate that about 55 million people died in Europe during the World War II; of these, about 8 millions were German. Death was not for soldiers – civilians died in their millions too, and came from many different directions through these cruel years. In the opening stages of the war, as the German armies invaded Poland, Adolf Hitler wasted little time in organizing the killing of large numbers of non-combatants.
The Bay of Pigs: The Unsuccessful Invasion
On the night of April 16th and 17th, 1961, 1,400 armed men on board a flotilla of small boats and landing-craft approached Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the southern coast of Cuba. ‘Brigade 2506’ was mainly Cuban, with a handful of ‘North Americans’ (US citizens in Cuba-speak), refugees from the regime headed by Fidel Castro, which had overthrown the pro-US caudillo Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar 27 months earlier. The brigade’s goal was to oust Castro and the Fidelistas. Within three days, more than three quarters of them had been captured and more than 100 killed.
The War Horses of the Western Front
Michael Morpurgo’s popular novel War Horse (1982) has rightly been referred to as ‘the Black Beauty of the Great War’. Like Anna Sewell’s classic of 1877, the story unfolds from the perspective of the horse, a device that allows the author to explore the world of those voiceless but sentient creatures and invites us to reflect upon both the misery they have suffered at our hands and the compelling call of compassion that can transcend the boundaries of ‘human’ and ‘animal’.
British bombarment of Copenhagen 1802
The British had shelled the Danish capital before, in 1801, but the second onslaught was even more devastating. The Danes had repaired their city and their fleet in the meantime, but late in July 1807 the new British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, received intelligence that the Franco-Russian alliance signed at Tilsit had included a secret agreement to force Denmark and Sweden into Napoleon’s continental blockade of British trade.