One of the highlights of my last trip to France was the three days I spent in Normandy, site of the D-Day invasion. As a professional military guy, this is one of the coolest possible trips because the Normandy campaign had it all – amphibious assaults, airborne drops, tank battles, joint firepower, fighters and bombers,…
Category: Historical Study
World War Two History: The First German-Soviet Military Pact And The Origins of World War II
Before dawn on June 22, 1941, German bombers began to rain destruction down on a swath of Soviet cities from Leningrad to Sevastopol. It was the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in the history of the world. By the end of the day, three million German soldiers and their allies crossed the…
American History: How Ayatollah Khomeini Suckered Jimmy Carter (And How Obama Got Suckered Too)
The Ayatollah Khomeini was using taqiyya in its classic sense. The concept of taqiyya as such is specifically Shi’ite, developed during the time of the sixth Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, in middle of the eighth century, when the Shi’ites were being persecuted by the Sunni caliph al-Mansur. Taqiyya allowed Shi’ites to pretend to be Sunnis in…
Obscure World War II History: The Failed Japanese Coup of 1945
A last-ditch attempt to overthrow the Japanese government at the end of World War II was a bloody embarrassment Open Road Media sponsored this post. By August 1945 more than two million Japanese soldiers, sailors and aviators had died in eight years of war stretching from China and Southeast Asia to halfway across the Pacific….
World War II Movies Worth A Damn: Fortress of War
This movie is also called “The Brest Fortress”. -SF The film is a flawed depiction of the Brest Fortress siege, but rightly celebrates the defenders’ enormous courage. The 2010 Russian-Belarusian film Fortress of War tells the tale of the Soviet men and women defending an exposed, antiquated fortress. As the first to be hit…
Profiles in Courage: The Tank Killers of Roughneck 91
I highly recommend the book Roughneck 91: The Amazing True Story of a Special Forces A-Team at War. This happened early on in the War and did not get a lot of coverage, but next to the Marines at Fallujah, this is definitely one of the most amazing stories of the War. -SF When a group…
World War II History: One of The Most Devastating Bombing’s of WW2 You Most Likely Never Heard About
“It was a lovely winter morning with a clear sky overhead. At 11:10 a.m., the earth shuddered violently.” So reads an official’s account of an otherwise unremarkable day in 1944. But what was very remarkable was the source of the shuddering: an explosion so fierce it left a crater 80 feet deep and a…
Brush-Up On Your History: The Myths of “American” Slavery
As construction of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture progresses toward its September opening, Museum Director Lonnie Bunch joined CBS “60 Minutes”’ Scott Pelley on a visit to Mozambique in search of a ship that carried hundreds of African slaves to the bottom of the Indian Ocean when it foundered 220…
Holocaust History: Ukraine Honors Nationalist Whose Troops Killed 50K Jews in 1920’s
Another sad example of how Anti-Semitism is creeping back into Europe and being virtually ignored in America.-SF Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for…
Vietnam War History: Trying to Find Viet-Cong Tunnels with Witching Rods?
The Military Has Been Known to Try Almost Anything Once, Regardless of it’s Effectiveness For more than five centuries, farmers, treasure hunters and others have applied a pseudoscientific practice known as “dowsing” to find water, caves, graves and more. During the Vietnam War, American troops tried using the method to divine the location of…