Britain is no country for old men: Britain is no country for a very old Second World War spitfire pilot called Flight Lieutenant Edmund James

Edmund, who is 98 years old, is one of the last remaining fighter pilots from the Second World War. While, at the age of 17, he was too young to fight in the Battle of Britain, Edmund enlisted in the RAF and joined 93 Squadron and based at Biggin Hill he saw action over British waters and above the fields of France during and after D-Day in 1944.

He was involved in …

Source: Britain is no country for old men: Britain is no country for a very old Second World War spitfire pilot called Flight Lieutenant Edmund James

Beaufighter Discovered by Couple Walking on the Beach

Graham Holden and his partner were walking their dog on a Cleethorpes beach when they discovered wreckage that left him “amazed.”

Experts believe that what they found is the remains of an RAF Bristol Beaufighter which crashed shortly after it took off from North Coates in Lincolnshire one day in April 1944. RAF North Coates was located six miles southeast of Cleethorpes when it operated from 1914 until its closure in 1990. The airfield is now operated privately…

Source: Beaufighter Discovered by Couple Walking on the Beach

May 19, 1944 The Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz – Today in History

Shimson Eizik Ovitz was a Romanian rabbi, a WWI era entertainer, and someone afflicted with pseudoachondroplasia. He was a dwarf. Ovitz fathered 10 children by two normal sized wives, Brana Fruchter and Batia Bertha Husz. Three of them grew to normal height, the other seven…

Source: May 19, 1944, The Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz – Today in History

D-Day | In Times Gone By…

This image – from the 6th of June, 1944 – shows British troops taking part in the iconic Normandy landings of the Second World War. Some 156 000 troops from more than a dozen nations to…

Source: D-Day | In Times Gone By…

Memory and identity: a personal history – Mathew Lyons

My father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He will be 90 this year. He grew up close by the docks in Beckton, East London, which are now long gone. He remembers seeing the first wave of German bombers flying over London on September 7, 1940.

He was stationed in the Pacific when he joined the Navy in 1944; he has photos of Nagasaki taken a few weeks after it was destroyed by the atomic bomb.

At Cambridge after the war, he joined the Communist Party only to leave in the 1950s, disheartened by the party’s refusal to fully endorse the democratic process. At least, this is what I remember being told long ago, when facts seemed more stable than they do now.He spent almost his entire working life in…

Source: Memory and identity: a personal history – Mathew Lyons

Holocaust documents trove unearthed in Budapest apartment

A document dating from 1944 that is part of around 6,300 census forms of Budapest’s then Jewish population. Photograph: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images

More than 6,000 historically valuable documents, long thought destroyed during the war, found hidden in wall cavity by couple renovating apartment…

Source: Holocaust documents trove unearthed in Budapest apartment

An Eyewitness Account of the Battle of Okinawa | Global Geopolitics

I am not allowed to re-blog this article but it is a moving eyewitness account from a Japanese perspective of the Battle of Okinawa in 1944.

An Eyewitness Account of the Battle of Okinawa

 

The History Girls: Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley

Gravestone of a female resistance fighter,
Powąnski Cemetery, Warsaw.
(Copyright Clare Mulley)

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Warsaw Uprising. By the summer of 1944 the tide of the Second World War had turned. The Soviets, now Allies, had reversed the German advance, and France was fighting towards liberation. Sensing change, the Polish government-in-exile authorized their highly organised resistance ‘Home Army’ to rise up against the extremely brutal Nazi forces occupying their capital.

On the 1st August thousands of Polish men, women and children launched a coordinated attack. The Poles had faced invasion on two fronts at the start of the war, and were well aware of the dual threat to their independence. Their aim now was to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis so that they could welcome the advancing Soviet Army as free, or at least fighting, citizens. Moscow radio had appealed to the Poles to take action, but the Red Army then deliberately waited within hearing distance for the ensuing conflict to decimate the Polish resistance before making their own entry. The Warsaw Uprising is remembered as one of the most courageous resistance actions of the Second World War, but also…

Continue: The History Girls: Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley.