Pointe du Hoc is the famous cliff promontory at the western edge of Omaha beach, that was heroically scaled and overrun by US Rangers on the morning of D-Day, June 6th 1944. Now it is a battlefield and memorial site. The History D-Day planners were particularly worried...
The Mary Rose is one of Britain’s most important historic artefacts and should be on everyone’s ‘Must See’ list. When she sank into the silt of the Solent almost five centuries ago (474 yrs), she became a Tudor time capsule containing the personal effects, weapons, tools, clothing,...
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is opening a new permanent exhibit on 9th May 2019. It’ll be the first in America devoted to exploring the constitutional debates from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Civil War and Reconstruction: The Battle for Freedom and Equality will feature key...
A new book about Ypres has just been published. There must be dozens of books about the WW1 battles for Ypres in Belgium, but Ypres – part of Oxford University Press Great Battles series – is not really about the strategy or carnage in the Ypres Salient....
The wreck of an aircraft discovered in 1996 near Papua New Guinea could turn out to be the Lockheed Electra 10E in which Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937. William “Bill” Pennington Snavely, Jr certainly thinks it could be, but he is reluctant...
There was a public auction today, of memorabilia and documents from the British Antarctic Expedition 1907–09, also known as the Nimrod Expedition. A ‘hat-tip’ to former colleague, Matthew Teller, for spotting it and posting it on Twitter. The Lots 1-6 being sold off in Golding Young &...
The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa will conclude its commemoration of the First World War Centenary with a special exhibition opening today. Victory 1918 – The Last 100 Days, explores the critical role the Canadian Corps played in the series of battles that led to the Allied...
Barbados is home to many obvious things; palm trees, beaches, rum and Bajan cuisine, but nobody expects a Cold War relic like the massive HARP space gun. Nor are they likely to stumble across it accidentally. You have to go and find it. The High Altitude Research...
Hardly a month seems to go by without another story of how the preservation of a battlefield site, usually in the USA or UK, is threatened by developers. In Scotland over recent months we’ve seen moves to build houses on part of Culloden¹, to accommodate a road...
It wasn’t just any civilian*, it was one of America’s most famous celebrities at the time, Charles A. Lindbergh. Lindbergh, famous for making the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in his single-engined Spirit of St Louis aircraft in 1927, wasn’t supposed to...
What was the average failure rate of aerial bombs in the Second World War, and whose were better – the USAAF, RAF, Luftwaffe, Russian VVS, Regia Aeronautica, or maybe Japan’s IJAAS? I’m wondering because I came across an interesting statistic in Ian McLachian’s book of Eighth Air...
This year is the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, and that moment finally came with the signing of the Armistice in a railway carriage in the middle of a wood 80 kilometres north east of Paris on 11th November 1918. Yesterday, after...
This clock in Salisbury Cathedral is thought to be the world’s oldest… that is still working! Once again it was the Dutch who were working at the cutting edge of technology (remember, their engineers were all over the UK at the start of the middle ages building...
The movie industry news media are talking about Tom Hank’s latest project, a World War 2 movie about the Atlantic Convoy War called Greyhound, to be shot on board the WW2 destroyer, USS Kidd. Hanks has written the screenplay and will play the lead character. His script...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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