When the US 101st Airborne* were besieged in Bastogne during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in Dec 1944, they were re-supplied from the air, not just by parachute but by gliders too. Until Dr Peter Caddick-Adams mentioned it in his excellent online lecture** on ‘The Battle of...
I came across this little ‘factoid’ in the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s in-house magazine, Scuttlebutt, which was a fascinating publication until they stopped publishing it! It’s one of those ‘unknown unknowns’ as Donald Rumsfeld would say. I didn’t know that I didn’t know it… until...
You’ve gotta love it! What a spectacular piece of engineering the Napier Sabre is! At least, what a spectacular engineering concept. Sadly its early iterations at the start of WW2 weren’t always the finest examples of engineering quality control when they went into production. So they weren’t...
One of Hamburg’s World War Two giant flak towers (Flakturm) is to have a 136-room hotel built on the top three floors. The NH Hotel Group has won the tender to operate the NHow hotel, which will have a bar, cafe and a spectacular roof-top garden with...
I recently came across this small event in Patrick Delaforce’s book, Churchill’s Desert Rats*. It illustrates how, sometimes, there can be brief moments of honour & decency – even involving the SS – in the midst of total war. It was during the opening stages of Operation...
I came across this statue of French aviator, Hubert Latham, a couple of days ago on the French coast just outside Sangatte. He’s an interesting guy and so nearly was the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. He was certainly the first to try! Latham...
We think of the Hawker Hurricane as the workhorse of the Battle of Britain and, while generally acknowledged to be not as fast or glamourous as the Spitfire, most pilots found it to be a highly efficient gun platform that could take a lot of punishment. Most,...
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...
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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