The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) opened its new ‘behind the scenes’ visitor centre last week in northern France. Most people are aware of the CWGC, particularly when they visit a CWGC cemetery or memorial, but they are perhaps not aware of what the CWGC does or...
The biggest surprise about the German military cemetery at La Cambe is its size – it is small (16.5 acres), given that 21,222 German soldiers are buried here. That’s much smaller than the American Cemetery at Colville (172.5 acres), which has 9,380 graves. The reason is that,...
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 National Park Service (NPS) in Hawaii has announced the immediate closure of one of America’s most famous memorials – the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. The closure is due to a “critical structural and safety issue impacting the USS Arizona Memorial dock and visitor loading...
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...
The long-awaited reopening of The Museum of War and Peace took place in Novion-Porcien in the French Ardennes at the end of last month, in this 100th anniversary year of the conclusion of The First World War. The French Ardennes has been at the heart of European...
I had heard of the Japanese WW2 balloon bomb campaign, but until I was reading David Hambling’s new book, Swarm Troopers – How small drones will conquer the world *, I hadn’t been aware that there had been civilian casualties. In fact these were the only deaths...
This is a memorial I stumbled across outside a church in Nottinghamshire a year ago. There’s not a great deal of information on the memorial itself but thanks to the efforts of a number of people who have been diligently researching the loss of Lancaster W4270 with...
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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