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  • Assassination by Plane April 5, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Assassination by Plane

    Assassination by plane. This is opening a new tag on instances where state actors have deliberately killed marked individuals by shooting down or, otherwise destroying, the plane that they happened to be travelling on. Operation Vengeance A couple of examples just to get the ball rolling. First, Operation Vengeance. Early April 1943 the US picked […]

    Wilhelm and Alfred Meet Stalin March 25, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Wilhelm and Alfred Meet Stalin

    Wilhelm and Alfred This post is written not with a sneer still less with pleasure, but with real sympathy for two men who saw their courage relegate them to a thousand footnotes. Welcome from left stage Wilhelm Korpik and Alfred Liskow. A light ripple of applause fills the auditorium. German Attack Wilhelm and Alfred had […]

    Helen Duncan and HMS Hood: A Coincidence? March 23, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Helen Duncan and HMS Hood: A Coincidence?

    Introducing HMS Hood This blog dealt yesterday (it feels longer ago) with Helen Duncan, medium extraordinaire, claiming, in Portsmouth in 1941, that HMS Barham had sunk before the British government had announced that ship’s demise. In that post I acknowledged that there was another case where Helen Duncan had learnt that a ship had sunk […]

    Helen Duncan and HMS Barham: A Sceptic Speaks March 22, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Helen Duncan and HMS Barham: A Sceptic Speaks

    Introduction It is one of the most extraordinary psychic events of the twentieth century, rave some. It proves that mediums really can communicate with the dead, state others. A Scottish medium, Helen Duncan brought, in early December 1941, a relative of a crew member of HMS Barham into contact with her recently dead son (or […]

    Who Coined ‘World War’? February 16, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Who Coined 'World War'?

    ‘World war’ is a magnificent phrase. It alliterates, it promises a vast scale, and it doesn’t get lost in tiresome Latinate polysyllables. But where does the expression come from? The Longer Oxford Dictionary gives its earliest reference in English to 1848 and the People’s Journal.* Actually the phrase seems to have been used earlier in […]

    Man at Station Changes Course of War February 4, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Man at Station Changes Course of War

    Mid October 1941. A man with a mustache walks up and down besides a train, while snow falls. He is conscious, all too conscious that he is about to make a decision that will change the direction of the war, perhaps even its outcome: a true hinge moment. And the decision? Quite simply should he […]

    Obscene Mexican Japanese Generals January 9, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Obscene Mexican Japanese Generals

    Beach came across this list of Japanese generals that was allegedly published in a Mexican newspaper in 1941. It was republished in A. Jimenez, Picardía Mexicana in 1965. The joke is that the names are all clever and very obscene double entendres in Mexican Spanish. Beach does not understand them all, but if anyone else […]

    World War 2 Rumours January 5, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    World War 2 Rumours

    Beach is continuing to hunt down rumours, this time from the British press in the Second World War. Here are some global and some local, some silly and some worryingly credible. All were published with the implication being that they are not to be believed and yet were they so far off the mark? The […]

    Review: Grossman, Life and Fate November 25, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Review: Grossman, Life and Fate

    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate [1960] This blogger has been very reluctant to write posts on historical fiction for the simple fact that he cannot stand most representatives of the genre. But Life and Fate was started reluctantly during the recent flu wars, and has been great bedtime and pre-siesta reading ever since. Written in […]

    The End of German Bohemia, May 1945 August 25, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    The End of German Bohemia, May 1945

    Thanks to Stephen D. for sending in this extraordinary video of the disintegration of German Bohemia in May 1945. Bohemia was a mixed Czech-German province and German speakers had lived there since perhaps as early as the year 1000. Bohemia became part of the Czech Republic after the First World War, and the ‘cause’ of […]

    Myths of Twentieth-Century History August 6, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Modern
    Myths of Twentieth-Century History

    Seven twentieth century myths follow. Any other contributions or angry rebuttals, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Great War: A Disaster Waiting to Happen, 1914 The Great War was going to happen sooner or later because two countries, Germany and France, wanted it. However, the consensus that the Great War would have inevitably led to the ‘breaking […]

    Review: Hitler’s Forgotten Children December 5, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Review: Hitler's Forgotten Children

    Lebensborn is a Nazi word to place side by side with such Teutonic charmers as Einsatzgruppen, Lebensraum and Endlösung. The Lebensborn or Life’s Fount was a scheme to breed a hundred million blond supermen and their hand maidens. It had various reflexes: sex between consenting Aryans was encouraged, against conventional Christian morality; Aryan women siring children […]

    Review: Postwar November 22, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Review: Postwar

    Tony Judt is often touted as one of the great historians of the later twentieth century. Yet really his writings are, with one exception, not the stuff that world reputations are made on The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century or Socialism in Provence 1871–1914: A Study in the Origins […]

    Night Soldiers: the World of Alan Furst November 20, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Night Soldiers: the World of Alan Furst

    Europe from 1933-1945, from Hitler’s arrival in office to the moment that the moustached one ends his life with a pistol in the bunker. What a truly remarkably, ear-splittingly screwed up continent! We travel from De Valera’s theocratic Ireland dancing  hopelessly at the crossroads, to men, women and children being taken downstairs to be shot […]

    Herman Göring in Plymouth November 11, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Herman Göring in Plymouth

    In Plymouth, in the Second World War, a strange idea evolved, among the bombed out population: Plymouth, as an important port, was all too frequently visited by the Luftwaffe. The population came to believe that Herman Göring, the head of his Luftwaffe, personally took part in the attacks on the city. Plymouth folk even claimed […]