Category: Military History

The Strangest Battle of World War II? Uncovering the Battle of Castle Itter

The Strangest Battle of World War II? Uncovering the Battle of Castle Itter

by | Apr 3, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In the waning hours of the war, exactly five days after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, a bizarre battle would commence in a small Austrian town, just south of the German border.
Seven hundred years after its construction in the 1200s, Castle Itter would host a battle between the Waffen-SS (the Nazi party’s specialist paramilitary) and a combined force of defecting German Wehrmacht troops, American soldiers, Austrian resistance fighters, and various French political prisoners.

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Slavery at home? The Australian Conscription Referendums of WWI

Slavery at home? The Australian Conscription Referendums of WWI

by | Mar 20, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 11 minutes
On 31st July 1914, just days before the catastrophe of war was allowed to come to Europe, Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher made a solemn promise on behalf of his country to “stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.”
But as the months passed as the fighting ground on, and as stories of the horrors endured in Turkey and France trickled back to the home front, Australia’s young democracy faced one of its most harrowing trials yet as those on both sides of the issue battled to determine the path ahead.

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Visions of Despair: 6 Artworks Capturing the Horrors of WWI

Visions of Despair: 6 Artworks Capturing the Horrors of WWI

by | Feb 27, 2025 | , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
The emotive styles captured both the physical destruction of war to humanity and the environment and its lasting emotional toll.
World War I, the first truly global conflict, impacted every facet of society and culture, including the art sphere. New forms of weaponry, casualties on an unbelievable scale, and changing political structures drastically reshaped the world and formed a new cultural landscape.

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Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

by | Feb 20, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.
A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.

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Free of the Trench: How British & Imperial Forces Overcame the Deadlock of the Western Front

Free of the Trench: How British & Imperial Forces Overcame the Deadlock of the Western Front

by | Feb 20, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 12 minutes
The First World War came to an end just over 100 years ago, a mere moment’s time in human history. But as close as we are to it, a century is more than enough to surround that conflict with myth and misconception.

The image of the war on the Western Front, as brought to us through decades of outdated scholarship and popular fiction, is simple: two vast armies, each equipped with the latest murderous fruits of the industrial age, found they couldn’t decisively defeat one another in the field and so settled into a long, bloody, dirty, and consumptive war in which thousands of lives were thrown away every day, often for minuscule gains which would bring neither side meaningfully closer to victory.
The real story is more complicated. By 1916, it was plain to see that tactics like those championed by Haig, designed to draw out the enemy for a momentous set-piece battle, weren’t working, and even those neck-deep in the fight didn’t need the benefit of hindsight to recognise that.

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Intelligence agency’s 1981 assessment of climate-change threat was remarkably accurate

Intelligence agency’s 1981 assessment of climate-change threat was remarkably accurate

by | Feb 3, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Australia’s national intelligence agency has released a report that ‘examines the implications of the increasing accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, with special reference to Australia as a producer and exporter of coal’. It flags that ‘major economic and social adjustments’ are going to be required as a result.

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Inventing Special Forces: Operation Jaywick

Inventing Special Forces: Operation Jaywick

by | Jan 30, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 11 minutes
Modern special forces are capable of astonishing feats of arms, from crippling their opponents’ infrastructure to derailing entire campaigns. While soldiers have been detailed for highly specialised and dangerous tasks since before history began, the first true forbears to today’s special forces were first established in the midst of the Second World War, when the Axis powers seemed poised to seize victory at any moment.

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Free France was African: the Story of France’s African Soldiers in WW2

Free France was African: the Story of France’s African Soldiers in WW2

by | Jan 23, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 15 minutes
From a humble, precarious exile in London, Free France patched together from soldiers and sailors of the scattered French military under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. One of the most storied resistance movements in World War II, far-flung Frenchmen swelled in number until hundreds of thousands could return to liberate France in 1944.

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