Remembering the Battle of Crete – 2025 Commemorations
This year is the 84th Anniversary of the Battle of Crete. The fighting around Rethymno will be...
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Tag: German
The Malta convoys: Australian sailors speak
Reading time: 7 minutes
The island of Malta, located in almost the exact centre of the Mediterranean, was an important depot and staging post for the Allied efforts in North Africa and, later, the invasion of Italy. As a result, the Axis forces bombed it relentlessly for years, something you can read about more in our article on the Siege of Malta through Australian eyes.
The Strangest Battle of World War II? Uncovering the Battle of Castle Itter
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.
Menace at Home – Australia Under Attack 1939-1945 Conference – Melbourne 10th May
10th May 2025, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. This one-day conference will explore the numerous ways...
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Free France was African: the Story of France’s African Soldiers in WW2
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.
The Akikaze Massacre: the Japanese Navy’s Mass Murder in the Solomon Sea
Reading time: 12 minutes
When the Pacific War began in 1941, Japanese military planners had long recognised that they could not hope to win a protracted war against the United States, its likeliest and likely deadliest opponent in the Pacific. Instead, they pinned their hopes on a swift, devastating series of campaigns to seize strategic points.
A History of Drinking with the World’s Oldest Pubs
Reading time: 7 minutes
Alcohol is one of humanity’s oldest inventions.
Our earliest evidence of humans brewing and drinking alcohol comes from 8th Century BCE China – over 9,000 years ago.
Across the world, from China and India to Mesopotamia and Europe, we’ve brewed many different types of alcoholic drinks, and almost as old as the drinks are the places we drink in.
While most of the world has a long history of drinking establishments, Europe is the home of the pub, which comes from the Roman tradition of establishing tabernaes or wine shops everywhere they went.
Dive! Australian Submariners at War by Mike Carlton – Book Review
Reading time: 4 minutes
Dive! opens with the best description of the development and implementation of submarine technology and doctrine I have ever read. This could easily be part of a broader history of submarines, Carlton has clearly done broad and extensive research and his writing effortlessly demonstrates his command of the topic.
“IT WON’T DO TO PRETEND THAT WE ARE POWERFUL”: CHINA’S GERMAN-TRAINED ARMY
Reading time: 11 minutes
In 1926, a newly-unified China had millions of men under arms, but few who could wield them effectively. Determined to make the country ready to defend itself, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek turned to an unusual ally.
For a decade, officers and experts from Germany’s Reichswehr oversaw the transformation of China’s army. While their plans were never fully realised, they had a significant impact on the war to resist Japanese invasion.
HISTORICALLY SKEWED AND MUSICALLY SUBLIME: AMADEUS AT 40
Reading time: 9 minutes
In the pantheon of Western classical music an esteemed list of names has captured the admiration and attention of the public for centuries. From the Baroque masters of Bach and Handel, the classical giants of Beethoven and Haydn, and the romantic poets of Chopin and Liszt, much of society’s collective fascination with these composers has extended far beyond just their musical creations. Who were they and how did they write such exquisite melodies? In attempting to learn more about the lives of these men who continue to move so many around the world, personal portraits emerge of seemingly ordinary beings. An ordinariness that vanished when pen was put to paper, and a musical sublimeness was born.
Traitors to King and Country: Inside the British Free Corps, Hitler’s British Legion
Reading time: 11 minutes
From the moment it took power, the Nazis ruled over a German state possessed of two armies. One was the inheritor of the imperial lineage of the First World War, and the second was the Waffen-SS, which grew from a tiny band of Hitler’s most hardened antisemites to a force of nearly a million men from over two dozen nations before its demise.
The Blue Division: Franco’s Soldiers on the Eastern Front
Reading time: 12 minutes
From 1939 to 1945, scarcely one of the 99 countries on Earth went untouched. Just 14 nations remained neutral throughout the Second World War, and even those couldn’t completely escape the gravity well of war.
Nor did they all want to. A prelude to the European war – bloody, massive, and unspeakably destructive – had played out in Spain from 1936 until just a few months before Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939.
