Ancient history

• Task Force Baum, Patton's disastrous operation to free his son-in-law from a prison camp

  Normally, when a war is long enough, a multitude of actions of all kinds are recorded:large-scale campaigns, large and small battles, ambushes, rapid commando interventions... Sometimes very imaginative operations are attempted that, if successful, praise their opponents. author and make him a tacti

• The aerial bombardment that destroyed Pompeii for the second time

  It is well known what happened in the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the year 79 AD. The brutal eruption of the Vesuvius volcano, in the vicinity of which they were located, caused their destruction and the death of thousands of people burned, suffocated and buried under a thick layer of

• The Nazi plan to attack the Panama Canal during World War II

  Sometimes it seems that the Nazi regime had a plan for absolutely everything, since three quarters of a century after the end of World War II, some unpublished are still being found. A good example would be the one that was revealed in mid-2017 in Chile, which would have the objective of attacking t

• The unusual concrete barges that rest on the Thames and were used in the Normandy landings

  One of the many legends that tell of the arrival of the apostle Santiago to the Iberian Peninsula says that he arrived at the coast of Gallaecia crossing the Pillars of Hercules by boat and then going up the Atlantic; another version tells that there were actually seven disciples moving his body.

• The Alpine Wall, the impressive Italian defensive line carved into the rock of the Alps

  Since ancient times, towns, cities and nations have built defensive walls, some as impressive as the Great Wall of China, Hadrians Wall or the walls of Ston. More recently, the war conflicts of the 20th century in Europe left the continent dotted with border fortifications and defensive lines made u

• Aleksandra Samusenko, the first female tank commander during World War II

  War has always been, fundamentally, a mans job; at least when it comes to fighting at the front, where women only used to be various auxiliaries (bartenders, sanitary...), wielding weapons only in extreme cases. However, in the 20th century, female participation experienced a remarkable effervescenc

• Joseph Beyrle, the soldier who fought in the US Army and the Red Army during World War II

  «Amerikansky tovarishch! Amerikansky tovarishch!» The members of the Soviet brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army that was crossing Poland towards Berlin in mid-January 1945 could not believe what they saw:instead of German forces ready to stop the column, a soldier with the A US Army uniform had just

• Max Heiliger, the holder of the bank accounts of the Nazi plunder

  The bank accounts that hid the money looted by the Nazis were in the name of a curious character named Max Heiliger. Among all the outrages committed by the Nazi regime in concentration camps and extermination camps, the appropriation of the material goods of those who were murdered was one of the

• Biuro Szyfrów, the Poles who first cracked the Soviet codes and then the Germans

  Having seen her in a few World War II movies and novels, almost everyone knows that Enigma was the name of a German machine used to encrypt and decrypt codes transmission through an electromechanical system. It is also known that the operation of this device, which had its equivalents in the Unite

• How Bicycle Reflectors Funded Nazi SS Organizations

  Led by Heinrich Himmler, the Ahnenerbe and Lebensborn organizations, both created in 1935, had complementary objectives. The Ahnenerbe was the Society for the Research and Teaching of the German Ancestral Heritage, a pseudo-scientific organization that tried to gather proof and evidence, as well as

• Charles Joseph Coward, the English sergeant who contradicted his surname by saving Jews in Auschwitz

  In 1962 the actor Dirk Bogarde starred in a film entitled The password is courage There he will not be satisfied with continuing to try to escape but will help several Jews in the same effort. The really curious thing is that everything is based on an authentic character who made a cameo in the fil

• When Hitler offered a reward for the capture of Clark Gable

  There is a certain tendency, logical on the other hand, to contemplate the figure of Adolf Hitler from a monolithic prism:that of a dictator and genocide incapable of having a human feeling. It is a common view that also occurs in serial killers, for example, because his criminal actions inevitably

• The fortress of Mimoyecques, the secret base of the Nazi V-3 to destroy London

  In 1943, construction began on an impressive fortress to house the cannons that were to reduce London to rubble. In August 1943, Hitler approved the start of work on an impressive battery silo dug into the limestone of a hill near the village of Mimoyecques, opposite the Pas de Calais. From there

• During World War II the United States lent 149 ships to the Soviet Navy, 23 never returned

  In exchange for the Soviet Unions declaration of war on Japan, the United States secretly began a ship loan program to the Soviet Navy in the spring of 1945. Despite the fact that both the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union had their war clashes with Japan since the Russo-Japanese War of 190

• The Cephalonia Massacre:the extermination of 5,000 Italian soldiers at the hands of the Germans

  One of the first movies that Penelope Cruz made in Hollywood was Captain Corellis Mandolin , a loose adaptation of the novel by the British writer Louis de Bernieres. In it she played (although she was nominated for the Razzie Award for Worst Actress) the role of a young Greek woman from Kefalonia

• Operation Keelhaul, the forced repatriation of millions of people to the USSR after World War II

  In his work Gulag Archipelago , written between 1958 and 1967, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refers to an agreement reached between the participants in the Yalta Conference. According to that agreement, after defeating Germany, the two blocs that were beginning to form as a prelude to the Cold Warwould

• The training base for spies in Canada, so secret that not even the Canadian government knew exactly what they were doing

  Many readers will be familiar with the name of the writer Roal Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Matilda or James and the Giant Peach , among other childrens successes. What they probably dont know is that Dahl joined the RAF in 1939 and fought in World War II (with some heroic ac

• Attu, the only World War II battle fought in North America

  A priori It might seem that a place as remote as the Aleutian archipelago was of no interest to World War II fighters. However, the possession of that insular territory was revealed as a fundamental strategic objective both by its owners, the United States, and by its Japanese enemies and, in fact,

• When three British agents stole Amsterdam's diamond reserves in the face of the German invasion

  In 1959 London hosted the premiere of one of those films about World War II that were so abundant in the decades after it. Of British production, it was titled Operation Amsterdam (here in Spain it was changed to The Robbery of the Century) and was directed by Michael McCarthy, a minor filmmaker w

• The great massacre of pets in the United Kingdom before the outbreak of World War II

  At the start of World War II, the London government distributed a leaflet advising people to keep their pets safe in the countryside. And, if they did not have that possibility, to sacrifice them for their own good, given the hardship that was going to befall the country imminently. Consequently, a