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Books > History > World history > From 1900
A gripping first hand account of how Soviet Communism impacted on
those who had to live their daily lives under its rule.
Oswald Harcourt-Davis joined the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1916
to become a despatch rider. He was allocated a Triumph motorcycle
at Abbeville France on 18th July 1916 and was attached to the
ANZACs for the duration of the war which saw him motorcycling
around the Somme and Ypres Salient areas. He won his military medal
at Messines.
This work explores the value of the motorcycle to communications,
and how the despatch rider helped prevent German victory.
Paul and Charlotte Bondy were refugees from Hitler caught up in
Churchill's policy of mass internment. Paul was detained at the
Alien Internment Camp at Huyton, near Liverpool, from late June to
early December 1940. During this time his only contact with his
wife and young daughter was by post. As this young married couple
struggled to overcome the vicissitudes of war and exile to maintain
some semblance of family life, they wrote to each other regularly.
The letters, postcards and telegrams reproduced here are a unique
example of a complete WW2 Internment Correspondence.
I have found that there are many people who do not have any
knowledge of the Great War. But we should remember it, as nearly a
million people died. Their names are written on memorials all over
England, as well as France and Belgium. Do not forget them and the
sacrifice they made.
Two days after Christmas 1944, during the harshest winter in living
memory, 33 SAS troops parachuted into the valley of Rossano,
Northern Italy. Carried out in broad daylight, the parachute drop
was intended to deceive observing enemy forces into believing that
a full parachute brigade of 400 men had landed behind them. Drawing
on post-op reports and memoirs, this book is a fictionalised
account written from the perspective of one of the rank and file
parachutists who took part in the operation: the author's father.
Scrupulously researched and richly illustrated, Hann's personal
narrative brings to life the co-ordinated attemptsof the SAS and
local partisans to engage and evade the enemy. For the first time,
Hann provides a detailed account of some of the devastating
setbacks and triumphs of Operation Galia: one of the hardest fought
and most successful operations of the Second World War.
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