Dresden Church Raised From the Ashes
Visiting the rebuilt Church of Our Lady in Dresden, Germany, was one of the most inspirational experiences of my life.
Read MoreOur Allies at War
Australian Nurse Survived Massacre
After a bullet from a Japanese machine gun tore through her body, Australian nurse Vivian Bullwinkel floated face down in the sea and feigned death. She was the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island Massacre, in which 22 nurses were forced to wade into the ocean at gunpoint and then shot in the back. It’s […]
Read More
Iris Porter Served in Egyptian Desert
Plucky Iris Porter of the WAAF, the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, slept in a tent for two long years, swam in the Mediterranean Sea, rode camels, and visited the pyramids – all while serving her country in the burning Egyptian desert during World War Two.
Read More
Bud Abbott Rained Terror on the Tirpitz
Bud Abbott was just twenty-three years old when he strapped himself into his cockpit, took off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, and headed into aerial combat for the very first time. His target: the Tirpitz, one of the deadliest German battleships ever built.
Read More
The Brass Pitcher: Wartime Souvenir
Nobody remembered the fascinating history of a humble brass pitcher owned by this Canadian family, until Brenda Blair of Calgary discovered that it was once a prized wartime souvenir of Holland’s liberation by the Canadians.
Read More
Saving Jewish Lives: What Would YOU Do?
This week marks the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and the Holocaust survivors who made it out alive. Please read my previous post about the Scheffer family, who hid a Jewish couple for two years in their home in their small town in Holland: Heroic Family Hid Jews From Holocaust. […]
Read More
The Woman With the X-Ray Eyes
The aerial photo interpreter who made the biggest impact in the Second World War was the brilliant, beautiful Constance Babington Smith. (My wartime novel Bird’s Eye View is fact-based fiction about an aerial photo interpreter.) Constance Babington Smith is well-known in some circles, although most people have never heard of her. But she is credited with […]
Read More
RAF Medmenham: Where the Magic Happened
Danesfield House is now a luxury hotel, but during the war it was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force, renamed RAF Medmenham, and served as the headquarters for aerial photographic interpretation. It has personal meaning for me, too. I visited this lovely place in 2022, when I was invited to be the guest speaker at a […]
Read More
Tales From an RAF Wing Commander
My friend Russ Jeffs was a Royal Air Force veteran who rose to the rank of RAF Wingco, or Wing Commander, before leaving England in the 1950s and moving to Canada. He was an inveterate story-teller with an endless stream of anecdotes about his days in the air force. After Russ moved to Canada, he spent the next […]
Read More
The Night Witches
Russian women, often known as Night Witches, were the only females in the world engaged in aerial combat during World War Two. These daring young women, some of them just teenagers, flew lightweight aircraft that dodged and darted and dropped bombs on the enemy under cover of darkness. So feared were they that the Germans […]
Read More