The Russians were the only women in the world who 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 called them The Night Witches. Regular readers will […]
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Arthur Bradford’s Spitfire was shot down over Normandy on D-Day, and he parachuted into the sea where he was promptly “rescued” by a landing craft, steaming towards the beach. He was unarmed, unprepared, and very, very unhappy. I interviewed Arthur Bradford at his comfortable lakeview home in Invermere, British Columbia before he passed away in […]
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Operation Fortitude was an elaborate, mind-boggling hoax – using decoys such as rubber tanks, canvas ships, plywood aircraft, and even dummy soldiers to fool the Germans about where we secretly planned to land on D-Day. Everyone knew the Allies would eventually try to take back the continent. But when, and where? To refresh your knowledge of geography, Pas-de-Calais […]
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Twenty thousand Dutch civilians starved to death as World War Two drew to an end, while others ate tulip bulbs to stay alive. The Allies stripped their bombers of weapons, and dropped tons of food instead. One woman describes how Operation Manna delivered her family from starvation. Even the most famous war stories bear repeating […]
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A Jewish couple spent two terrifying years hiding inside the Scheffer household, in a small town in Holland. Casey Scheffer, who moved to Canada after the war, told me how his courageous family hid Jews from the Nazis without being caught and executed. Note: This was posted on May 7, 2014 — and on June […]
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Jewish teenager Georg Hein, sent to England to escape certain death in a concentration camp, changed his name to Peter Stevens and became a decorated RAF pilot. This daring young man was shot down, captured, and spent four terrifying years as a German POW. When I read a book recently called Escape, Evasion and Revenge, written […]
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Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the British royal family, was born on April 21, 1926. Just six months after her thirteenth birthday, the world went to war. This determined teenager threw herself into the war effort and over her father’s objections, she even joined the armed forces and trained as a mechanic. […]
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This sweet-faced woman boosted morale so vigorously during the Second World War that Adolf Hitler himself called her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.” Elizabeth, mother of the current queen, died in 2002 at the age of one hundred and one, and most of us remember her only as a wrinkled old lady in a […]
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