The Second World War
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The Second World War’
Over a hundred young Greeks were slated to be shot after resistance fighters and British forces sabotaged an airfield.
The German occupation of Greece began in 1941, and continued for three years of forced labour, summary executions, and famines. By the summer of 1944, Berlin was struggling to keep hold of the Mediterranean, but airbases popping up on the Greek islands might have been a grave setback for the Allied cause.
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens took his wartime protest straight to the top.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, plunging the country into a four-year nightmare of fear, persecution and famine. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were targeted, but even in the midst of starvation and suspicion the Greeks hid them, found them food, and tried to frustrate the deportations to the camps of Germany and Poland.
On October 28th, 1940, the Kingdom of Greece surprised everyone by refusing to become part of the German war machine.
By the Autumn of 1940, British forces fighting the Second World War were dangerously overstretched: Paris had fallen, Benito Mussolini had pledged Italy’s support to Germany, and Greece was under a state of emergency, with fascist sympathies.
The only truly global conflict in history began when German troops crossed into Poland in September 1939.
The Second World War began twice, once in September 1939 for the countries of western Europe, and then again in February 1941 with the entrance of Japan and the United States of America. For those early months, long and bruising, Great Britain stood alone against almost every government from Norway to Spain.
Railway enthusiast, music lover, and the man who gave us stereo sound.
Alan Blumlein (1903-1942) is the acknowledged father of stereophonic sound recording. There were others working on stereo, notably Arthur Keller in the USA, but Blumlein was the first man to patent stereo recording equipment, and the man whose ideas best stood the test of time.