View from the fields around Bulson down to the valley of the Meuse.
I’ve just returned from a recce trip to the area around Sedan and the Ardennes in eastern France and southwestern Belgium. I was retracing, as much as I could, the route that German Army Group A used in May 1940. And I was struck, once again, at just how risky the German operation was – and how Hitler staked everything on Army Group A making a successful dash towards the French coast and trapping Allied forces north of them.
At the Barbican
I was fortunate enough to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University at a degree ceremony in London today, where hundreds of OU graduates also received their degrees. This is what I said in my speech to say Thank You.
It is a particular honour for me to receive this award from the Open University – an institution I have long admired. In fact, I first heard about the OU when I was at school and one of my science teachers was trying to gain an OU degree whilst also carrying on with his full time teaching job.
I remember thinking then that in order to get an OU degree you didn’t just have to have the intellectual ability of a student who was working full time for a degree at a traditional university, but you also needed to possess many other personal qualities as well, including an extraordinary level of commitment and determination.
I also suspect that most of you couldn’t have managed to achieve your degree without the love and support of someone else. Perhaps that someone else is with you today. Never forget the debt you owe them. I know I could never have achieved anything over the last twenty five years without the love and support of my family.
So I hugely admire everyone here who has managed to gain a degree from the Open University. And the single quality each of you possesses that I most admire is best summed up in words of advice that were written some years ago by the Dalai Lama. This was his advice for life: ‘Never Give Up. No matter what is going on around you. Never Give Up.’
Many times you must have thought of giving up – but you never did. I congratulate you. Thank you again.
Well done to all of the WW2History.com subscribers who knew the correct answer to last month’s competition – which was Dietrich Eckart. The question wasn’t at all easy and yet many people got it right – so this month’s question about Charles De Gaulle is the hardest yet. Good luck!
And congratulations to Caitlin Kilby of Wales who was the first name chosen from all of those who answered with the right answer to last month’s competition. A signed, paperback copy of Ian Kershaw’s brilliant one volume biography of Hitler will shortly be winging its way to you.
The desert of Libya
Seventy years ago this month, the most brilliant German battlefield commander of the war, Erwin Rommel, was fighting over the exact same territory in Libya as the rebels are today.
Rommel, who had only arrived to take up command of German forces in North Africa just days before, led in March 1941 one of the most audacious offensives in modern military history against British, Commonwealth and Empire troops who were defending Benghazi and Tobruk in Western Libya. The British swiftly withdrew from Benghazi and the Germans laid siege to Tobruk. Read the rest of this entry
Hitler in the Reichstag
I’m normally extremely suspicious of any direct comparisons between events today and events in history. Rhetoric, at the time of the Iraq war, like ‘Saddam Hussein is another Hitler’ always made me irritated. No one is ‘another’ Hitler. Historical events and personalities exist only in the past and cannot be replicated today.
So I’ve been surprised that so many of Colonel Gaddafi’s words and actions have reminded me of the Nazis. For example, Gaddafi’s belief that straightforward lies about his own actions can work in propaganda terms certainly matches Hitler’s own belief. The Nazis pretended that they entered Poland on 1st September 1939 in response to Polish ‘aggression’, just as Gaddafi’s representatives today said that they are attacking Benghazi only in response to ‘aggression’ from rebels.
I was robbed in Barcelona this week. I was queuing up waiting to get into the Camp Nou to see the Barcelona/Arsenal game (which turned out to be a tremendous match, as all sports fans will know by now) when I was set upon by a gang of pickpockets. They were an extremely effective group of thieves. One knelt in front of me and started rubbing my leg below the knee. It was a weird thing to do and took all my attention. Once I was distracted then the other two put their hands in my pockets and snatched my money.
Tokyo, after the American fire-bombing in March 1945.
We’ve just added onto the site for subscribers the testimony of Paul Montgomery who was a member of a B29 bomber crew during the war against Japan.
I’ll never forget meeting Paul Montgomery nearly a dozen years ago on his farm in the flat lands of Oklahoma. He was one of the nicest people I ever met on my travels. Kind, forthright and compassionate. Yet he had helped take part in the killing of more people than probably anyone else I ever encountered.
Here’s the result of last month’s subscribers’ competition. Congratulations to Mr Barnetson from Moray who correctly identified the name of the leader of the British delegation to Moscow in the summer of 1939 as Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Erne-Erle-Drax.
A signed paperback copy of Richard Overy’s ‘The Road to War’ will shortly be winging its way towards him.
Not many people got the right answer last month, and this month’s question is, I think, the hardest yet. But the prize is worth the effort. Ian Kershaw’s one volume biography of Hitler – signed by Sir Ian himself.
Much of Germany was in ruins by the time the Nazis gave up.
Recent events in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya have shown us how quickly dictatorships can be challenged and (in the case of the first two countries) overthrown.
Which leaves us once again with one of the enduring mysteries of WW2 – why did the Nazi regime hold out until the spring of 1945 when Red Army soldiers were just yards from Hitler’s bunker in Berlin? After all, Mussolini had been ousted in the autumn of 1943, as soon as the Italians realized which way the war was going. So why couldn’t the Germans have got rid of Hitler at the same time?
The answer to that question tells us a great deal about the way revolutions can happen – or not happen – and how dictators can fall. Ultimately there were two crucial reasons why Hitler was not brought down by the popular discontent for the war which no doubt existed in Germany after the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. The first reason is practical, the second is institutional.
If you know a spitfire pilot – interview them now….
I gave a lecture yesterday at the literary festival held at the London School of Economics, where I am currently a Senior Visiting Fellow. I love the London School of Economics, there is an energy and a vibrancy there which – as my American friends might say – is ‘very special’.
My experience of an LSE audience is that you will always get one or two questions that you have never been asked before. True to form that happened yesterday. I was asked why no one had attempted to make something like my series ‘Nazis: A Warning from History’ before. That series transmitted in 1997, more than fifty years after the end of the war. Why hadn’t someone tried to make it twenty or thirty years earlier?
Laurence will post a new blog article regularly. More about Laurence Rees.
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