Download or read book From Eton to Ypres written by Charles Smith and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2016-07-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as one of the most outstanding commanding officers on the Western Front, Wilfrid Abel Smith commanded an elite unit of 1,000 of the finest soldiers in the British Army. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Smith was a career soldier who led his battalion of Grenadiers with distinction through the First Battle of Ypres and the winter trench warfare of 1914–15. He died of wounds received at the Battle of Festubert in May 1915.The letters and diaries provide a vivid, first-hand account of the fighting and suffering on the front line, written by a compassionate commander and affectionate family man. Most of his brother officers were Old Etonians, including his brigade commander, Lord Cavan, and his second-in-command, George ‘Ma’ Jeffreys. Smith’s account offers a poignant insight into the way in which the privileged world of a Guards officer responded, with the highest sense of duty and courage, to the unprecedented demands of industrial warfare.From Eton to Ypres is edited by his great-grandson, Charles Abel Smith.

Download or read book Walking the Salient written by Paul Reed and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 1998-01-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on from Walking on the Somme, Reed has produced this remarkable voyage around the Ypres Salien t, which saw some of the most memorable campaigns of WW1. Il lustrated throughout, this book gives an insight for visitor s & armchair travellers. '

Download or read book The Children who Fought Hitler written by Sue Elliott and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2010-05-13 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people know that Ypres, centre of First World War remembrance, was once home to a thriving British community that played a heroic role in the Second World War. This expatriate outpost grew around the British ex-servicemen who cared for the war memorials and cemeteries of 'Flanders Fields'. Many married local women and their children grew up multi-lingual, but attended their own school and were intensely proud to be British. When Germany invaded in 1940 the community was threatened: some children managed to escape, others were not so lucky. But, armed with their linguistic skills and local knowledge, pupils of the British Memorial School were uniquely prepared to fight Hitler in occupied territory and from Britain. Still in their teens, some risked capture, torture and death in intelligence and resistance operations in the field. An exceptional patriotism spurred them on to feats of bravery in this new conflict. Whilst their peers at home were being evacuated to the English countryside, these children were directly exposed to danger in one of the major theatres of war. James Fox was a pupil at the British Memorial School in 1940 and he has made it his mission to trace his former school friends. The Children Who Fought Hitler is their story: a war story about people from an unusual community, told from a fresh and human perspective.

Download or read book Into the Lion s Mouth written by Larry Loftis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International bestseller! James Bond has nothing on Dusko Popov. A double agent for the Abwehr, MI5 and MI6, and the FBI during World War II, Popov seduced numerous women, spoke five languages, and was a crack shot, all while maintaining his cover as a Yugoslavian diplomat… On a cool August evening in 1941, a Serbian playboy created a stir at Casino Estoril in Portugal by throwing down an outrageously large baccarat bet to humiliate his opponent. The Serbian was a British double agent, and the money―which he had just stolen from the Germans―belonged to the British. From the sideline, watching with intent interest, was none other than Ian Fleming… The Serbian was Dusko Popov. As a youngster, he was expelled from his London prep school. Years later, he would be arrested and banished from Germany for making derogatory statements about the Third Reich. When World War II ensued, the playboy became a spy, eventually serving three dangerous masters: the Abwehr, MI5 and MI6, and the FBI. On August 10, 1941, the Germans sent Popov to the United States to construct a spy network and gather information on Pearl Harbor. He successfully made contact with the FBI in an attempt to warn the country, but J. Edgar Hoover blew his cover. Later, MI5 desperately needed Popov to deceive the Abwehr about the D-Day invasion, but they assured him that a return to the German Secret Service Headquarters in Lisbon would result in torture and execution. He went anyway... Into the Lion’s Mouth is a globe-trotting account of a man’s entanglement with espionage, murder, assassins, and lovers―including enemy spies and a Hollywood starlet. It is a story of subterfuge, seduction, patriotism, and cold-blooded courage. It is the story of Dusko Popov―the inspiration for James Bond.

Download or read book Final Wicket written by Nigel McCrery and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While cricket remains a national game today, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, it was THE national game. Cricketers were the sporting icons of their age, as footballers are today. When the call to arms was made in 1914 and the years of war that followed, it was answered in droves by young men including Test and First Class cricketers. The machine guns and gas of the Western Front and other theatres did not discriminate and many hundreds of these star performers perished alongside their lesser known comrades. The author has researched the lives and deaths of over 200 top class cricketers who made the ultimate sacrifice. He includes not just British players but those from the Empire. The enormity of the horror and wholesale loss of life during The Great War is well demonstrated by these moving biographies.

Download or read book Send More Shrouds written by Jan Gore and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Sunday 18 June 1944 the congregation assembled for morning service in the Guards Chapel in Wellington Barracks, St Jamess Park, central London. The service started at 11 am. Lord Hay had read the first lesson, and the Te Deum was about to begin, when the noise of a V1 was heard. The engine cut out. There was a brief silence, an intensive blue flash and an explosion and the roof collapsed, burying the congregation in ten feet of rubble.This was the most deadly V1 attack of the Second World War, and Jan Gores painstakingly researched, graphic and moving account of the bombing and the aftermath tells the whole story. In vivid detail she describes the rescue effort which went on, day and night, for two days, and she records the names, circumstances and lives of each of the victims, and explains why they happened to be there.Her minutely detailed reconstruction of this tragic episode in the V1 campaign against London commemorates the dead and wounded, and it gives us today an absorbing insight into the wartime experience of all those whose lives were affected by it.

Download or read book Public Schools and The Great War written by Anthony Seldon and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering and original book, Anthony Seldon and David Walsh study the impact that the public schools had on the conduct of the Great War, and vice versa. Drawing on fresh evidence from 200 leading public schools and other archives, they challenge the conventional wisdom that it was the public school ethos that caused needless suffering on the Western Front and elsewhere. They distinguish between the younger front-line officers with recent school experience and the older 'top brass' whose mental outlook was shaped more by military background than by memories of school.The Authors argue that, in general, the young officers' public school education imbued them with idealism, stoicism and a sense of service. While this helped them care selflessly for the men under their command in conditions of extreme danger, it resulted in their death rate being nearly twice the national average.This poignant and thought-provoking work covers not just those who made the final sacrifice, but also those who returned, andwhose lives were shattered as a result of their physical and psychological wounds. It contains a wealth of unpublished detail about public school life before and during the War, and how these establishments and the country at large coped with the devastating loss of so many of the brightest and best. Seldon and Walsh conclude that, 100 years on, public school values and character training, far from being concepts to be mocked, remain relevant and that the present generation would benefit from studying them and the example of their predecessors.Those who read Public Schools and the Great War will have their prevailing assumptions about the role and image of public schools, as popularised in Blackadder, challenged and perhaps changed.

Download or read book The Red Sweet Wine Of Youth written by Nicholas Murray and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poetry that emerged from the trenches of WWI is a remarkable body of work, at once political manifesto and literary beacon for the twentieth century. In this passionate recreation of the lives of the greatest poets to come out of the conflict, Nicholas Murray brilliantly reveals the men themselves as well as the struggle of the artist to live fully and to bear witness in the annihilating squalor of battle. Bringing into sharp focus the human detail of each life, using journals, letters and literary archives, Murray brings to life the men's indissoluble comradeship, their complex sexual mores and their extraordinary courage. Poignant, vivid and unfailingly intelligent, Nicholas Murray's study offers new and finely tuned insight into the - often devastatingly brief - lives of a remarkable generation of men.

Download or read book The Letters of Rudyard Kipling 1911 19 written by Rudyard Kipling and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth volume of Rudyard Kipling's letters, now collected and edited for the first time, continues the story of his life from the end of the Edwardian era through the Great War, a crisis in Kipling's life as well as in that of the world. The years before the war saw the publication of Rewards and Fairies and Songs from Books. In politics, the great issue was Irish home rule and the fate of Ulster. At the outbreak of the war Kipling devoted himself to the struggle. He wrote patriotic verse, made recruiting speeches, and traveled as a correspondent to the French and Italian fronts. He published no new fiction, only what he wrote as correspondent and propagandist: France at War, The Fringes of the Fleet, and The Eyes of Asia. In 1915 his only son, John, was killed in the Battle of Loos; at the same time Kipling began to suffer from the undiagnosed ulcer that would torment him for the rest of his life. His last volume of poems, The Years Between, published in 1919, embodies the suffering and bitterness of these years.

Download or read book QI The Second Book of General Ignorance written by John Lloyd and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just when you thought it was safe to start showing off again, the bestselling authors of The Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off are back. With a foreword by Stephen Fry, this parcel of unimaginable information is here to solve a few common misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings. Octopuses have six legs, oranges aren't orange, bats aren't blind, napoleon wasn't short, vikings didn't wear horned helmets, there is no such thing as a fish. QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance is the essential set text for everyone who's proud to admit that they don't know everything, and an ideal stick with which to beat people who think they do. John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are the bestselling authors of QI: The Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off. Here they present a wonderful collection of astonishingly interesting facts, perfect for pub quiz lovers, trivia buffs and general knowledge experts alike.

Download or read book British Political Facts written by David Butler and published by Springer. This book was released on 1969-09-01 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambrian written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Return to Belgium written by Bernard O'Connor and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the German occupation of Belgium and the evacuation from Dunkirk, many wounded soldiers were left behind and captured. Those who escaped and downed Allied pilots and crews were helped to get back to Britain by some remarkable men and women in the Comète escape line. As well as telling the story of Andrée de Jongh, one of its founders, using recently released documents from the National Archives, this book provides details about Elaine Madden, Frédérique Dupuich, Olga Jackson and an anonymous blonde, women who had got out of Belgium and yet volunteered to be flown back from RAF Tempsford: 'Churchill's Most Secret Airfield' and parachuted into occupied Belgium with vital missions to undertake prior to liberation.

Download or read book The Harrow School Register 1845 1925 written by Harrow School and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Final Over written by Christopher Sandford and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2015 Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award. Shortlisted for the Cross British Sports Book of the Year 2015 (Cricket category). August 1914 brought an end to the 'Golden Age' of English cricket. At least 210 professional cricketers (out of a total of 278 registered) signed up to fight, of whom thirty-four were killed. However, that period and those men were far more than merely statistics: here we follow in intimate detail not only the cricketers of that fateful last summer before the war, but also the simple pleasures and daily struggles of their family lives and the whole fabric of English social life as it existed on the eve of that cataclysm: the First World War. With unprecedented access to personal and war diaries, and other papers, Sandford expertly recounts the stories of such greats as Hon. Lionel Tennyson, as he moves virtually overnight from the round of Chelsea and Mayfair parties into the front line at the Marne; the violin-playing bowler Colin Blythe, who asked to be moved up to a front-line unit at Passchendaele, following the death in action of his brother, with tragic consequences; and the widely popular Hampshire amateur player Robert Jesson, whose sometimes comic, frequently horrific and always enthralling experiences of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign are vividly brought to life. The Final Over is undoubtedly a gripping, moving and fully human account of this most poignant summer of the twentieth century, both on and off the field of play.

Download or read book Postcards from the Western Front written by Mark Connelly and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visitors to the battlefields of France and Belgium expressed pain and anguish, pride and nostalgia, and wonder and surprise at what they saw. Postcards from the Western Front chronicles the many ways in which these sites were perceived and commemorated by British people, both during the First World War and in the twenty years following the Armistice. Mark Connelly’s definitive and engaging study of the former Western Front examines how different and distinctive sub-communities – regional, ethnic and religious, civilian and armed forces – influenced the depth and strength of the visiting public’s relationship with the battlefields, all the while comparing and contrasting this relationship with the viewpoint of the French and Belgian inhabitants of the devastated regions. Connelly draws from a vast archive a number of interlocking themes, including the lingering presence of the battlefields in the British domestic imagination, the often fraught experience of visiting the battlefields, memorials and cemeteries functioning as part of a historical testimony to wartime realities, and the interactions between visitors and the people living in these former fighting zones. Focusing on French and Belgian sites, Connelly nevertheless provides insight into other major battlefields fought over by troops from the British Empire. Extensively illustrated with black and white photographs, Postcards from the Western Front offers a groundbreaking perspective on landscapes that rarely left anyone – whether tourist, inhabitant, veteran, or pilgrim – unmoved.

Download or read book British Political Facts 1900 1985 written by David Butler and published by Springer. This book was released on 1986-02-01 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: