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“THE USE OF TRAINS TO TRANSPORT AND CONCENTRATE FORCES DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR IS OFTEN TOUTED AS ONE OF THE DEFINING ELEMENTS OF THAT CONFLICT”
Spread across two major venues in London and Cosford, Shropshire, the Royal Air
Force Museum is dedicated to the story of Britain’s aerial warfare force. Its huge collection of approximately 1.3 million objects includes everything from aircraft to small, personal items. The museum has now announced a scheme for members of the public to adopt one of over 50 objects from the museum’s collection.
‘Adopt an Artefact’ is a unique opportunity for everyone to be part of the RAF’S story, while raising funds for the museum. The selected highlights include iconic objects that each have their own fascinating story to tell. These items include small items like lapel badges and lucky mascots to more iconic artefacts such as aircraft and even relics from the Dambusters Raid and the Great Escape.
Artefacts are available to adopt across three tiers (Standard, Enhanced and Executive) with adoptions starting at £25. Each artefact adoption lasts for 12 months from the date they are adopted and adoptees can also choose to add Gift Aid, which will increase their donation by 25 percent for no extra cost.
All adoptees will receive a digital adoption certificate and photograph of their adopted artefact along with exclusive information on your chosen object throughout the year. Recognition of an adoption will feature alongside the object on ‘Collections Online’, the museum’s new digital collections system. If an artefact is purchased as a gift, or in memory of a loved one, you have the option to include a dedicated message along with the name of the adoptee. Artefacts can be adopted on an individual or corporate basis and those adopting one of the ‘Exclusive’ tier items will receive additional benefits tailored to their adoption.
Edward Sharman, head of development at the museum says, “Support from adoptees will help the museum to continue sharing the RAF story to engage, inspire and encourage learning for current and future generations. This is a fantastic opportunity to be part of the RAF’S history and to receive something unique in return for your support. Each item tells its own fascinating RAF story, whether it’s a stuffed toy with an adventurous past to large iconic Battle of Britain aircraft, there is something to inspire and connect everyone.”
As of August 2020, Chelsea Football Club has already adopted the museum’s Avro Lancaster bomber.
The Royal Mint is the government-owned body that has been producing coins for England, and latterly the United Kingdom, for over 1,100 years. During WWII, it played an important role that ensured that Britain did not suffer coin shortages. By 1943 its output had even doubled to issuing 700 million coins a year despite the threat of bombing. It additionally continued producing overseas coins, including for Iceland, and the Mint’s basement acted as an air raid shelter although three of its staff were killed.
In this period 20 per cent of the Mint’s male staff volunteered or were conscripted into the British armed forces and so from June 1941 the employment of women in coin production began. By 1942, the superintendent of the Operative Department hailed female labour as “an important innovation” and in that year the coining department produced a record-breaking 54 million pieces in one month. By 1943, women accounted for 29 percent of the total workforce with staff working all week with limited annual leave. This dedication ensured that the Mint continued to operate effectively throughout the war.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, the Royal Mint has produced a commemorative £5 coin. It is available to buy as limited-edition gold Proof, silver Proof and silver Proof Piedfort variations alongside a Brilliant Uncirculated edition. The coin’s design captures the magnitude of events and was inspired by British war memorial inscriptions.
Shortly after the failure of the Luftwaffe to destroy the RAF, the Germans scaled up bombing raids on Britain’s major cities, beginning the period known as the Blitz. The Royal Family had decided to remain in London despite this threat, and on 8 September, Buckingham Palace was itself struck by a 50kg high-explosive bomb. The palace was hit a total of 16 times during the Blitz, all while the King and his family were in residence.
In Berlin, 27 September, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, Saburo Kurusu, along with Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano and Adolf Hitler, signed a defensive pact agreeing mutual cooperation in the ‘new order’ across Europe and Asia. The Tripartite Pact in effect added Japan into the Axis alliance, a phrase first coined by Mussolini in 1936, in reference to Berlin and Rome. Though Japan remained the sole East Asian signatory to the pact, further European states, including Hungary and Bulgaria, also joined the Axis months later.
France earlier the same year, Japan saw the chance to forcibly occupy the country. On 22 September Governor General Jean Decoux agreed to Japanese troops crossing the border to Indochina, and occupying several airfields. Under agreement the French administration was allowed to remain in place during this occupation, however it was finally overthrown in 1945, in the face of the Allied advance.
In August 1953, Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was arrested and removed from power, replaced by a military regime with the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, at its head. It was an event that changed the course of Iran’s history away from democracy and reform under Mosaddegh, and towards an autocracy. Historians have pointed to the 1953 coup as one of the principal causes of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the importance of which cannot be overstated when discussing the last 50 years of the Middle East’s history.
Though the CIA has since acknowledged – some might even say taken credit for – its involvement in the regime change, the UK has not admitted its involvement. In
Coup 53, all the evidence presented leads to the damning conclusion that not only were
British intelligence agents involved in the coup, they were its originators. For those less knowledgeable of the full context surrounding the coup d’etat, filmmaker Taghi Amirani provides a more than adequate crash course in the Anglo-persian Oil Company, British interests and influence in the region, as well as America’s anti-communist policies and
Cold War paranoia.
With the background established, Amirani takes us through his years of research into the coup d’etat, its origins and unsolved mysteries. Born in Iran, he moved to the UK in 1975, while the Shah was still in power and his personal investment is truly the beating heart of the film. From Washington to Berlin we follow as he tracks every last document and piece of interview footage. Often it is as though Amirani is hunting ghosts – a majority of those involved in the coup, or associated Mosaddegh at the time are now deceased. One elusive character, a British agent, soon emerges from Amirani’s research as the key to proving Britain’s role in the coup.
Engaging, engrossing and ultimately eyewidening, this film brilliantly sets the historical record straight.
A DECADE-LONG INVESTIGATION INTO THE 1953 COUP IN IRAN UNEARTHS BRITAIN’S SECRET INVOLVEMENT, WITH GROUNDBREAKING IMPLICATIONS THAT ARE STILL FELT OVER 60 YEARS LATER
You don’t need to be a railway enthusiast to be captivated by this new book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Hiltzik – the story of America’s railroads is about far more than locomotives and train stations.
It is as much about the people who worked on these immense projects, the communities made, shaped and destroyed by the twin rails snaking over the continent, and the men who controlled and directed the entire enterprise – the infamous ‘robber barons’ who made vast fortunes and just as often lost them again.
Hiltzik contends that the railways were America’s first ‘big business’. When the first lines were proposed, the train was little more than an oddity, a new-fangled mode of transport that traditionalists despised – trains would surely never replace steamships as the most important mode of transport. The picture would change dramatically in just a few decades.
In 1812, a relatively modest proposal to build a railroad across New York State was considered almost farcical, but by 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad linked east coast to west (at least it nearly did, it actually finished a hundred miles short of the west coast). The railroad was now the dominant form of transport in a nation just starting to flex its industrial muscle, and would remain so until the invention of the automobile.
The shocking speed of travel by steam locomotive was one advantage. The New York businessman Asa Whitney had his first trip by train in 1844, and his verdict was dramatic,
“Time & space are annihilated,” he noted in his diary. He had travelled at 25 miles per hour.
The railroads also had the benefit of going wherever they wanted, within reason. They did not have to follow the long and lazy loops on the Mississippi – they could travel as straight as an arrow, and journey times were slashed. It took four days to travel the length of the Eerie Canal, while the equivalent journey by train took about five hours.
Business applications were obviously of huge importance, but many also grasped the railway’s potential in wartime. The use of trains to transport and concentrate forces during the American Civil War is often touted as one of the defining elements of that conflict (trains would play a similar role around the same time in the Franco-prussian War).
The science behind the industry, however, and the impact it had on the American landscape and economy, are only parts of the story. Hiltzik’s book really comes to life when he turns his attention to the men behind the business – famous (or infamous) names like J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The savage competition between such men would spill over into the American economy as a whole, to the point that President Theodore Roosevelt would call them “malefactors of great wealth” and work to clip their wings.
By the time you reach this final stop in Hiltzik’s book, you will be as surprised as those getting their first taste of the railroads had once been at how quickly your journey has ended.
THE FASCINATING STORY BEHIND THE BIRTH OF AMERICA’S FIRST ‘BIG BUSINESS’
The opening of formerly closed Soviet archives has allowed Nevenkin – a
Bulgarian historian – to re-assess the savagely-fought battles that culminated in a Red Army victory as the Hungarian capital finally succumbed. Sometimes overshadowed by what was happening on the Western front at the same time, as the much more famous Ardennes ‘Battle of the Bulge’ was being fought, Nevenkin paints a complex and in-depth picture of a defining conflict in Hungary’s recent history, describing the often desperate defence put up by the combined German-magyar forces as they vainly tried to hold the Soviets back. The level of detail the author includes is truly extraordinary; the first volume is text and is over 1,100 pages long, while the second contains maps, sketches of
Axis defences and a panoply of photographs stretching to almost 500 pages.
Broken down to cover the fighting on a day-by-day basis, what could be a dry history is brought to life by Nevenkin’s liberal use of eyewitness testimony from Hungarian, German and Soviet veterans as well as Budapest’s residents. It is this testimony that captures the reader, and draws them into a battle whose final result was never in doubt, but highlights the often see-saw nature of the fighting as the Soviet attackers first broke through the city’s Attila fortifications, and then took the city literally street by street and block by block. Nevenkin also covers the oft-neglected aerial battles during the siege, as well as logistics and the attempted break out, where fewer than a thousand of the 100,000-strong garrison managed to reach Axis lines to the west.
A MAMMOTH TWO-VOLUME WORK THAT COMPREHENSIVELY DETAILS THE BRUTAL BATTLE FOR HUNGARY’S CAPITAL, UTILIZING A MASS OF PREVIOUSLY INACCESSIBLE ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTS TO PRODUCE A STUNNING PIECE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Dan Kaszeta’s chilling account of the history of nerve agents takes the reader back to antiquity and the poisonous Calabar bean, used in West Africa in judicial proceedings on people accused of a grave crime. If the victim survived, he was presumed innocent. Death by poisoning was taken as proof of guilt. It was a kind of Russian roulette, an apt description in light of the 2018 Novichok attack in Salisbury on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
The author, a former soldier in the US Army, explains that nerve agents were first developed in Nazi Germany, though ironically they were never used by Hitler’s regime. It was the Iran-iraq War of 1980-88 that saw the first significant battlefield use of nerve agents. It was in the closing months of that conflict when Saddam Hussein’s regime began unleashing nerve agents on civilians.
Kaszeta’s grim but fascinating narrative goes beyond cataloguing the historic growth of nerve agents by warring states. He describes the effect this deadly substance can have on the brain and the likely connection between nerve agent exposure and mental illness. He brings to light incidents like US workers in Cold War manufacturing and storage programmes who were considered ‘abnormal’, as well as the chronic and multi-symptomatic disorders related to the Gulf War Syndrome of the early 1990s.
From Sarin to Novichok, the 21st century demonstrates that the use of nerve agents, far from being an unethical and unacceptable practice, is an increasing threat to civilian populations across the world, be it part of conventional wars or state-sponsored assassinations. “The greatest sin of nerve agents,” says the author, is their disproportionate effect on the innocent and unprotected.’
DESPITE THE BAN ON CHEMICAL WEAPONS IMPOSED BY THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION OF 1997, NERVE AGENTS ARE STILL DEPLOYED IN WAR ZONES AND BY AGENTS FROM MALAYSIA TO SALISBURY