We will remember them (with pastry and badly piped icing)
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"I only went in for a chicken" has absolutely ended me.Comment
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Bloody well broke me too, that bit.Comment
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Posted on a Facebook feed, thankfully the guy who posted it was saying that's why he won't buy a poppy anymore.Comment
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I bet if you called them racists they'd get very upset and deny it. Then complain on Facebook about how mean you were to them.Comment
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Two more sleeps!!
...to be honest I was a little disappointed with the lack of a 'Fallen please stop here' sign in the front yard.Comment
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Speaking with my floristry hat on, it seems such a waste to have a November occasion dedicated to a summer-blooming flower. If only they'd seen delphiniums on the fields of Flanders, or alstroemeria, then we could have cleaned up!
(Er, with a suitable percentage to whoever it goes to, obviously)Comment
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Is that on Friendly Street?Originally posted by Uros Predic View PostTwo more sleeps!!
...to be honest I was a little disappointed with the lack of a 'Fallen please stop here' sign in the front yard.Comment
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I'm sure this isn't the reaction that I'm meant to have, but I look at that and think "Why are WWII planes flying over WWI poppy fields?"Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View PostComment
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Have I outed you?Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
No, but not far away. Two streets over. Admiral or Strickland. I forget which is which.Comment
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I did wonder if it was Friendly Street but I thought the house looked too big. I can only presume those cottages are inhabited by Borrowers.Comment
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Thanks for that; i know embarrassingly little about Irish history.Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
As you'd expect, war mythology in France is complex, but it's not widely appreciated that the Liberators of '44 made up much of the officer corps at Dien Bien Phu or, as in the case of my grandfather, a substantial and militarily experienced part of the OAS in Algeria.
A couple of things almost worth setting fireworks off for:
Eighty years ago this very day, on a sidestreet near St-Lazare station in Paris, a 28-year-old engineer named Jacques Bonsergent was arrested by the Germans. He had just returned from Brittany with friends, including a couple whose wedding he had been attending. Nobody will ever know precisely what happened. According to the story that would quickly circulate around the capital, a drunken Wehrmacht officer groped the newlywed bride on the street; one of Bonsergent's party – perhaps the groom – punched the officer in the face; another – perhaps Bonsergent himself – then intervened to prevent further reprisals, but other German soldiers gave chase. The only person they caught was Bonsergent. He was arrested, interrogated, imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal the names of his friends. The Nazis knew he had committed no crime. The day after Christmas, he was executed.
The day following Bonsergent's arrest was 11 November 1940. Hundreds of Parisians defied a curfew and congregated around the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, just as they had done every year. The name of Jacques Bonsergent and the details of his arrest were whispered (and, perhaps, publicly pronounced) at the gathering. Within hours posters began appearing on street walls containing nothing but the words JACQUES BONSERGENT and the V-sign. Parisians sought to get hold of the underground press to find out who was this person. He would soon become the first civilian martyr of the resistance. This was significant because he was not a troublemaker and not a communist: not someone who had it coming to him. The initial impression made by the occupiers – that they would treat the locals 'correctly' – was tarnished. There had been resistance from the beginning of the occupation, but the arrest and execution of Bonsergent ignited something bolder and more widespread: something we might call the capital-R Resistance. It began eighty years ago tomorrow.
Two years later, on the other side of the Mediterranean, another important advance took place. On 10 November 1942, Admiral Darlan, imposing himself as the central figure of the Vichy regime in North Africa, cannily agreed to change sides in the war and support the Anglo-American alliance, which was in the process of invading (and very quickly establishing itself in) Morocco and Algeria. This marked the effective end of Vichy power in Algeria while also removing its raison d'etre on the mainland. The Nazis swiftly abolished the 'free zone' in southern France, leaving Vichy to govern nothing very much at all, and exploding any remaining illusions that it was other than a Nazi puppet.
Darlan's about-turn was accelerated by a curious event of which i had never read the full story. Two days previously, on 8 November, a local resistance group had attempted a coup in Algiers, occupying the central police station and telephone exchange, the governor general's palace, and other important buildings, while placing the commander of French land forces, General Juin, under house arrest. This group, calling itself after the boxer Geo Gras in whose gym the conspirators trained, was made up of mostly Jews, who had been driven underground by Vichy's anti-semitic and 'aryanising' laws, pedantically and violently enforced in Algeria. The coup attempt did not go smoothly, largely because it did not receive much of the weaponry and support it had been promised by the Americans, whose landing it was supposed to clear the way for. In a typically convoluted sequence, the coup's failure meant that the perpetrators were quickly arrested by the French general (Giraud) who had secretly promised he would support their endeavour. The following day, when Darlan switched sides, the Geo Gras conspirators seemed to be on the right side of the law once again, but when Darlan was assassinated the following month, Giraud rounded them up and threw them into camps.
Nonetheless, the attempted coup seemed to discourage Vichy troops from defending the regime, and the capital went over to the Americans without bloodshed, unlike Casablanca, Oran and later Tunis. Even though lots of Vichy officials remained in place, the regime did not, and so relatively few Jews were deported from north Africa to the death camps in Europe. North Africa was the first region to be liberated by the WW2 Allies. It began seventy-eight years ago the day before yesterday.Last edited by laverte; 10-11-2020, 17:32.Comment
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