Over the coming weeks and months I will be building various medal guides for both the Second and First World Wars and uploading them to Slideshare.net Here is the first one – A guide to British and Commonwealth Campaign Medals of WW2. I hope you like it and find it of interest!!   WW2 British [...]

Researching WW2 family members can be awkward at the best of times. There are things that can be done – my blog post ‘Researching Your WW2 Ancestors‘ covers the most common research avenues, however, for service records and medal information you have to be a direct family descendant, and you need to know some basic [...]

To celebrate and remember the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches, here are a few interesting facts about this most historic and heroic day. The codename given by the Allies for the overall  invasion was ‘Operation Overlord’. The invasion took place over 61miles of beaches. The beaches were split into 5 sectors and given the [...]

With the sad but inevitable news that Claude Choules, the last surviving veteran from WW1 passed away earlier this week, I guess the press will be full of articles about their lives, television programmes dedicated to their memory and a renewed interest, for a while, in the “Great War”. That we remember those who fought [...]

A project to trace hundreds of children who were displaced by the Holocaust has been launched by am American museum. The campaign, run by the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum is calling for information about more than 1100 children, depicted in a series of photographs which can be seen online. The photos were taken at refuge [...]

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, on this day in 1945 Russian soldiers finally liberated the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz. To mark this anniversary here are a few interesting facts about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Auschwitz II – Birkenau, was built in October 1941. It held more than 100,000 prisoners and housed gas chambers capable [...]

Now, I don’t normally read too many newspapers, firstly because I don’t get a great deal of time to do so, but mainly because I am not that interested in which footballer is bedding which whore, or if Paris Hilton is partying in Vegas without any knickers… But today is different, because as I was [...]

Today, at 15.52BST to be precise, marks the 70th Anniversary of the famous ‘So Few’ speech from Sir Winston Churchill as he paid tribute to the RAF as they threw everything they had against the mighty Luftwaffe in The Battle of Britain. To commemorate this anniversary, the speech will be replayed outside Churchill’s war-time bunker in Whitehall, at 1552 BST [...]

I always think back on this day – the anniversary of the allied beach landings on the Normandy coast - about a trip that I did with a good buddy of mine, Andy Wootten, a few years back. (I want to say 2004, but my memory is shocking and that could be wrong). Andy’s Dad took part in [...]

When my wife texted me yesterday saying she had bought me a surprise present I thought that I had finally worn her down enough to give in and buy me a Mustang. When I finally got home and didn’t see it all shiny and new on the driveway I thought to myself ‘Aah, she has [...]