We had a history teacher at school who failed to put over history as an interesting and relevant subject, despite a war memorial nearby with several of our classmates surnames on it. (uncles and grandfathers)
The playground rang with stories our fathers and grandfathers had told us about the Great war and the -almost-within-reach- Second World war ending only 14 years previously. `Old Brown` as we knew him, in the village, had actually gone over the top at Passchendaele.
Despite this, the teacher droning on in class on hot Summer afternoons about the 100 years war and so on. (never making a link with our common experience) At that age the fording of the river Somme... and Crecy, Agincourt seemed as distant as the pyramids being built.
Except now, pushing 60 you realise the the Middle Ages are not that far back in time, relatively speaking.
It was memory of something said in class all those years ago that took us to Normandy, to Bayeur and the Tapestry last Autumn.
We also stood at the top of the cliff at Gold Beach (and the others) appreciating the magnitude and losses of D day.
We have seen the Atlantic wall blockhouse and museums and looked at High Wood and surrounding battle ground.
tinyurl.com/5gco7o
The van was parked at the Memorial on the above picture this spring.
I find that reading Military History is one thing, but field visits add another dimension and the van has proved ideal for these trips, attracting no attention at all.
Regards
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I know what you mean Oilrag. In school history lessons I remember studying the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War, but for me at that age it was too old and distant to be really interesting. I was fascinated by 20th century military history from an early age but at school that was not really touched upon.
The most interesting military related study we did at school was reading war poetry, but that was in english lessons, not history.
I would love visit some of those places you mention. My dad, brothers, uncle and I have been talking for ages about a driving trip to France to look at WW1 and WW2 sites but have still not got round to it, I think it will get put off to next spring.
Its a shame we never got the opportunity to do the trip with my Grandad when he was still with us.
He had visited the Normandy coast before, and done his own 'driving trip' of many months duration around the Bocage countryside and beyond. But under very different (distressing) circumstances; it was June 1944, driving a Cromwell tank.
Edited by Rich 9-3 on 04/07/2008 at 15:12
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On my trips to visit the outlaws ... ooops... Inlaws about 500kms inland at a town called Beuafort West, I pass a couple of Boer War blockhouses.
The road and rail line runs pretty damn parallel for much of the way, and there are places where the old blockhouses were built to protect railway bridges against boer commados.
fascinating to see the logic in their siting and construction, and also amazed to realise that the cavalry, and the boers, rode across hundreds and hundreds of miles of empty veld, trying to catch/avoid one another.
It is a carp enough journey at 80 mph, let alone days and days in the saddle...
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oilrag you want to include the Rhone dams (of dambusters fame)on your next trip beutiful countryside and significantly historic
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Cheers welshlad.
Going again in late September, will look that up on the map. ;)
Edited by oilrag on 04/07/2008 at 18:56
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Uli, on the old road between Lagos and Calabar in southern Nigeria, early seventies: a sudden couple of miles of straight, slightly wider than usual, relatively well-surfaced road with silver tailfins and other wreckage littering the bush alongside it, left over from the then-recent Nigerian civil war during which crazed mercenary pilots in dodgy old freighters had landed weapons at night (and perhaps some food although that wasn't the Biafran leadership's main priority) for the beleaguered Biafrans. Still got old photos of that and Ikot Ekpene service station, at the site of one of the last Federal pushes in the war.
Britain and the Soviet Union supported the Federal side in the war. The Biafrans got most of their support from France, Portugal, South Africa and their allies, which were gambling on Biafra holding onto the Nigerian oilfields.
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Apologies for straying beyond the OP title into the late sixties, and into someone else's military history, Britain having been involved in the Nigerian civil war politically and financially, but not militarily in any major direct way except as a hardware supplier.
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Found it interesting Lud. Thanks.
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