Posted on 01/29/2014 4:09:02 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Me, too. When the homeschool association was studying “The Hobbit,” I drew a set of battlefield maps like that.
I just finished hearing about the Battle of the Bulge on my World War II recordings. Professor Childers (U. of Pa.) says the Germans who murdered the prisoners at Malmedy were Russian Front veterans, just doing what they'd done all along.
cool idea
I’ve seen a lot of them for Civil War and WW2, never considered them for fictional battles
The Lake Country and Ticino is a beautiful part of the planet.
And the casino is still there.
I was surprised at home much information was in the text. It was possible to diagram the Battle of Five Armies very clearly, including the locations of major characters. It was a lesson for the children in reading carefully for details.
Wow. Are there maps like that online?
As a general rule, the fighting between Germans and Americans/British in the west was not as brutal as the fighting in the east between Germans and Soviets. There were the occasional truces in the west for both sides to recover their wounded. A wounded British or American soldier could be expected to receive decent medical care if captured by the Germans, and vice versa. None of this happened in the east. From the outset, the Germans intended Operation Barbarossa to be a war of racial extermination. And the Russians were more than willing to play that game, too.
There were exceptions of course. Malmedy is one example. Another is fighting between American airborne units and German SS divisions. By the time of the Battle of the Bulge, the fighting between those groups was described as “especially bitter,” which I take to mean “no prisoners.”
Much as I’d like to go to that Museum, the best place for aviation is the Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH. It’s only two hours away from here. I’ve taken the boys there several times. I would rate it as the best military museum I have been to, although the Imperial War Museum in London is still on my bucket list.
I have had the good fortune to visit the Imperial War Museum. My long suffering wife discovered it has a delighful coffee, er, tea shop and let me take all the time I wanted. It is definitely a bucket list item. Be sure to include the Churchill War Rooms in your visit.
Interesting thing about naval construction from WW2: you can look at the profile of a ship and identify the country that built her. The bridge and bowline of HMS Spartan clearly identifies her as British built.
Some day Mrs. tanker and Mrs. henkster need to have some tea for a few hours, and can commiserate on the hours of long suffering they have endured....
I haven’t looked. There probably are maps and artwork either in books or online. Tolkien was a World War I vet, so he staged battles carefully. I drew my maps based on a diagram of the Lonely Mountain that was in the book; fortunately it was pretty simple, because I’m not much of an artist.
That seems reasonable.
Of course, more recent research suggests that some of the statements by the Belgian witnesses was less than accurate. In any event, I'm not sure that I accept the findings of the Senate Subcommittee at face value.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/Malmedy_report.pdf
It doesn't seem that long ago - the early days around Guadalcanal - when the Navy was agonizing over how to best use their one fleet carrier and losing cruisers left and right.
My wife discovered the same thing when I went to the atomic museum in Albuquerque. She found coffee and a nice book to read while my oldest son and I proceeded to spend 6 hours in this small museum. Of course she knew this would happen. The first time I want to the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in D.C., I was there when it opened and they kicked me out so their employees could go home.
Aren’t we lucky to have had such understanding women have us?
BTW the “Ninety-Ninth Warhawk Squadron”, AKA “The Tuskegee Airmen.”
Reading above, I was about to ping you!
Thanks! I saw a man in the lobby at the gym the other morning wearing a Tuskegee Airmen cap. He didn’t look quite old enough to be a vet, but maybe he was well-preserved.
More on bombing in today’s (Thursday’s) news. One has to wonder how the war would have gone if both sides had used all those resources differently.
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