The British A17 Tetrarch light tank is best known for its role in Operation Overlord, where they landed in Hamilcar gliders in support of the…
Military history and RPG books
The British A17 Tetrarch light tank is best known for its role in Operation Overlord, where they landed in Hamilcar gliders in support of the…
On 30th April 1980, terrorists stormed the Iranian Embassy in London and took twenty-six hostages. A six-day siege ensued, during which the embassy’s press attaché,…
Recently, I saw a link to an Atlas Obscura article about the M65 “Atomic Annie”. The M65 was a US 280mm artillery gun that could…
During the Cold War, both sides did what they could to hide the capabilities of their military equipment. As Sun Tzu advised, “A military operation…
Last week, The Sun ran a story about how the CIA wanted to force Britain to hand over the Falkland Islands to Argentina and force…
Today is Commonwealth Day. It seems like an appropriate day to remember that Britain didn’t stand alone in 1940. The Commonwealth, and a few other…
On Remembrance Day last year I wrote, “I consider Remembrance Day to be a time to remember everyone that has been harmed by war. Any…
It is generally accepted that the First World War was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip. In recent years, however, an extra twist has been added: that the only reason Princip was in a position to fire at the Archduke was because he happened to be eating lunch when the Archduke’s car drove past. Millions of lives were lost during the war that followed. The Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the Second World War, and even the atomic bomb can arguably be attributed to the First World War, and thus, to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It’s sobering to think that all of those terrible things might never have happened if Princip hadn’t felt a little hungry and stopped off at Schiller’s delicatessen for a sandwich.
The sandwich theory, however, is deeply flawed. The Smithsonian blog published an excellent debunking of it back in 2011. It appears that the original source of the sandwich was a novel by a Brazilian TV host. The post is very interesting, and well worth a read.
Recently, I posted a link on Google Plus, about a widely-held belief that Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand.…