Simmons, General Keith
Simpkins, Peter
Simpson, General William
Singapore
Japanese atrocities
liberation and Japanese surrender
and loss of battleships
Singora
Sinkawang
Sio
Sittang,river
Skorzeny, Obersturmbannführer Otto
Skudai, river
Slim, General William
and recovery of Burma
and recovery of Malaya
and retreat from Burma
sacking and reappointment
Slim, river
Slot,the
Slovakia
Slovenia
Smolensk
Smoot–Hawley Act
Smuts, Field Marshal Jan
Smyth, General J. G. ‘Jackie’
Social Darwinism
Sollum
Solojewka
Solomon IslandsSomaliland
Somerville,Admiral Sir James
Somme, river
Sousse
South Africa
South African air force
South African War
Soviet air force
Soviet navy
Soviet Union (USSR)
and Britain
civilian deaths
collectivization
death toll
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and Geneva Convention
and German rearmament
German invasion
and history
invasion of Poland
and Japanese surrender
and Japanese threat
and Molotov–Ribbentrop pact
partisan resistance
purges and show trials
railway system
and Spanish Civil War, 75–6
war with Japan
and Winter War
see also Russia
Spaatz, General Carl
Spain
and Gibraltar
and invasion of Soviet Union
Jews
railway system
Spanish Civil War
Spanish-American War
Sparks, Marine William
Special Night Squads
Special Operations Executive
(SOE)
Speer, Albert
Speranza
Spree, river
Spruance, Admiral Raymond
Allgemeine SSEinsatzgruppen
European volunteers
and Jewish vengeance
and retreat from Soviet Union
Waffen SS
and Warsaw Rising
Stakanowo
Stalin, Josef
and allied advance
and Arctic convoys
and Britain
and German surrender
and invasion of Soviet Union
and Japanese surrender
and post-war Europe
and Soviet air force
and strategic bombing campaign
Stalingrad
Stark, Admiral Harold
Stark, Colonel Robert
Steiner, Obergruppenführer Felix
Stemmerman, General Wilhelm
Stephan, Colonel
Stilwell, General Joseph ‘Vinegar
Joe’
Stoltz
Stopes
Stopford, General Sir Montague
Strait of Gibraltar
Strait of Johore
Strait of Kerch
Straits of Messina, Straits of Vitiaz
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Strauss, General Adolf
Stresa Front
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Student, General Kurt
Stülpnagel, General Karl-Heinrich
Stumme, General Georg
Stuttgart
submarines
long-range
U-boats
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wolf packs
SudanSudetenland
Suez Canal
Suez Crisis
Sultan, General Daniel I
Sumatra
Sungei Jurong, river
Sungei Kedah, river
Sungei Muda, river
Suzuki, Admiral Baron Fantaro
Swatow
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Tai Po
Taiwan
see Formosa Takagi, Admiral Takeo, 282
Takeda, General Hisashi, 466
Tamu,331,391,548
Tanaka, Admiral Raizo, 376
Tanamdogo, 373
Tananarive, 334
Tangiers, 404
tanks
Christie tank suspension
and invasion of Soviet Union
and North Africa campaign
tanks, types of
Char B
Churchill
KV
M3 (Grant)
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Hisaichi
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Territorial Army
Teschen
Teutonic Knights
Thailand,see Siam
Tharrawaddy,
Thoma, General Wilhelm Ritter von
Thomas, Sir Shenton
Thrace
Tiddim
Tilsit
Time magazine
Times,The
Timor
Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon
tin
Tinian
Tippelskirch, General Kurt von
Tito, Marshal (Josip Broz)
Tobruk
Todt Organization
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Tojo, General Hideki
Tokyo
air raids
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Tokyo war crimes trials
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Tonkin
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trade unions
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Trans-Siberian railway
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and German rearmament
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Henning von
Treviso
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Triple Alliance
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Truman, Harry S.
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Tsunoda, Admiral Kanji
Tsushima, battle of
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Tula
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Turkey
typhus
Tyrol
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Umberto, Crown Prince, of Savoy
unconditional surrender
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America
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and economic recession
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and history
and invasion of Soviet Union
and Israel
and Japanese internment
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and the Philippines
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relations with Britain
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war economy
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USSR, see Soviet Union
van der Lubbe, Marius
Vasilevsky, Marshal Aleksandr
Vatican
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Vengeance weapons
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Vladivostok
Vlasov, General Andrei
Voice of America
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Volksturm
Vormann, General Nikolaus von
Voronezh
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Vyazma
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Wagner, General Edouard
Wainright, General Jonathan ‘Snowy’
Wake Island
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Warm Springs, Georgia
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Washington conferences
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Waterloo, battle of
Wavell, General Sir Archibald
and Far East and India
and Middle East
and Orde WingateWavre
Wavre
Waw
Webb, Beatrice
Webb, Judge Sir William
Wedemeyer, General Albert C.
Weichs, General Maximilian Freiherr von
Weidling, General Helmuth
Weiss, General Walter
Wellington, Duke of
Wells, H. G.
Welsh, Air Marshal W. L.
Wenck, General Walter
West Wall
Weygand, General Maxime
Weymouth
White Russians
Wilhelm II, Kaiser
Wilhelmina, Queen
Wilson, Captain Eric
Wilson, General Henry Maitland, ‘Jumbo’
Wilson, Woodrow
‘window’
Wingate, Brigadier Orde
Winter, Denis
WinterWar
Wismar
Wolf, General Karl
women
women soldiers
Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma, (Wasbies)
Women’s, Voluntary Service, (WVS)
World Disarmament Conference
Worthing
Wuest, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacob
Xerxes the Great
Yalta conference
Yamamoto, Admiral Isoruku
Yamashita, General Tomoyuki
Yangtze, river
Yeats, W. B.
Young, Owen
Young, Sir Mark
Ypres Salient
Yugoslavia
Yunnan province
Zaghouan hills
zaibatsu
Zaponezhe
Zeitzler, General Kurt
Zhitomir
Zhukov, Marshal Georgi
Ziegler, General Heinz
Zinoviev, Gregory
Zokali
Zossen
* If the countries of the British Empire are counted separately, then the total is even greater.
* Starting in 1793, as far as the British are concerned, when France declared war on England.
* Even if the Germans, unlike the British, stubbornly refused to conscript women until the final stages.
* The British would have sent troops too, if the Norwegians and Swedes had agreed to allow them passage. By 1941 perceptions had changed and Britain declared war on Finland.
* Quoted in Wolfram Wette, Die Wehrmacht – Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2002.
* A British private soldier stationed in Moenchengladbach was recently reprimanded by a German Hausfrau for smacking his child, who was misbehaving in the street. At the soldier’s subsequent interview with his company commander (a close relative of this author), it transpired that the lady had said, ‘In Germany we do not strike children’, to which the soldier replied, ‘And in England we don’t gas Jews.’ Mud sticks for a very long time.
† But see Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where it is stated that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Germans were directly involved and ‘millions’ knew about it.
* The word means ‘compete destruction by fire’ and so could equally well refer to the Allied bombing of Dresden, or the fire-bombing of Tokyo, but instead has come to mean, with doubtful etymological accuracy, the elimination of large numbers of the Jewish population of Europe by the Germans from 1942 to 1945.
* Mud, Blood and Poppycock (Cassell, London, 2003) won me two death threats, both written in green ink with lots of block capitals and bits underlined. Fortunately, the would-be assassins’ map-reading was as bad as their spelling and I am still here.
† 1 South African, 2 New Zealand, 4 Indian, 9 Australian and a French brigade.
* By the end of the war, Pape was a major-general in command of a panzer grenadier division. After the war, he became a major-general in the Bundeswehr but resigned in 1966 during the ‘Crisis of the Generals’, when the head of the Luftwaffe, Lieutenant-General Werner Panitzki, and the head of the army, General Heinz Trettner, resigned over differences in the method of civilian control of the armed forces. Pape resigned in loyalty to his commander. Ernst finished the war as a captain, when he surrendered the city of Iserlohn to the Americans on 16 April 1945.
* There are many ways to calculate inflation but using the conservative Consumer Price Index measure, this is equivalent to over $100bn today, or about one and a half times the UK’s annual defence budget.
* An investor buys a thousand shares each priced at $10.He puts up 10 per cent ($1,000) and borrows the rest ($9,000) from the broker. A month later the shares have doubled in value to $20 and the investor sells. He gets $20,000 for the sale, pays the broker back the $9,000 plus interest (say, an annual interest rate of 6 per cent, as it was in mid-October 1929,orroughly$45 for the month) and now has $10,955 for an initial investment of $1,000.
* Readers should note that the United Kingdom, despite its geographical location, is not considered part of Europe, at least in regard to matters of finance.
* Louis Napoleon, the son of Louis, the one-time king of Holland and brother of Napoleon I. He reigned as Napoleon III to sustain the fiction that the first Napoleon’s infant son was the rightful ruler of France after his father’s exile to St Helena. Like so many deposed emperors, kings and dictators, Napoleon III went into exile in Hampshire and his son (the Prince Imperia
l) was killed in a particularly foolish escapade while an observer with the British Army in the Zulu War in 1879. Louis Napoleon, his Spanish ex-empress Eugenie and the Prince Imperial are all buried at Farnborough Abbey. Despite the Bonaparte lineage, most of the French considered them to be upstarts and have never asked for the bodies to be repatriated.
* The First Republic was that established by the Revolution and lasted until Napoleon I crowned himself emperor in 1804; the second ran from the 1848 revolution which ditched King Louis Philippe until the coup by Napoleon III in 1852, and the Third from the defeat of the Second Empire in 1870 until defeat yet again in 1940.
* The term ‘intellectual’ is one frequently found in descriptions of political groupings and presumably refers to writers, artists, poets, philosophers and other idlers whose influence is considerably greater than their numbers or contribution would warrant.
* The full-time armies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were tiny at the beginning of the war; only India had a professional regular army almost as large (or as small) as Britain’s.
* This was to ensure that there would be more male voters than female. When it became apparent that female voting patterns broke down in exactly the same way as men’s, the females’ age was also set at twenty-one in 1928.
* The Daily Mail refused to print a government-dictated leader – some things don’t change.
* The USA threatened to build a navy to rival the Royal Navy. To maintain superiority, Britain would have had to build too, and her government was terrified by the cost. At the Washington Conference Britain agreed a ratio of tonnage that made the US Navy equal in size to the Royal Navy. To get to that tonnage, the USA could build, while the British had to decommission and scrap. The result was a Royal Navy unprepared for war when it came. In fact, if the British had shown a bit more gumption, the US would not have built – the Crash and the Depression would in due course have seen to that.
† Britain went formally on to the gold standard in 1844 whenthe pound sterling was fixed at 113 grains of gold to one pound. She came off it in 1914, went on again in 1925 at the same rate and came off it in 1931.On 1 July 2008 (before recession began temporarily to inflate its price) the same amount of gold cost £109.
* Actually the November Revolution – Russia was still on the old calendar.
* Strictly speaking, White Russia is Belorussia, that area bounded in the west by Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and to the south by the Ukraine, but the term quickly became applied to all those in arms against the communists.
† Although it is doubtful if they knew that the Tsar was there, and questionable whether they could have cared less what the communists might do to him.
* As the population was around 240 million, the one copper’s nark per 2.29 million people must have been a very busy spy.
* By Dora Kaplan, a socialist revolutionary who had done time in Siberia and whose parents had emigrated to the USA. She thought Lenin was betraying the revolution, and put two bullets into him. She was caught and executed shortly afterwards.
* In December 1918 Lenin sent Kamenev to London to explain to the British government what the new communist state was all about. He lasted a week before the British deported him, irritated by his clumsy attempts to spread Bolshevism amongst British workers. Distrustful of foreigners as British workers are, those few who understood what Kamenev was trying to say thought him a joke.
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