Although the Western Front continues to dominate the popular memory of the First World War in Britain and Ireland, the conflict had its beginnings in eastern Europe, and it was here that it would have its profoundest effects. This often overlooked fact was brought home to the world in the 1990s, when the state of … Read more
The Somme offensive was initially conceived as a joint Anglo-French advance which would break the German lines and open the road to Berlin. The area was not chosen for any great strategic reasons: the German line was not particularly weak there nor was the fate of any strategically important city or railway junction at stake. … Read more
Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, a group of Irish separatists took the decision to launch a rebellion before the war ended, and early in 1915 an unofficial military committee of the Irish Republican Brotherhood began to draw up plans. The military forces to be used were the Irish Volunteers, but the … Read more
The average Dubliner’, according to an anonymous letter-writer to the Irish Times, commenting on the revelations about the Nazi Holocaust at the end of the Second World War, ‘would not be persuaded even though all the hosts of Hitler’s victims were to rise from the dead; he would only pour himself another drink muttering “British … Read more
The story of the Refugee Resettlement Farm, which existed in Millisle, County Down from 1938 to 1948, is one of the little-known ‘secret histories’ of the Second World War in Ireland. To this remote, disused farm on the beautiful Ards peninsula, came, in the late 1930s, Jewish children who escaped on Kindertransports, together with older … Read more