The Most Decisive Battle In All History

The British Realised How Useful The Gurkhas Could Be.
The Gurkhas are citizens of a neutral country, Nepal, whose last war, in 1816, was against the British East India Company, the result of border tensions.
Since then, Nepal as a country has not fought a single war.
However, the Gurkhas played a major role both in extending and defending the British Empire.
This came about because the British followed a policy in Nepal that was the reverse of the one it had applied in the rest of the subcontinent.
The 1816 war came when the British were securing their Indian Empire, and although they emerged superior, they realised how useful the Gurkhas could be as fighters.
The result was an extraordinary deal.
Nepal was allowed to carry on much as it liked, spared the ‘civilising mission’ that was the creed in the rest of the subcontinent.
What the British were interested in was getting the Gurkhas to fight for them, so it was arranged that every year the British could come and recruit Gurkhas.
Now, such is the demand that 11,000 Gurkhas apply for some 170 places in the British Army each year.
There is little doubt that the British had the better of the deal.
Nepal was allowed to vegetate for a century and a half under the corrupt rule of the Rana Dynasty, the consequences of whose mismanagement are all too visible even now.
The British, on the other hand, got fighters who were paid much less than their white comrades.
It was not until 1911 that Gurkhas were even eligible for the Victoria Cross.
In the rest of Nepal there is not much regard for the Gurkhas, who come from a small Hindu sub-caste in one region of the country.

The Most Decisive Battle In All History.
One date in history most of us know is 1066.
During the previous few centuries, England had suffered a series of Viking invasions but there had never been an invader quite as ruthless as Duke William of Normandy.
William claimed he had been promised the English throne by Edward the Confessor.
But when Edward died at the beginning of 1066, the Anglo-Saxon nobility offered the crown to the most powerful man in the kingdom, Harold, Earl of Wessex.
William was furious, and nor was he alone.
Harold had fallen out with his brother Tostig, who forged an alliance with the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada.
Harald, a famous warrior, landed in the north and smashed the local levies at the largely forgotten battle of Fulford, outside York.
England’s Harold arrived in the north a few days later after making a forced march from London and annihilated the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge.
Harald and Tostig were killed, but the triumph was to be short-lived.
Duke William had crossed the channel in Harold’s absence and was ravaging the English countryside.
Harold’s weary men marched south again but they were overwhelmed at Hasting’s, one of the most decisive battles in all history.
For William, it was an all-or-nothing gamble.
But Harold had only to survive and he would have been able to summon reinforcements to fight again.
Why didn’t he bide his time?
His death deprived the English of a figurehead, and William bullied surviving nobles into submission.
They soon had cause to regret their surrender, as William set about ringing the country with castles and imposing the ‘Norman Yoke’.
Rebellions were crushed without mercy and whole populations slaughtered.
The Norman Conquest began the process of modernisation that was to lead to the birth of modern Britain.
William’s achievements are admirable, but it’s hard to like him as a man and impossible not to feel sympathy for Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

The Siege Of Venice, 1849.
On or around July 15, 1849, Austrian forces besieging Venice launched the first aerial attack using balloons carrying 30lb bombs.
The idea was pioneered by Austrian Artillery Lieutenant Franz Von Uchatius.
He developed small balloons made of paper that could stay aloft for half an hour carrying a bomb.
The balloons would be released upwind and, when it was hoped they would be over the enemy, a timed fuse would free the bomb.
Uchatius released the balloons from a warship, but the wind proved too strong and many of the balloons drifted right across the city and fell on the Austrian army encamped on the mainland.

A Strange Coincidence Of Fate.
On December 5, 1660, a ship sank in the Strait of Dover.
The only survivor was noted to be Hugh Williams.
On December 5, 1767, another ship sank in the same waters.
127 lost their lives, and the only survivor was Hugh Williams.
On August 8, 1820, a picnic boat capsized on the River Thames.
There was one survivor, Hugh Williams.
And on July 10, 1940, a British trawler was destroyed by a German mine.
Only two men survived, one man and his nephew – both were called Hugh Williams.

Tories Left Liverpool To Rot.
I’m still coming to terms with the “shock” revelation that the Tories planned to abandon Liverpool during the 1980s.
The only shock here is that anyone is shocked.
In the first five years of the 1980s, the Tories presided over my home city and 50,000 vital manufacturing jobs were lost.
School-leavers were told to get out of town, unemployed 40-year-olds told they’d never work again, inward investment stagnated, the city council’s funding was hammered and crime soared.
It was reckless neglect, part of an ideological war against its perceived enemies that Tories do very well.
Ask the miners.
Liverpool was left to go into freefall as a warning to other cities about what could happen if your council became too bolshie or your unions took a stand.
Under Thatcher, if you were One of Us, you were fine.
If not, you were another word beginning with ‘F’.
( Brian Reade )

The Greatest Mass Murderer In History.
The 20th Century witnessed death and slaughter on an unprecedented scale.
It was the century of the Holocaust and two World Wars.
Communist, Nazi, Fascist and military dictators killed more than 100 million people.
Mao Zedong, 1949 – 1976, China’s so-called ‘Great Helmsman’ was in fact the greatest mass murderer in history.
Most of his 60 million victims were his fellow Chinese, murdered as ‘Landlords’ after the communist takeover, starved in his misnamed ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958 – 1961, or killed and tortured in labour camps in the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties.
Mao’s rule, with its economic mismanagement and continual political upheavals, also spelled poverty for most of China’s untold millions.
Joseph Stalin, 1929 – 1953, was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people in the Soviet Union.
Stalin imposed a deliberate famine on Ukraine, killed millions of the wealthier peasants as he forced them off their land, and purged his own party, shooting thousands and sending millions more to work as slaves and perish in the Gulag.
Adolf Hitler, 1933 – 1945, was responsible for the deaths of 30 million people.
The horror of Hitler’s dictatorship lies in the uniqueness of his most notorious crime, the Holocaust, which stands alone in the annals of inhuman cruelty.
It was carried out under the cover of World War Two.
The war ended up costing millions of lives, leaving Europe devastated.

Children Were Made To Watch Their Parents Being Beaten.
In 1942, Richard Dobson was arrested for smuggling food into one of the civilian prison camps on Java after the Japanese invasion.
His interrogators thought he was a spy and he was repeatedly tortured.
So terrible was his suffering, he later found he had lost the ability to feel fear.
Stories of Japanese mistreatment of wartime prisoners are sadly familiar, but what is not is Richard’s age.
He was just 17, and one of 4,000 British children whose lives were shattered by defeat in the Far East and their families’ subsequent imprisonment.
Many of the children had led pampered lives, raised in imperial outposts such as Singapore and Hong Kong to be the next generation of colonial rulers.
The families last act in their old homes was to obey the order to kill their pets, as they were not allowed in the camps to which they were being sent.
Conditions in these camps varied widely.
The Japanese army had made no plans for dealing with tens of thousands of non-combatant prisoners.
In some places, the worst trial was a lack of privacy for undressing.
In others, families were separated and disease was rampant.
As the war continued, rations everywhere became scant, and death from starvation common place.
A rare treat for some detainees in Shanghai was to be allowed to eat the greyhounds kept at the race track.
Aside from hunger pains, there was the constant threat of violence from guards.
They were especially tough on women, for whom they had no respect, but children were not spared either.
A mother was ordered to brand her sons with a red-hot poker when they broke a window.
Youngsters were made to watch their parents being beaten and other prisoners hanged.

Nancy Wake, French Resistance Fighter.
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Nancy moved to Sydney, Australia with her family when she was only two years old.
At 16 she ran away from home and worked as a nurse.
Then, with £200 she had received in an aunt’s will, she travelled to New York, and London, where she trained as a journalist.
In the 1930s she worked in Paris as a European correspondent for America’s Hearst newspapers and in 1939 met and married wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca.
In 1933 in her work as a journalist, she went to Vienna to interview Hitler.
Nancy was shocked while she was there to see Jews chained to huge wheels, being whipped by Nazi troops.
The experience had a profound effect on her and proved to be the turning point in her life.
Realising what a danger Hitler posed to the world, she devoted herself to defeating the evil she had seen.
In 1939 when the Second World War broke out she immediately joined the French Resistance, starting as a courier carrying everything from simple messages to hi-tech radio parts.
She used her native cunning and beauty – being openly flirtatious – to overcome the suspicions of German guards to get through checkpoints.
Nancy soon graduated to spiriting, downed Allied pilots or groups of Jewish refugees from one ‘safe house’ to another until they reached the base of the Pyrenees, the gateway to freedom in Spain.
She once said: “Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work I used to think it didn’t matter if I died, because without freedom there is no point in living”.
She once cycled more than 500 miles through several German checkpoints to replace codes which her wireless operator had been forced to destroy during a German raid.
Once the Gestapo almost caught her – but she shot her way out of a roadblock and managed to escape while bullets whistled around her ears.
Then at the sixth attempt, she managed to flee over the Pyrenees to safety in neutral Spain.
Her husband Henri was not so lucky.
After being arrested by the Gestapo he refused to divulge her whereabouts or give an account of her activities and was executed.
Nancy later said:  “I will go to my grave regretting that. Henri was the love of my life”.
After escaping to Spain, Nancy came to Britain and joined the Special Operations Executive, before being parachuted back into France on April 29, 1944.
She became a vital liaison between London and the French Resistance.
Known by partisans by her codename Madame Andree she co-ordinated Resistance activity before the Normandy invasion and recruited more people to fight Germany.