With Allied armies pushing ever northwards through the “tough old gut” of Italy, and German forces pulling out, Benito Mussolini took a long look at the situation before departing Milan on 25 April 1945. It was, fittingly, Italy’s Liberation Day as the despot fled Milan in his red Alfa Romeo, with long-time mistress Clara Petacci…
The USSR’s Christmas 1979 intervention into Afghanistan was foreseen as a swift, near-costless and necessary conflict. Days after the military move, Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev assured his diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin that, “we will end this war in three or four weeks”. It continued for almost a decade in fact, outlasting by over six years Brezhnev…
About 75 years ago in Italy the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini fell, leaving an imprint on the fate of this country and partly the course of world history On the night of July 25, 1943 in Rome, in the Palazzo Venezia, the fate of Benito Mussolini, who had ruled Italy since 1922, was decreed,…
Fifty years ago the world received a lesson in the revolutionary power of protracted people’s war when some 84,000 Vietnamese communist peasants stunned the world’s greatest military power, the United States, with an astounding offensive considered impossible by America’s Army generals who had only weeks before declared the communist revolutionaries of South Vietnam essentially defeated….
In mid-December 1960, a conference was held at Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, to outline America’s nuclear war strategy. During the meeting, plans were revealed whereby Moscow alone would be hit by 40 megatons of nuclear weapons. That is: about 4,000 times the force of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, on 6…
In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia’s last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city…
