Israel Provided Argentina With Weapons That Were Used Against British Forces

Saving The Children.
On 2 December 1938, as the clouds of war gathered over Europe, a ship docked at Harwich bringing 200 Jewish children, immigrants seeking sanctuary, facing an uncertain future.
They would be the first of thousands, brought here by the Kindertransport to save their lives. These children had been saved by British men and women who cared, men like the late Sir Nicholas Winton and his friends.
They came to Britain on the trains, planes and ships organised by British organisations dedicated to rescuing Jewish children from the Nazis.

They arrived without their parents, coming to a country that would be at war within the year, but at least they would not know the horrors of Auschwitz and the death camps that took their families.
The trigger that sparked the Kinder-transport was the night of 9/10 November 1938, when Jewish businesses in Germany were attacked by Nazi mobs, their windows smashed and their businesses vandalised.

It became known as Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass) and began to confirm to a horrified world just what Hitler’s regime was capable of.
It spurred on organisations like the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the British based Movement for the Care of Children from Germany.
( Brian Lynch, August 2015 )

Israel Provided Argentina With Arms And Skyhawk Jets To Use Against British Forces During The Falklands War.
Declassified UK Foreign Office files have revealed that Israel sold weapons to Argentina in 1982, when the Falklands War was at its peak.
Israel provided Argentina with arms that were used against British forces during the battle for the territory.
Prior to the war, Israel exported Skyhawk jets to Argentina which was used to bomb British warships and kill dozens of British military servicemen.

The files have also revealed that Israel was about to sell spy planes to Argentina which were to be used to gather electronic and signals intelligence from the British.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, foreign secretary at the time, managed to talk the Israelis out of doing so.
Initially, Israeli officials denied any arms sales to Argentina, but dropped their claim by 1984 justifing their actions by saying the UK sells arms to enemy Arab states.
( Middle East Monitor, 24.08.2016 )  ..  middleeastmonitor.com

German Missiles Fired At London.
Towards the end of the Second World War, thousands of V1 and V2 missiles were fired at London and South East England.
The V1 pilotless planes announced their arrival with an ominous drone, followed by silence as their motors stopped and they and their payload of explosives glided downwards along a chillingly unpredictable path.
The V2 rockets delivered instant destruction with a ‘double crack’, the breaking of the sound barrier, then the explosion.

The most destructive V2 impact was on Woolworth’s in New Cross, South East London.
The store was filled with housewives attracted by rumours of saucepans for sale.
168 were killed.
The public outcry led the RAF to bomb suspected launch sites in The Hague, but the German crews were long gone.
Instead, 500 Dutch civilians were incinerated, an even greater horror than the New Cross explosion.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact is that more people died making the V-weapons than in the explosions they caused.
Thousands of slave labourers perished underground, working in horrific conditions.
Those who survived to the end were shot, hanged, burned alive or sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis.

In contrast, the German’s top rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, was able to arrange for himself and his team to be captured by friendly Americans.
He swiftly transferred his loyalty from the Third Reich to the US space programme, and in due course was celebrated in a movie called ‘I Aim At The Stars’.
Cynics called it ‘I Aim At The Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London’.
( Originally posted on May 2, 2012 )

Liberating Brussels.
On 3 September 1944, British Second Army units were on the move.
A long column of vehicles was making its way through the quiet Belgian countryside. German resistance to the Allied forces was weakening.
I was in a Royal Signals truck as part of 30 Corps HQ Signals unit and, as far as we were concerned, it was just another move.
But soon rumours were spreading, we were on the way to Brussels.

We really began to believe it as people appeared in the outskirts, waving and cheering.
It was the prelude to the most exciting and memorable day of my army service.
In the city centre, people were lining the streets – laughing, crying and some waving makeshift Union Flags.
Women climbed into the slow-moving vehicles, hugging and kissing the overwhelmed soldiery.

Trucks were festooned with flowers, and food and drink were thrust into our hands.
Completely surrounded, the convoy halted amid the riotous carnival atmosphere.
For the rest of the day, we were on leave, and told to report to camp in the Royal Palace grounds by dusk.
With my mates Jack and Percy, I went into a small bar.

The place was crowded, and we were feted and given more food and drink by men who told us how the Germans had scuttled away overnight.
I had my cap snatched as a souvenir and recovered it with some difficulty.
Finally, despite the protestations of the occupants of the bar, we were able to make our unsteady ways back to the truck.
( Eric Savage, February 2016 )

Bad Times In Malaya, Over 2,000 Civilians Killed.
The Malayan Emergency, a 12-year guerrilla war which saw Commonwealth forces facing a communist force, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), up until 1960.
British taxes on rubber and tin caused resentment before the Second World War, then the Japanese ran the economy into the ground after they invaded.
Unemployment and famine ensued.
All this provided fertile ground for communist revolution after the war.

It began with strikes, then in 1948 three European plantation managers were killed at Sungai Siput, Perak.
In response the British banned the Malayan Communist Party which began a guerrilla campaign against the tin mines and rubber plantations.
Ironically 400 of the guerrillas were British trained former resistance fighters.
It foreshadowed the Vietnam War in many ways.

The rebels hid in the dense jungles of Malaya, there were several atrocities and blanket bombing and defoliation was actively used.
Special Constables guarded the plantations before General Sir Harold Briggs developed the Briggs Plan which tried to cut the rebels off from the rest of the population.
He would starve them out.

British patrols, full of nervous conscript virgin soldiers and uncertain who was friend or foe, sometimes employed brutal and indiscriminate tactics in the isolated villages.
Inaccurate blanket bombing of dense jungle also killed civilians.
The Briggs Plan saw the forced relocation of 500,000 rural Malayans to, effectively, concentration camps, and extra British and Commonwealth troops (including reforming the wartime SAS) placing some 40,000 men under Sir Gerald Templer.

In October 1951 the MNLA killed British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney.
This was a step too far for many of the Malayans but put fear into the Europeans.
An amnesty in September 1955 saw few guerrillas turn themselves in, but the communist leader Chin Peng arranged truce talks.
These led only to an intensification of the conflict (bringing New Zealand into the war) when his demands were ignored.

Malay became independent on 31 August 1957, which effectively ended the emergency by 1958.
Chin Peng fled to China, then Thailand, but would return.
Some 6,710 MNLA guerrillas were killed.
British and Commonwealth casualties were 519 with 1,345 Malayan troops killed.
Compared to this, a staggering 2,478 civilians died.
( Steve Windsor, February 2016 )

Man Who Said He Escaped From Auschwitz Is A Liar.
A Pennsylvania man who claimed for years to have escaped from Auschwitz, met track and field star Jesse Owens and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, confessed that he had fabricated the entire story.
For years, Hirt gave public speeches about his experiences in the second world war, including his Jewish family’s flight from Poland to Belgrade.

But he also told people that he was arrested by the Nazis, sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and met Mengele, the SS physician who tortured prisoners of the concentration camp.
Hirt claimed to have escaped under an electric fence at the camp.

He added an extraordinary prologue and epilogue to the story, saying that he saw Adolf Hitler turn his back on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and that he met Eleanor Roosevelt and Owens after his arrival in the United States.Hirt is not the first to fabricate or exaggerate a Holocaust story.

Herman Rosenblat, a Polish survivor, embellished his 1993 memoir and made up some parts entirely, including the love story at its heart.
At the time, historian Ken Waltzer wrote in the New Republic that he was alarmed by how quickly people accepted the story.
( Alan Yuhas, 24.06.2016 )  ..  theguardian.com

When Children Never Went To School.
It is hard to imagine a Britain where children never went to school, but until the 1790s the opportunity of learning to read and write was rare for most of the country’s youth.
Learning was mainly the privilege of the aristocracy.
The army, the church, the law or taking over the family estate was the burden of the upper classes and they prepared their offspring accordingly.
Rich fathers hired tutors to ready their sons for running the country before packing them off to Oxford or Cambridge.

North of the border, the Scots were ahead of the times with five universities.
Wealthy wives oversaw the appointment of a governess capable of teaching their daughters how to look pretty, laugh in the right places and bully the servants.
Some elementary knowledge of reading and counting was an advantage but on no account must your daughters appear to be clever.

Wealthy men endowed colleges for the good of their souls, but benefactors apart, it was the Sunday school that introduced the mystery of reading to a wider audience.
Its purpose was to enable the flock simply to read the Bible.
Writing came a poor second and arithmetic was irrelevant.
In 1807, Mr Samuel Whitbread voiced the revolutionary idea that local parishes should be responsible for providing two years’ teaching for children between seven and 14 years of age.

Objections were vociferous.
It would be too expensive, children needed to work on the land and in factories, and anyway they would ‘get ideas above their station’.
Education, of course, was really meant for boys.
The Victorian writer and educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell, a supporter of girls schooling, still reflected the ethos of the time in that ‘boys are sent into the world to govern and direct, girls are to dwell in quiet homes to exercise a noiseless influence’.
Just to make her point clear, she added ‘a woman who is not feminine is a monster in creation’.

In the 19th century, British people were growing restless.
In farming communities new machinery threatened the already pathetic wages and saw agricultural workers turn to violence.
Families moved to the new industrial towns in search of work.
There, in the mills, appalling conditions finally alerted the humanitarians to the need for reform.
If people could read and write and add up, all kinds of new opportunities awaited them.
Many remained unconvinced.

In 1833, the Factory Act included the proposal that children between nine and 13 should have two hours education a day and those under seven should not be employed in the mills.
In that year Mr Roebuck expressed his hope in the Commons that with the ‘slow operation of time, patience and industry’, those in parliament would be won round to seeing that education was a good thing.

It took until 1870, when for the price of 2d a week, all children between five and 13 should go to school.
Poor children’s fees would be paid.
Even then the churches weren’t entirely happy that their sphere of influence was being taken over by the State.

Finally, in 1944, what was known as the Butler Education Act (after Richard ‘Rab’ Butler, the Education Secretary) came into force.
It swept away all previous legislation and guaranteed free non-denominational education for all five to 13-year-olds.
It was intended to promote the spiritual, mental and physical well-being.
( Janet Toms, September 2015 )