World History Analysis and Views

Vo Nguyen Giap, the communist general widely regarded as one of the military geniuses of the 20th century, who masterminded the defeat of the French and the war against the Americans in Vietnam, has died. He was 102. Giap died Friday at a military hospital in Hanoi, the Associated Press reported, citing a government official. Though Ho Chi Minh was the symbol of Vietnam's fight for independence and reunification, it was Giap who carved out the victories. From Dien Bien Phu to Khe Sanh to the Tet offensive, his name became synonymous with the battles that defined a chapter of world history and emboldened liberation movements from Africa to Latin America. A man of little pretense and great ambition, Giap had no formal military training and used to joke that he was a self-taught general. His early nationalistic calling was as a writer and propagandist. Never having touched a gun, he protested when Ho ordered him to prepare for a war with France: "I wield a pen, not a swor...

Rochus Misch, who served as Adolf Hitler's devoted bodyguard for most of World War II has died at the age of 96. Misch died in Berlin on Thursday after a short illness, Burkhard Nachtigall, who helped him write his 2008 memoir, revealed. Misch remained proud to the end about his years with Hitler, whom he affectionately called "boss". In an interview given in 2005 Misch spoke of Hitler as "a very normal man" and gave a riveting account of the German dictator's last days before he and his wife Eva Braun killed themselves as the Soviet Red Army closed in around their bunker in Berlin. "He was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman," Misch said. Born in the tiny Silesian town of Alt Schalkowitz, in what is now Poland, Misch was orphaned at an early age and joined the SS at the age of 20, seeing it as an organisation that was against the rising threat from the left. He signed up for the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a unit founded...

The Battle of Stalingrad (August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943) [6] [7] [8] [9] was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in the southwestern Soviet Union. Marked by constant close quarters combat and lack of regard for military and civilian casualties , it is among the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare . The heavy losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. [10] It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II , the German forces never regaining the initiative in the East and withdrawing vast military force from the West to reinforce their losses. [11] The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in late summer 1942 using the 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army . The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble. The fight...

Background In August 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed a military expedition to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, in a letter to the directory, seeking to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain’s access to India. The plan was agreed upon in March 1798. The Directory, although troubled by the scope and cost of the enterprise, readily agreed to the plan in order to remove the popular general from the center of power. At the beginning of the campaign, Bonaparte’s expedition seized Malta from the Knights of Saint John on June 9 and then landed successfully at Alexandria on July 1, eluding, for the time being, detection by the Royal Navy. Conquest of Egypt After landing on the coast of Egypt, Bonaparte’s force of 25,000 fought off a force of about 100,000 Mamelukes in the Battle of the Pyramids approximately nine miles (15 km) from the pyramids. He defeated the Mamluk cavalry using a larger version of the common infantry square, with cannons and ...

The Bastille was a royal fortress in Paris, but revolutionaries gave it an inflated notoriety by declaring it a state prison. On 14 July 1789, militant Parisian workers stormed the fortress and dismantled it. Although they claimed they were releasing prisoners, their real purpose was to acquire weapons. This event triggered a three-year reign of terror and political turmoil in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and 1000 people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were guillotined. Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. The Bastille was originally constructed in 1370 as a bastide, or "fort...

Operation Barbarossa was the name given to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia on June 22nd 1941. Barbarossa the largest military attack of World War Two and was to have appalling consequences for the Russian people. Three army groups attacked Russia on June 22nd 1941. Army Group North, led by von Leeb, Army Group Centre, commanded by von Bock and Army Group South commanded by von Rundstedt. Army Group Consisted of? Army Group North XVIII Army led by von Küchler IV Panzergruppe led by Hoepner XVI Army led by Busch Totalled 20 divisions and Luftflotte I Army Group Centre III Panzergruppe led by Hoth IX Army led by Strauss IV Army led by von Kluge II Panzergruppe led by Guderian Totalled 51 divisions and Luftflotte II Army Group South VI Army led by von Reichenau I Panzergruppe led by von Kleist XVII Army led by von Stülpnagel Hungarian Army Corps ...

Unpublished: LIFE correspondent Percy Knauth (left) sifts through debris in the shallow trench in the garden of the Reich Chancellery where, Knauth was told, the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were burned after their suicides. (William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)