Garrett E Eriksen examines uniforms and gear worn by the Red Army and Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. The rest of this article can be found in the December 2017 issue of The Armourer. The Battle of Stalingrad is near mythical in its status as a decisive battle during World War II. Any history buff worth their salt has, at the very least, heard of this battle if not … Continue reading What they wore at Stalingrad
Garrett E Eriksen examines some of the uniforms, medals and equipment of Navy and Civilian personnel deployed to the Evacuation of Dunkirk. The rest of this article can be found in the September 2017 issue of The Armourer. The events at Dunkirk over 26 May to 4 June 1940 saw nearly 400,000 soldiers evacuated from the shores of the embattled French coastline. The desperate situation the … Continue reading The Uniforms of Dunkirk
Garrett E Eriksen examines the Women’s Voluntary Service during the London Blitz. The rest of this article can be found in the November 2017 issue of The Armourer. THE WOMEN’S VOLUNTARY SERVICE The romantic notion of warfare, until World War I, held that fighting and dying should be left to the soldiers. Civilians in towns and cities were considered non-combatants and the expectation was that they would … Continue reading “The WVS Never Says No”
Garrett E Eriksen takes a look at the kit equipped by Allied and Axis soldiers at the Normandy Landings. The rest of this article can be found in the July 2017 issue of The Armourer. The 6th of June 1944 saw the largest seaborne invasion in history taking place along the beaches of Normandy, France as part of the Allied invasion of German-occupied Western Europe. It has … Continue reading Gearing Up For D-Day
I am a huge fan of the Folklore Podcast. I find the host, Mark Norman, to be an eloquent writer and speaker and his podcasts contain some incredibly detailed pieces of research. Recently he uploaded a show on vampires and their folklore, but shortly after this first of two episodes there was an outburst of mob violence in Malawi that saw nine people killed as … Continue reading African Vampires and the Folklore Podcast
I am a historian who has been studying the South Africa Border War in detail for almost a decade. I am currently completing my PhD at Stellenbosch University and my topic is on what SADF soldiers did when not in combat and/or during recreation time, and specifically when deployed in Angola and on the Border between 1966 – 1989. I’m looking for stories, photos, videos, … Continue reading VETERAN STORIES NEEDED
I was invited to speak on 6 August 2017 at a special event hosted by the Congolese Civil Society at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference was to be on nuclear weapons, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacy of atomic weapons and how the Congo was directly involved in the acquisition of uranium for the bombs dropped … Continue reading The Atomic Bomb – From Function to Fallout
Bobby Blacburn, the Crocodile Man, and his dentures of Crocodile Teeth from South Africa. Continue reading The Crocodile Man
An examination of the gear worn by both Axis and Allied forces at the Siege of Tobruk. The rest of this article can be found in the April 2017 issue of The Armourer. 1941 saw the likes of General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox himself, testing the might of his Afrika Korps against the steely resolve of the British Western Desert Force (WDF) in Northern Africa. … Continue reading The Uniforms of the Desert
170 years ago today, 26 July 1847, the West African country of Liberia declared independence. Continue reading Liberia – Africa’s “little America”
CITIZEN HISTORIAN 