81 years ago on Wednesday, June 22, Nazi Germany launched the biggest land invasion in human history: Operation Barbarossa, its drive into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This began the biggest and bloodiest part of the Second World War in Europe, by an order of magnitude. On June 22, 2022, episode one of Beyond […]
Help spread the word about the Kickstarter campaign for Beyond Barbarossa and win prizes The fundraising campaign to support the start-up costs for the upcoming podcast is now live on Kickstarter, and I’m asking for your help to spread the word. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform, where interested people can contribute money to pay for […]
Last week in Second World War history Those who know their history know that the Eastern Front was by far the largest theatre of operations during the Second World War. The Soviet Union put more men and women into the fighting than all other Allies combined, and the countries of the Eastern Theatre suffered over […]
On this day, September 18, 1941, the German forces invading the USSR captured the city of Poltava, Ukraine. My father-in-law, Maurice Bury, was in that battle. I wrote what he saw and experienced in Chapter 10 of Army of Worn Soles, the first book in the Eastern Front trilogy. Here’s a sample. Chapter 10: Panzers […]
It’s book launch day for the follow-up to Army of Worn Soles: Under the Nazi Heel tells the true story of Maurice Bury, the Canadian drafted into the Soviet Red Army in 1941, as he joins the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The book has a terrific cover designed by David C. Cassidy and was edited […]
Ukrainian Christmas Eve Paska and candle. January 6, as everyone knows, is “Ukrainian Christmas Eve.” Actually, it’s Christmas Eve according to the old Julian calendar. So my Ukrainian Christmas present to readers, and to Ukrainians around the world, is an excerpt from my upcoming book, still unnamed, the sequel to Army of Worn Soles. […]
Writing the first paragraph of anything is always difficult, because there’s so much pressure. That first paragraph, even more so, the first sentence, has to do so much: set the scene, get the story moving and grab the reader’s attention. But I took a lot of pleasure from that pressure last week and wrote […]