My favorite war-facts are the ones that you never ever knew about. The ones that you read about and think, “How many people still remember this?” One of those moments happened to me last week when brainstorming for a new Sabaton Saturday. So this week on Overall Loudness’ Sabaton Saturday: ‘The Six Day War’, or, in other words, the ‘Third Arab-Iraeli War’. Which is featured in Sabaton’s ‘Counterstrike’.
In, and after, the second world war the rights and places of women in the world, and especially in the United States, changed drastically. The men were gone off to fight in the overseas war and slowly the women were forced to be doing the tasks the men used to do, before they left.
But also in the war itself, women were very much involved. So this week on Overall Loudness’ Sabaton Saturday: The 588th Night Bomber Regiment, a.k.a. the ‘Night Witches’.
With the recent success of films like ‘300’ and ‘300: Rise Of An Empire’, you could almost feel that the Sabaton track ‘Coat Of Arms’ is about this same time period. But that is not true. On this week’s Sabaton Saturday the real background of ‘Coat Of Arms’: The Greco-Italian War.
Another one of Sabaton’s timeless classics and an absolute fan favorite, I guess. It’s one of those songs that fans want to hear them play, and Sabaton approves of that.
This week on Sabaton Saturday, the start of World War II in 1939. The year that the Germans invaded Poland and sparked the flame of war in Europe.
We, the Dutch people, have never really experienced the horrors that the World War I brought along. With the excuse of being “neutral”, we were ignored by the German forces that cut straight through Belgium, without harming Holland.
Sabaton have written a song about the horrors of the First World War, ‘The Price Of A Mile’. It’s about all the young men being stuck in a trench, knee-deep in the muddy water. It was cold, it was filthy, everyone was afraid. People were dying out there. And if you didn’t die, you were going insane.
Let me begin by apologizing for the fact that I did not post a Sabaton Saturday last week. I had a tough week, finishing a lot of stuff for school and in the meantime working for a new boss. I know, a bad excuse, but it happened and therefore I apologize.
So now to the new Sabaton Saturday. Most wars are fought mostly on land. That are the wars that I always got taught about at school and that children hear about these days. But this story is one that took place on the Atlantic ocean. This is all about the ‘Wolfpack’, an alternative name for the groups of German submarines during the Second World War.
Two weeks ago I explained the conclusion of the pacific war and, at the same time, the end of World War II. The atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While most of WWII went down on the European mainlands, there was some heavy fighting in the so-called ‘Pacific Theater of Operations’.
First the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a naval base near the Hawaii islands. This was a terrible and unpredictable attack from the United States’ point of view. Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor the Allied forces fought off another Japanese attack in the Pacific Theater. At the Midway Islands the battle of Midway was fought, 4-7 June, 1942.
Sometimes a war is all about groups of soldiers. Battalions, regiments or resistance groups. But the most intriguing war stories are mostly about single persons. One man, or woman, that decided there were things to be done and duties to be fulfilled.
After Simo Häyhä, also known as White Death, I will discuss another single war hero. Witold Pilecki was a dedicated Polish soldier and the leader of the Polish cavalry. After the conquering of Poland by the Germans, he decided, together with his general Włodarkiewicz to found the Secret Polish Army. A resistance group dedicated to undermine the German rule.
My first four Sabaton Saturday posts have all been about happenings in the European part of the world. While both WWI and WWII were fought on, mostly, European grounds, the impact has reached almost every corner of the world.
This time I will analyze the most terrible and terrifying happening that marked the end of WWII and also drew the outlines for years of unease and the so-called “Cold War”. The very first atom-bomb being dropped above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
