"It was while I was in this Field Hospital that I saw the first case of shell-shock. The enemy opened fire about dinner time, as usual, with his big guns. As soon as the first shell came over, the shell-shock case nearly went mad. He screamed and raved, and it took eight men to hold him down on the stretcher. With every shell he would go into a fit of screaming and fight to get away. A much larger number of soldiers with these symptoms were classified as 'malingerers' and sent back to the front-line. In some cases men committed suicide. Others broke down under the pressure and refused to obey the orders of their officers. Some responded to the pressures of shell-shock by deserting. Sometimes soldiers who disobeyed orders got shot on the spot. In some cases, soldiers were court-martialled. It is heartbreaking to watch a shell-shock case. The terror is indescribable. The flesh on their faces shakes in fear, and their teeth continually chatter. Shell-shock was brought about i
Volkswagen was founded On May 28, 1937, the government of Germany–then under the control of Adolf Hitler of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party–forms a new state-owned automobile company, then known as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH. Later that year, it was renamed simply Volkswagenwerk, or “The People’s Car Company.” Originally operated by the German Labor Front, a Nazi organization, Volkswagen was headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. In addition to his ambitious campaign to build a network of autobahns and limited access highways across Germany, Hitler’s pet project was the development and mass production of an affordable yet still speedy vehicle that could sell for less than 1,000 Reich marks (about $140 at the time). To provide the design for this “people’s car,” Hitler called in the Austrian automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche. In 1938, at a Nazi rally, the Fuhrer declared: “It is for the broad masses that this car has been built. Its purpose is to a
Plataea (479 BC) - The battle where Western civilization hung in the balance: The Battle of Plataea was fought between the united city-states of ancient Greece and the mighty Persian Empire, and while it was the most important battle of the Greco-Persian Wars, it is not nearly as well-known as three other battles. Thermopylae was a Greek defeat, and Marathon and Salamis, although Greek victories, were only temporary setbacks for Persia, which returned to the fight each time. Plataea, however, was decisive and effectively ended the Persian invasion. If the Greeks had lost this battle and become merely one more province of the Persian Empire, the cultural flourishing of Greece in the 5th century BC might not have taken place. This victory ensured the continued independence of the Greek city-states - permitting an astonishingly rich period of art, science, and philosophy to begin which would lay the foundations for Western civilization. So much was on the line and so stacked the odds seemed
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