History is a series of great stories….with dates.

Before commissioning into the British Army from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, it is traditional that the Officer Cadets undertake a final exercise, a culmination of the months of training, which sees them tested one final time in all of the skills they have learned in the field throughout the course. 

Usually lasting two weeks, the exercise, today called ‘Exercise DYNAMIC VICTORY’, represents the final hurdle before students are permitted to graduate from the famous institution that has spawned each generation of the British Army’s leadership since it was formed in 1947. 

It was also a tradition when I graduated that the Officer Cadets upon completing the exercise would be allowed on the final morning, to wear the berets of the chosen unit to which they would soon belong.  The donning of the beret represented a significant ‘rite-of-passage’. For weeks prior, Cadets would be shaping and grooming their berets so that, when the order was given, they would seamlessly perform an act that would see them transform into the image of an officer that would soon be given the responsibility to lead soldiers.  

To add to the excitement, it was also tradition that the final exercise would take place overseas. The year I was commissioned, we were bound for Cyprus. Two weeks in the sun beckoned with little consideration for the heat and all its associated discomforts.

As the actor David Niven, himself a soldier, observed in his excellent 1972 autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon, there’s an old Chinese proverb to the effect that “just when everything in your garden is at its most beautiful, an ill wind blows the seeds of weeds and suddenly, when least expected, all is ugliness”. In our case, the wind chose to blow from the direction of the bleak fens of East Anglia in eastern England. For reasons that were never explained to us, Cyprus was suddenly off, and a decision was taken by someone, somewhere that we would be bound instead for STANTA, a miserable training area in Norfolk that lay just to the south of the market town of Thetford. The collective disappointment was huge and, in the final weeks of our course, morale plummeted. 

If you have never been there, STANTA, next to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, the Brecon Beacons training area in Wales, and Otterburn in Northumberland is one of the U.K. Ministry of Defense’s main pieces of real estate available to the infantry for its training. For those of an appropriate age to remember the TV series Dad’s Army, the opening and closing scenes of the popular show were filmed around Frog Hill, the only part of STANTA’s terrain with any elevation. Unlike the forbidding mountains and moorland of the Brecon Beacons, STANTA is synonymous with sand, collapsing trenches, and pine and, for soldiers apposite to misery.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been on military exercises in Thetford over the years. It is a surprisingly small battle area of only 120 square miles that was requisitioned in 1942 by the War Ministry to allow troops to prepare for the D-Day landings. The land was appropriated with the promise of return to those villagers who had once resided there upon conclusion of the war. This never happened and, today, the quaintly named rural hamlets of Tottington, West Tofts, Sturston, Stanford, Buckenham Tofts, and Langford remain deserted, but largely intact.  In recent years, the once pretty, flint-covered buildings have been converted into Afghan or Iraqi bazaars in an attempt to lend authenticity to the training of soldiers bound for the ‘Cradle of Civilization’ or the dusty plains of Kandahar province. 

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In my day, our imaginary foe was the Soviet Third Shock Army against whom we would dig our trenches in time-honoured fashion, and prepare to hold our ground against the hostile force of Gurkha troops masquerading as Warsaw Pact warriors.  

To lend some excitement to our final exercise, a night drop of paratroopers from a flight of C-130s onto our position had been arranged. It was a golden opportunity for those jumping, and hopefully landing safely, to “fill in a Rupert (slang for an officer)” – with complete impunity – as they stormed over our positions a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ as they gleefully did so. From the perspective of being on the ground,  hearing the drone of the powerful four-engine Hercules’ as they approached and the roar as they passed overhead, anticipating what lay in the minutes ahead was unsettling. 

At whatever Godforsaken hour it was, the wind blew gently through the tree line in which we were concealed. Only the sound of one or two of the paratroopers – otherwise dropping silently – landing in the overhead branches and the shouts and bellows that followed, really gave warning of the pell-mell that was to follow. Like a tidal wave though, once they landed, and had collected themselves, they were upon us in strength and, with an aggression that took us more than a little by surprise. The coup-de-main was achieved successfully. 

I will not pretend to suggest this aspect of the exercise ran according to the training manual, nor was it necessarily clear what tactical lessons we were supposed to learn as a result. Nevertheless, it was a sobering experience of the sudden violence that warfare can bring, often without warning, and often over before you know it. 

It may be stretching it a bit far to suggest that the Fates further up the chain-of-command were spinning our destiny in our favour and that someone, somewhere felt sorry that we would be graduating around STANTA’s ‘Black Rabbit Warren’ instead of the land of Aphrodite and Adonis. As a consequence, again for reasons that were not clear to us mere mortals, instead of two weeks in Norfolk, our final exercise was reduced just to one. 

To compensate, we would instead be taken to France on a weeklong battlefield tour of the Normandy campaign, to study the invasion beaches and the important aftermath leading to the eventual breakout from the bridgehead in August 1944.  Add to this unexpected turn of events the prospect that our tour would be guided by British and German veterans of the ‘Longest Day’, privilege does not satisfactorily describe the opportunity we were being offered.

And, so it was, unleashed from the confines of the Military Academy as if we were on a school trip with the mud and camouflage cream scrubbed from our faces, over one hundred and twenty Officer Cadets found themselves aboard a cross-channel ferry, traveling overnight to the Norman port of Le Havre. Inevitably once on board, we exercised our right-to-roam from bar to bar courtesy of  whichever cross-Channel ferry company had the misfortune of bearing us on our ‘invasion’. Rather sadly, the soaked mob that stormed the beaches that next morning did not resemble, I am ashamed to admit, what would all too soon become the ‘cutting edge of Deterrence’ against the Soviet hordes. 

It is my deepest concern to this day that, in the twilight of these heroes’ lives, I fear we did not fully absorb how extraordinarily fortunate we were to be given the opportunity to retrace the veterans’ footsteps and to relive their experiences. There are really no reasons, just poor excuses for why we, as school trippers singularly failed to take full advantage of this rare privilege to walk with warriors.  

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I often travel to Normandy these days to show family and friends around. I cannot help but reflect on that first visit and kick myself for not asking more of Major John Howard and others that were there as he stood beside Pegasus Bridge retelling the remarkable story of its capture and subsequent defense against counterattack in the days that followed.  

Thirty-eight years after that first visit, I stood queueing to pay for five Croques Monsieurs for my children in the Café Gondrée adjacent to Pegasus Bridge. The Café holds the esteemed title of being the first property to be liberated on French soil in the small hours of 6^th June 1944. As I waited, I espied its proprietor, Madame Arlette Gondrée, then in her 83^rd year, making someone a coffee behind the bar. I had met her during our Sandhurst trip and felt that I needed to somehow redeem myself for our earlier deficiencies. 

Madame Arlette of course, is something of a national treasure being the first French citizen to be liberated by John Howard’s men. Only five years old at the time, she remains a rare connection to that day-of-days. Seizing the opportunity, I re-introduced myself and, with the extraordinary grace and charm she affords all veterans from whatever era, she took off her crisp pinafore and came to join us. 

I would love to say that we spoke about ‘Le Jour J’, but rather we talked for a long time about the years that have passed since she and her family were freed from the Nazi yoke. That in itself was a privilege and we left to begin the rest of our tour of the various beachheads somehow sensing that we had just experienced a highpoint.  

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I consider myself a Cold War Warrior who served during a time of relative certainty by comparison to where we stand today. I held a Queen’s Commission in the Scots Guards for nine years, serving in Northern Ireland and Operation DESERT STORM. In the twilight of the rivalry between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, I was stationed in what was then West Germany, serving with the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). 

As an officer belonging to the elite Household Division, it was something of an unreasonable joke amongst other regiments comfortably settled in West Germany that the Guards saw themselves rather distinctly as the ‘British Army of the Thames’ and would rather be haunting the bars and clubs of London’s Chelsea and Kensington than say Paderborn or Münster. 

Perhaps pandering to the stereotype, instead of embracing my surroundings, as I should have done, I, like so many others in similar circumstances, sat in our Officers’ Mess grumbling about our lot. Instead of deep forays into a neighbourhood rich in history, I often found myself taking a direct flight from Hamburg or Hanover back home to the watering holes of Fulham where I had a house or braving the long drive across the north German Plain, across the Netherlands, Belgium and France to Calais before catching the ferry “back to Blighty”. 

To be fair, our barracks were in the old concentration camp of Belsen and our Officers’ Mess the same mess used by the camp’s officers before, and generations of BAOR regiments since 1945. The point of departure to explore our surroundings was thus never a particularly joyful one. 

I thus have an additional ground for atonement if I was ever asked to describe one. That would be the regret that I have that I wasted the opportunity during my time in West Germany not to discover my surroundings that, despite the relatively healthy passage of years, in the early 1990s remained untouched by the ravages of time.  

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Therefore, you can imagine that when I returned to Brussels as a diplomat years after leaving the Army, I sought to make up for lost time. Despite BREXIT, Europe was again on my doorstep, and the opportunity existed both to make up for missed opportunities and to satisfy a subliminal itch to learn more about my surroundings. I wanted to stand where history had ‘happened’. 

My wife and my five now grown-up children have all had to endure this obsession over the years. However, I tell myself they have each developed their own curiosity in their surroundings as a result and even, dare I say it, an interest in history and for that, I am grateful. The word ‘proud’ does not fully convey how I feel about my daughter’s First Class honors degree in history that she received when she graduated from Oxford University this summer. I hope to have inspired in them the same appreciation that, as my Father used to tell me, “history is just a series of great stories with dates”.

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Over the years, I have had the privilege – or misfortune depending on your perspective – to visit places where history has been made. On occasion, I have even be caught up in events myself that may one day become a side note in someone’s recollections. 

Although I may declare myself a ‘War Tourist’, I see myself as being inspired nevertheless by the desire to undertake historical study rather than someone motivated by wanting a front-row seat to misery. I am certainly not a voyeur nor am I needing an adrenalin rush as some ‘Dark Adventurers’ do. 

Most of my trips to sites have taken place long after the fact. Even though I by no means qualify for the illustrious ‘Frontline Club’, every so often though, the Fates have chosen to spin my destiny so that I land plump in the middle of something ‘happening’ and this has usually come about because of my particular line of work, not through the act of globetrotting.

I certainly did not choose to be in a devastated Mosul in northern Iraq one week after it was finally liberated in 2017 or in the shattered Allai Valley of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people on 8^th October, 2005. It was also by tragic coincidence that I happened to be in the small North Ossetian town of Beslan on the 3^rd September 2004 when 186 children were killed as Russian security forces stormed the buildings of School Number One in an effort to free over 1,000 hostages held by Chechen separatists.  

Nor can I say it was high on my list in 2015 when I was sent to examine the honeycombed tunnel complexes dug by ISIS beneath the ravaged Yezidi city of Sinjar. Here, those subterranean recesses where only days before Da’esh fighters had performed systematic acts of indescribable horror and depravation upon their victims only reeked of death and the stench of stale sweat. 

There the hypocrisy of ISIS was evidenced by empty bottles of Jack Daniels and plastic syringes used to inject methamphetamine that littered the floor. Rather incongruously, the desiccated contents of hundreds of discarded Pot Noodle pots lay scattered across the dirt. The sights, the sounds and the smells remain seared in my mind. 

Still, the Moirai have on occasion provided me the opportunity over the years – combined with more than a modicum of curiosity – to visit places where something happened more at my leisure. I would rank – next to visiting Auschwitz and Belsen – spending a night deep in a Polish forest at the Wolfsschanze – which served as Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front HQ in World War II – as possibly one of the most affecting.

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As I stood in the darkness amongst the twisted metal and fractured concrete of that foreboding complex, my mind went off on a mental frolic for here, across the gentle but restricting terrain surrounding this extraordinary edifice to Fascism, Polish, Russian, Prussian, German and Lithuanian landowners, farmers and rural dwellers across the ages have trod. Armies have swung back and forth through here over the centuries. Napoleon’s Grande Armée headed this way in 1812…and back again the following year. So too the Knights of the Teutonic Order some 600 years before. 

More significantly, a shattering understanding dawned upon me. It was not that I was walking amongst the ghosts haunting these woods. Instead, it was the awful realization that, right where I was standing, most of the decisions made during those terrible years that influenced so much of the destruction and tragedy wrought across Europe decades before had emanated from here. 

Here in these deep, dark forests so central to Teutonic culture and identity as well as symbolic in Nazi ideology and comparable to their “blood and soil” slogan, the long consequential tentacles of decision-making by a few madmen in this remote hideaway in the Masurian woods near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg (now Ketryzyn) sealed the fate of millions of lives across the world. 

After years spent visiting World War II sites of interest across Europe and North Africa, this was a lightbulb moment. Now suddenly the pieces fell into place as to why those events had occurred. This was the sombre glade where a butterfly had first flapped its wings and, elsewhere, a hurricane followed. This was the true heart of darkness. A place that spawned human tragedy that will thankfully, before too long, be lost to Mother Nature. 

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It was here too on 20^th July 1944 that Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg failed in what historians believe to have been the forty-second attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  

More specifically, after the assassination attempt, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler announced the introduction of Sippenhaft – the ‘absolute detention of kinship’ ordering that the Stauffenberg family should be “extinguished down to the last member”. In the days following, Stauffenberg, along with his brother Berthold, was executed along with a number of other co-conspirators.  Other family members were interned and all children placed in a home. 

It has never been lost on me that I went to the same school as one of Stauffenberg’s descendants who, although a couple of years above me, must have born the weight of a family legacy upon his shoulders while representing the direct human link to the man who so nearly had succeeded in changing the course of history.

I could not fail to take notice of this connection as I stood alone looking at an upright doorframe, the original entrance to the conference room that was being temporarily used by Hitler and his key advisors for the day’s briefing on 20^th July 1944. Other than the doorway through which the target and others had walked that fateful morning, the site of the conference room itself was levelled to its concrete foundations. 

With the outline of the room still discernible, the location of furniture and the exact spot where the protagonists had stood when the blast ripped through the room can be easily determined. Here on this spot, something happened. 

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Like many British adults of my age, I grew up on a diet of war films and Pathé newsreels covering the plucky actions of the heroes in our midst. The exquisite 1970s twenty-six-part series, The World at War narrated so hauntingly by the actor Laurence Olivier was the first attempt of which I was aware to capture the 1939-1945 conflict so comprehensively.  

And here is where I start to feel old. I joined the Army in 1985, just three short years after Britain went to war against Argentina in the South Atlantic. It seems like yesterday since my brother, James and brother-in-law, Peter – also serving in the Scots Guards – came home victorious from that campaign. Remarkably, the time-lapse between then and today is longer than the one between when Victory in Europe (VE) Day was announced on 8th May 1945 and when my Regiment set sail for the Falklands. It is incredible to think too that some of the senior veterans of the Falklands War are in fact older today than the veterans of World War I who were still very much alive in 1982.

The time lapse between my own short and rather unglamorous participation in the Liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and today is the same as between VE Day and when, as a small boy, I was charging around the school yard with friends re-enacting some commando raid by someone or escape from somewhere by someone else.  The faces of those being interviewed in The World at War then were younger than I am myself today. My point of all this perspective is that, despite the passage of time, it all feels very recent.

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Like so many of my generation, there is perhaps an exaggerated appreciation of the two world wars that spanned the first half of the twentieth century not least perhaps because, growing up, the veterans of both were amongst us. 

However, today, it is not even the eleventh hour for the survivors of World War II. It is nearly midnight. Within a year or two, silence will soon descend as the remaining veterans pass and the direct human link to the largest and most violent military conflict in human history that resulted in around 75 million deaths will be lost.

I do not recall ever really asking very much of the veterans I have met, or living around me about their experiences and I regret that. As time passed, and the milestones of anniversaries were reached, it became clearer that an effort was being made to archive the stories of individuals. These make fascinating reading, but I realized I sought something different. I yearned for a deeper appreciation of how human agency had made history and of how historical narratives are constructed. My search was for a fuller understanding of the anatomy of battle as well as its rhythm amongst the proverbial fog and friction of warfare.

It was not enough just to read, or hear those stories. What I realized was that my burning desire was to develop an historical imagination, to actually go and stand where something notable had happened and try to visualize in my mind’s eye the circumstances surrounding that event, as well as the human story behind it. 

To stand on the spot itself and think deeply about why good – or bad – leadership or planning had contributed to the outcome or, more often than as not, how blind luck and good fortune carried the day inspires an almost intuitive feel for the place. One can read books, articles or reports to learn about history but it is not until you have actually been to where something of magnitude happened and really allow yourself to indulge your imagination that your limbic system goes into hyper drive. It becomes addictive.

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A revival of recent interest in World War II has been spurred by the Silver Screen and streaming services becoming entrenched in our culture. While one can quibble about the historical inaccuracies of productions like Band of Brothers or Pacific or Steven Spielberg’s brutally immersive epic Saving Private Ryan as well as Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 classic, The Longest Day, one cannot ignore how they have thoroughly shaped the popular imagery of World War II and, more particularly, D-Day. Normandy – or more specifically the beaches of Normandy – is now home to a vibrant tourism-industrial complex that far out-shadows any other historical site in Europe.

There can be no doubt that Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers have fired the awareness of new generations of enthusiasts generally insulated from World War II due to the passing of both time and the veterans who took part in the events portrayed. Both shows are savagely realistic and offer a visceral immediacy. 

The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan commonly has a profound impact on most viewers young and old. I remember watching it in the cinema with several army friends and we all sat silent in the pub afterwards reflecting upon our own various experiences. Importantly, it allows those interested to contextualize just what happened on those beaches over 80 years ago. This even if, as you stand on the beaches today, there is little sense of the carnage that happened nor indeed that the Allies were able to land over 156,000 troops on that first day or that, by nightfall, over 4,400 allied soldiers lay dead. This before considering the 9,000 German casualties or the thousands of French civilians who perished during the fighting. 

In a deeper sense, as the Greatest Generation is finally consigned to the history books, the film allows people to reflect on the meaning of values in today’s turbulent world. At a time when the liberal international order is again under threat, it is a truism that people are appropriating the past in order to try to make sense of the present. 

The Normandy Beaches have thus become entwined in our psyche in a way that speaks volumes about our Manichean moral code and how, in the West, we see ourselves today when our way of life is increasingly under threat. Operation OVERLORD has thus come to symbolize all the sacrifice, selflessness, courage and effort required to secure liberty. In our narrative, the beaches provided the launch-pad from which freedom prevailed over tyranny and good eventually triumphed over evil. 

No doubt inspired by films, the landing beaches serve as a magnet to which tourists are drawn. But, herein lies a challenge. Firstly, there is a risk that Saving Private Ryan gives the impression that D-Day was an entirely American affair. This means that many visitors from the United States particularly limit their trips to the American sectors of the invasion. By limiting any visit just to Pointe-Du-Hoc or Dog Green Sector on Omaha Beach one misses the full scale of the Anglo-American-French-Canadian operation across the entire front for the duration of the campaign through to August. 

There is the risk too that the walk down memory lane in search of the experience vividly portrayed on the screen tips the scales of interest against fact in favour of a quest to find fiction, a desire to construct a narrative around the performance of actors. The fashioned atmosphere provided by the screenplay risks becoming the key driver for many tourists who seek their experience conveniently packaged. This then is the point where myths, legends, folklore and perceptions become blurred and Hollywood’s narrative becomes both compass and map. 

One need only stand at the base of the Church of St. Mère-Église, another beating heart of the tourism-industrial complex in Normandy, and for a few minutes listen to the spectrum of speculations being offered by countless groups gazing skywards at the mannequin dressed as a paratrooper dangling from the ancient bell-tower to understand my point. A few short lines in Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day, an extended scene in the subsequent movie of the same name and the legend of Pte John Steele has become cemented in peoples’ minds often at the expense of other acts of heroism that took place in the surroundings that night. 

Over a million people visited St. Mère-Église, a town with a population of just 3,000 during the recent 80^th Anniversary celebrations. How many ventured left instead of right or further inland can only be speculated upon. 

So while I run the risk of sounding disparaging, that is not my intent. The aim is not to promote a morbid journey seeking out strife and bloodshed but to encourage people to picture history in human terms and to recall that while the Silver Screen helps to contextualize events, the director maintains artistic licence to adapt the facts. 

This is not meant to diminish in any way the bravery and heroism of those that fought on the beaches on 6^th June 1944. However, whilst the invasion beaches of Normandy are indeed the inception point for the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Fascist tyranny, it is important to be mindful of the weeks of fighting inland that followed. 

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Standing on the ground where perhaps the fates of nations have been decided and trying to make sense of what happened there is invigorating. 

On another level, it is equally satisfying trying to understand that while you may be standing on one spot where something happened, meanwhile somewhere else, someone else is part of the same enterprise but may be having an altogether different experience or contributing to the overall outcome in an as equally meaningful way – both positively as well as possibly negatively. 

This is where an interesting ‘compare-and-contrast’ can be made between the broader view of the D-Day battle offered by The Longest Day  and the subjective point-of-view of the Tom Hanks character and his small group of men in Saving Private Ryan. At no point in the latter movie do you really have any sense of the bigger picture or the ebb and flow of strategic events. Precisely because it is so immersive, Saving Private Ryan forces you to consider how you would have behaved if you found yourself in similar circumstances. 

George MacDonald Fraser’s remarkable memoir, Quartered Safe out Here about his wartime experiences in the Burmese jungle, notes that “by right, each official history should have a companion volume in which the lowest actor gives his version…it would at least give posterity a sense of posterity”. 

His is a soldier’s account of life in the jungle for a junior officer who is but a small cog in the otherwise large machinery of armed struggle. It serves as a perfect foil to say Field Marshall Bill Slim’s Defeat into Victory, which expertly covers the “big things”, while MacDonald Fraser recalls by contrast having little sense or awareness of the great events, the politics or even the strategy taking place around him. It is a book that concerns the human element as seen from the perspective of the small piece of real estate within the ordinary soldier’s limited field of view, the raw material of conflict upon which the industry of warfare revolves. The book admirably captures the insignificant but deeply personal moments endured by a small cadre of soldiers fighting in, as Slim describes “some of the world’s worst country, breeding the world’s worst diseases, and having for half the year at least the world’s worst climate”. Tom Hanks character, Captain Miller and his men have a similarly narrow perspective.

MacDonald Fraser’s story is but one tiny vignette in the vast apparatus of Slim’s Fourteenth Army. And yet, when you start to connect the dots of these equally limited perspectives, you of course begin to appreciate that, across the entire theatre of operations, there are multiple experiences which, when aggregated, may or may not have impacted the outcome in some small or large way. 

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Because we live in Brussels we are surrounded by many places where ‘history’ has been made on continental Europe over the centuries. The site of the Battle of Waterloo where my Regiment fought in 1815 for instance is barely 6 miles from where we live. There has been many an occasion when I have taken myself of an evening down to Hougoumont Farm and just sat by the famous north gate and try to make sense of it all. 

For those like myself seeking out stories with dates, living in continental Europe, we are spoiled for choice and Brussels serves as a perfect Launchpad to explore the immediate vicinity or, if time allows, surroundings that lie just beyond the horizon and well off the beaten path. Most weekends when we are not otherwise engaged, we will sally forth into the neighborhood come rain or shine, Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall if not for the purposes of discovery then to get some welcome exercise. 

With the help of our “AllTrails” App, we have been able to venture deep into the countryside of south-west Belgium as well as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and, in Germany, the Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine Westphalia. We have done a lot of mileage in the Ardennes and Eifel Forests that merge into one another. 

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Of course I knew about the so-called “Battle of the Bulge” that took place here in December 1944 and early January 1945 during one of the coldest winters on record and had seen the 1965 film of the same name with a stellar cast but questionable accuracy. But, it was ostensibly an American battle about which I knew little detail. 

Having an American wife and receiving flocks of visitors from the United States has accelerated my interest. However, it was perhaps walking the ground over the years and starting to make sense of the rhythm of this confusing battle that began to invigorate my deeper curiosity.

During these forays, I also encountered multiple stories some known and others less well so. Through my research, I was also able to start peeling back the layers and understanding better the second and third order consequences of often individual or small group actions that, often unknowingly at the time, shaped the strategic outcome of events. Each vignette, in no small way, thus serves as a single beat of the butterfly’s wing.

This blog then is an homage to those stories which I hope will inspire curiosity and a desire to walk the ground where events really happened and to marvel at the impact that unwitting human behavior can so often have upon the course of history.

In a good way, the Silver Screen has made events from the past very real to people. It has helped contextualize the situation that our forebears faced. I defy anyone not to be moved by the experience of visiting some of these places and to really think about what happened. If nothing else, it heightens further the sense of our debt of gratitude to those who sacrificed their youth upon freedom’s altar – “for our tomorrow, they gave their today”.