Gloucester is only 12 miles on from Cheltenham so we carried on to there the same afternoon.

We chanced upon Gloucester War Memorial and managed to get parked nearby.

I like the restraint of this one and the fact it’s at the edge of a piece of parkland. Unfortunately the road is quite busy, though; but at least that means lots of passers-by will see the memorial.

The cenotaph-like stone is surmounted by a lion and is incsribed to the men of the Gloucestershire Regiment.

The long low, curving wall with the central gap is dedicated to the men of Gloucester. Both top lines of names are for the Great War and the lower lines are for the Second.

Home of Albion Rovers FC.

The “Wee Rovers” heyday is long gone, being just after the First World War when they reached the Scottish Cup final and had a run in the First Division. They also achieved promotion in 1934 and mostly remained in Division 1 till the Second War. Thereafter they have been mostly in the lower divisions. For a fuller account see link.

Below is a view of the Stand and entrance gates of Cliftonhill from Main Street, Coatbridge (the A 89.)

The stand and its immediate surroundings is the only area where spectators congregate.

The Stadium is unaffectionately called the “Stadio San Giro” by its detractors.

It’s fair to say the ground has seen better days but any disparagement is out of place. It’s very homely and has a friendly atmosphere.

This is the west end. Standing may once have been allowed here but not for a long time, I think.

The east end is similar, only a mound of earth.

The North Terracing (below) is now, I believe, closed to spectators for safety reasons but it was from here that I saw Kenny Jenkins deflect with the neatest of touches with his head a Charlie Gallagher free kick to score in a 1-0 win in 1972, vital to the championship win that year.

On our recent trip down south we stopped off at Morecambe again. This time we stayed the night so I was able to take quite a few photos.

The War Memorial there has an imposing position overlooking the sea. The lion surmounting the plinth is a good touch.

This is the west side, commemorating WW 1.

There are more names on the north and south sides.

The east side commemorates WW 2.

You can glimpse part of the Midland Hotel in the background in this angle.

Just to the east of the main memorial there is a small garden area containing a memorial of the Burma Star Association.

The other side of this shows a stone poppy encircling a star.

I assumed the local regiments had been posted to Burma and the Burma Star Association website confirms Lancashire regiments were indeed involved there.

Cenotaph-like, this is an imposing structure on a hill above the southern approaches to Arbroath, overlooking the Firth of Tay and the North Sea.

WW1 names are on the front and back, WW2 on the sides. There is also one name from 1972 on the plaque added on the lower left.

A few months ago on an open day we visited the Old Kirk, Kirkcaldy, the old parish church of the town, whose tower can be seen here from Kirk Wynd.

We knew before we went that there was some stained glass by the pre-Raphaelite (in its later phase) Edward Burne Jones.

The church is no longer in use as a place of worship having been closed as such by the Church of Scotland in November 2010. The congregation merged with that of St Brycedale Church – no more than 50 yards away! – to become known as St Bryce Kirk. St Bryce is the patron saint of Kirkcaldy. (See here.) These two Burne Jones windows are towards the back of the building if you were entering from Kirk Wynd and are only two of many stained glass windows whose splendour cannot be fully experienced from the outside.

The above much more recent stained glass windows represent the flames of the fire which damaged the interior a good few years ago. These flank the main entrance from Kirk Wynd.

One slightly older window by Crear McCartney is on the immediate left wall (see left.)

None of the pews remain as the space inside has been cleared for community use.

It is possible to climb the tower. Don’t do it on a windy day (of which there are a quite a few in Kirkcaldy) as you are fairly exposed on the tower parapet.

Before the stairs/ladders which allow the climb we passed the impressive memorial – see below – to the members of the congregation who died in the World Wars. (The 1939-45 addition blends in well.)

I had to stitch three pictures to get the full panorama of the memorial as the space to step back was limited. The passageway to the stairs is on the left of this.

Grafton, 1987, 272 p including Source Notes and Index.

*

To counteract the German surge during the famous Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes, Allied Supreme Commander, Eisenhower, was forced to move General Patton’s troops away from a more southerly front in Alsace and along the Rhine on the border of France and Germany. This dangerously thinned the Allied forces in that area – so much so that Eisenhower ordered General Devers (in whom he apparently had little confidence) to withdraw to the Vosges in the event of being attacked. This was contrary to all US military convention which is against the giving up of ground hard won by US blood. Moreover it meant that Alsace would once more be under German control and that Alsatian city beloved by the French, Strasbourg, would for the third time in 70 years have fallen to Germany.

The Germans had foreseen most of this and, hoping to drive a wedge between the Allies, attacked here also in Unternehmen Nordwind, Operation Northwind. The resulting crisis caused a major rift between the French and US commands and poisoned French attitudes to the US for decades after. At the hint of withdrawal De Gaulle told Eisenhower that even if US troops would not defend Strasbourg French ones would. Eisenhower then threatened to withhold supplies from the French army and De Gaulle, de facto leader of France, then counter-threatened to deny the Allies transport rights across France! Partly as a result, but also because General Devers wanted to fight his ground, thousands of US troops – not to mention the French and the Germans – became casualties, in atrocious winter conditions. One of the troops involved was the most decorated US soldier of WW2 and later Hollywood film star, Audie Murphy, who won the Medal of Honor in these actions.

The author occasionally displays an animus against the French. He lays at their door the lack of withdrawal and hence the responsibility for subsequent US casualties – though the French attitude to Strasbourg in particular and Alsace in general is perfectly understandable, especially since their fall might have led to De Gaulle’s government being replaced by the communist elements of the Resistance. In the epilogue we find Whiting also blames General Leclerc’s determination to restore French military pride for the French attempt to retain their colonies in Indo-China hence the subsequent US embroilment in Vietnam, and thousands more US deaths.

As is usual with military history the text sometimes resembles an alphabet soup of Divisional nomenclature. A serious lack here is of maps. There is at the beginning of the book one map of the general area of operations but the place names are tiny. More detailed maps of parts of the overall battle would have aided comprehension of the ebb and flow.

In the end the Allied troops held out (but not without retreats, surrenders, self–inflicted wounds and even desertions along the way) and the Germans exhausted themselves against the defence, failed to hold off the counterattack and broke off, partly to send troops back to the Eastern Front.

*This is not the cover of the Grafton edition that I read. Neither was/is the cover shown on my Library Thing pages.

I suppose a seventieth anniversary is something special but perhaps it is more so when it involves an almost iconic event.

7/12/2011 marks seventy years since the Pearl Harbor attack, the event which turned relatively localised war into World War. “7^th December 1941: a date which will live in Infamy,” – FDR.

It is sobering to realise that the Second World War lasted less than four years after that. The US and UK have now had troops dying in Afghanistan for much longer than that; and in Iraq for not much less time. Not so many troops dying admittedly, but dying nonetheless.

I vaguely remember Gore Vidal saying something to the effect that the difference between Pearl Harbor and the September 11^th attack was that no-one saw the latter one coming. He had a personal reason to blame the US authorities for the war with Japan, though. His lover died in the Pacific fighting.

The most prominent feature of Dundee Law is the War Memorial erected there.

The east side commemorates the men of Dundee who died in the First World War.

The west side commemorates the Second World War dead.

The door must allow access to the inside. Apparently the device at the top is a lantern of remembrance which is lit on four occasions through the year:
25th September; in memory of the Battle of Loos,
24 October; United Nations Day,
11 November; Armistice Day
and Remembrance Sunday.

This is the view of the Memorial from just in front of the radio/mobile phone mast which also sits on the summit. You can see the rail bridge across the Tay in the background to the right here.

On Saturday we ended up at Dollar, Clackmannanshire.

This is Dollar’s WW2 memorial, situated in a small memorial gardens just off the main A 91 road. The gardens side has two names for servicemen killed in Northern Ireland. There was no sign of any First World War names.

We walked up the hill beside the burn, over which there are two nice bridges.

The white building behind the second one houses Dollar Museum, which contains, among other things, a display on the Devon Valley Railway (now sadly defunct, victim of the greatest act of institutional vandalism in Britain in my lifetime, the Beeching cuts, though the part to Alloa has been reopened recently.)

We asked the attendant if there was a WW1 memorial anywhere and were told it was in the school grounds.

Of course, Dollar Academy. Lots of former pupils would have served in the wars. The memorial is unusual, showing a figure with outstretched hands.

The main school building can be seen in the first photo. The side facing it seemed to contain names from the parish rather than FPs. Other sides were reserved solely for ex-pupils, with WW2 and later conflicts also commemorated.

Stalin’s War With Germany Volume 1
Grafton, 1985, 814p (including 144p of sources and references and a 26p index.)

I remember seeing a newspaper review of this and thinking, “That sounds interesting, I’ll maybe get it in paperback.” Then I realised it was the paperback. (£7.99 was a lot of money for a book in 1985. And there was the second volume to consider). It was a few years later before I bought both, I believe. They are weighty tomes and I didn’t feel able to give them the necessary time till now.

Originally published in 1975, firmly during the cold War era, The Road To Stalingrad filled a gap by being the first UK history of the Russian Front to focus primarily on Soviet sources.

Its starting point is the disruption to the Soviet armed forces caused by the purges of the 1930s, the rearrangements and lack of preparedness which that caused, all of which was exacerbated by the strange purblindness of Stalin with regard to German intentions in the run up to war. Thereafter it considers the frontier battles, the deep German advance, touches briefly on events behind the German lines, deals with the Moscow counterstroke and the following abortive Soviet offensive in early 1942 with which Stalin thought he might win the war that year, up to the German drive to the Volga and the Caucasus.

The book is strongest on the deliberations within the stavka, the Soviet high command, but really that means the decisions reached by Stalin. Marshal Shaposhnikov, the main military voice within the stavka – even though Zhukov was made Stalin’s deputy in 1942 – seems to have learned early to go with that flow.

Unfortunately it is not till page 538 and the start of the Battle of Stalingrad that the narration comes to life. Here Erickson begins to leaven his account with details of the battle. Up till then he is more concerned with the general sweep of events and is peculiarly fixated on enumerating the switching of multifarious Divisions between the various Soviet Armies, Groups and Fronts. Along the way there is a daunting array of Russian General’s names to deal with.

While the book does have maps, they are very few and only depict large areas. Some showing the smaller movements involved would have provided clarification of the somewhat dense prose.

What, for me, it all illuminated was the unlikelihood of any attack to liberate Europe by the Western Allies being likely to succeed had Hitler’s armies not already been embroiled and macerated in the East. The sheer numbers of troops involved, the scales of the operations, are stunning. As it was, Stalin’s pressing of Britain and the US to initiate a Second Front quickly was deflected as they were as yet not adequately prepared for any such endeavour.

At the end of the 642 pages of narrative we have reached only the encirclement of von Paulus’s Sixth Army, trapped in the city. The second volume of Erickson’s history, The Road To Berlin, awaits. It may be some time.