Purpose of this blog

Dmitry Yudo aka Overlord, jack of all trades
David Lister aka Listy, Freelancer and Volunteer

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Arras and After

Over the last two weeks I've been telling the story of the Arras counter attack. They can be found here:
Part one and Part two.

Now one of the more interesting things during writing the article was the difference in sources. Not the facts, but the styles and information given. So I figured I'd post the main sources I used here for you lot to read.

First we have the official report:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five

And now a News paper article on the battle, remember this was written during the war, and so had to be somewhat careful:

There was another news paper article, but well it was from a tabloid and about as much use a bicycle for a fish, the headline is pure tabloid though:

I also used an audio recording from the Imperial War Museum interviews. If you don't know, some time ago the IWM went around and got hold of every veteran they could find and interviewed them about their experiences in the Second World War. Over the last few years they've been digitising the archive and putting them up on the web.

Here's the interviews for the fight around Warlus, which wasn't very accurately described, and when writing I found it lacked the fine details the other parts of the battle had.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=WARLUS+interview&items_per_page=10

Finally an interesting thought. While looking for pictures I noticed something interesting. These two Matildas were pictured after being knocked out at Arras:

Now that lead Matilda looks pretty unburnt, and no signs of damage. Well, there's another picture:

I've seen quite a lot of pictures of tanks that have been hit, and looking closely at the second picture it looks very odd. It looks to me like someone has doused it in flammable liquid and lobbed a match on it. For example on the gun mantle, you'll spot a line of flames on a part that normally has nothing there to burn. So I'm suspecting the German propaganda machine in full flow there.