Watch the livestreamed broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation by clicking here.
Month: April 2023
The Doughboy Foundation is the successor to the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission, which has sunseted. You can learn more about the Doughboy Foundation by clicking here.
Now available are The Virtual Explorer App and The Visitor Guide App. You can read about these and download them by clicking here.
The small Hungarian village of Vácrátót is about 25 miles NNE of Budapest. A feature there is a world-class sixty-seven acre botanical garden which includes a modern war memorial. It’s created in the genre of Emil Krieger’s 1956 Four Mourners (at the Langemark German Cemetery in Belgium) and the 1932 Käthe Kollwitz sculpture The Grieving Parents, (now at Vladslo Gerrman Cemetery, also in Belgium), each of which emphasize the tragedy of loss rather than sacrifice for victory. The Vácrátót statue depicts a family of four in traditional Hungarian folk dress, but the father is a cutout silhouette, forever gone but never forgotten. The wife is trying to wrap her arm around the husband’s missing shoulder, the infant child is trying to sit on daddy’s knee and the daughter is attempting to cuddle with the void. These little actions emphasize the horrific loss of thousands of families in two catastrophic wars.
This photograph has been zinging around the social media for a few weeks now. The artifact in question is reported to have been found on the WW1 Gallipoli battlefield and is held in a private collection in Turkey. Although the Turkish bullet, which is on the right, collided with the British one, on the left, there are no rifling marks on the British bullet, which means that it was never fired at all. The likely explanation is that the Turkish bullet struck a British cartridge, and the brass was later salvaged for scrap. You can read more by clicking here. Some have termed this collision to be a ‘billion to one’ chance, but there are five other examples of similarly collided bullets in this Turkish collection alone.
While five million men were being mobilized from America for WWI, over seven million women were participating in the war effort at home and overseas. You can read more about this by clicking here.