On the night of December 7, 1941, Adolf Hitler was at his secret military headquarters in East Prussia, known as the Wolf’s Lair, when he received the first reports of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was pleased with the news. For Hitler, the heavy damage inflicted on United States battleships like the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma signaled victory for the Axis powers, whose main members were Germany, Japan, and Italy.

Why Hitler Welcomed the Attack on Pearl Harbor

To understand why Hitler was elated, it helps to look at a map of Europe in early December 1941. For the previous six months, German armies commanded by the Oberkommando des Heeres fought through the massive landmass of the Soviet Union during the invasion codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which began on June 22, 1941. By early December, German forces had reached the outskirts of Moscow before their advance stalled due to the harsh winter. On the morning of December 5, 1941, Soviet forces led by General Georgy Zhukov launched one of the largest counterattacks in history, successfully pushing German troops back 50 to 100 miles.

If Soviet forces could break through German defenses, they would have an opportunity to split the stalled German army in the Soviet Union in half. Hitler feared this outcome more than anything else. What he hoped for was an event that would draw American attention away from Europe, as growing United States supply shipments to Great Britain and the Soviet Union were severely undermining German strategic plans.

When news reached Hitler of the Japanese attack against the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, he welcomed the development. He believed that Japan would tie down the United States Navy and force America to divert major military resources to the Pacific for the duration of the war. What he didn’t know was that the primary United States aircraft carriers, including the USS Enterprise and USS Lexington, had escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor because they were at sea at the time of the attack.

Why Hitler Wasn’t Obligated to Declare War on the US

While many analysts believe that Hitler was forced into the war with America because he was bound by a treaty with Japan and Italy, this claim is only partially accurate. While the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940 stipulated in Article 3 that if any of the signatories were attacked, they would come to one another’s defense, it did not obligate them if a signatory struck the first blow. Because Japan struck the first blow at Pearl Harbor, Hitler was under no treaty obligation to enter the war to defend Japan.

However, he personally ordered Germany to enter the war on Japan’s side as soon as he learned of the attack. He rushed Germany’s formal declaration of war because he wanted Japan to remain a committed ally. Seeking the political initiative, Hitler announced the formal declaration of war on the United States in a speech to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House on December 11, 1941.

The Miscalculation That Made Hitler Underestimate America

Another factor behind Hitler’s happy reaction was his miscalculation of the American national character and drive. Through his racial lens, he viewed America as a nation made up of weak individuals who had surrendered control to corporate leaders. He believed that Americans were too soft and undisciplined to handle a long, protracted war, despite understanding the nation’s industrial strength.

For perspective, the United States had a population of roughly 132 million people and produced far more than Germany in overall economic output by 1941. Thinking that Japan would knock America out of the fight or keep it distracted, he believed that the Axis powers would buy enough time to defeat the Soviet Union in 1942.

How Pearl Harbor Unleashed German U-Boats on the US Coast

Pearl Harbor was exactly what the German submarine command, known as the Befehlshaber der U-Boote, was waiting for. Until December 1941, German Admiral Karl Dönitz, serving as Commander of Submarines, operated under orders from Hitler to avoid conflicts with American ships so as to keep the United States out of the war. Now, Hitler looked forward to Operation Drumbeat, the code name given to attacks that German Type IX U-boats would launch off the East Coast of the United States.

With America officially in the war, he could send his submarines to target ships along the American shoreline and cut off supplies to Great Britain. German U-boats would go on to sink hundreds of Allied ships in American waters shortly after he declared war on December 11, 1941. German U-boat crews nicknamed these easy victories the Second Happy Time.

His hands were clammy like those of a corpse, and his fingers ended in sharp claws. His eyes glowed like bright red orbs, and from his mouth he breathed blue and white flames. Beneath a black cloak, this thin figure was that of Spring Heeled Jack, a terrifying and devilish man who terrified the people of England and Scotland during the Victorian era.

The Violent London Encounters That Sparked a National Panic

The first encounter with the monstrous Spring Heeled Jack occurred in October 1837 in Clapham Common in south London. A servant girl, Mary Stevens, was walking home when a man jumped out and accosted her. He grabbed her with cold, corpselike hands and forced his kisses upon her. Her screams alerted others who ran to her aid, and the mysterious figure took off.

The next day, the cloaked figure appeared again as he jumped in front of a carriage before fleeing by easily springing over a 9-foot wall while cackling maniacally. Such an impossible feat earned him the nickname of “Spring Heeled Jack.”

Over the next few months, reports poured in as women were attacked by this mysterious cloaked figure, and panic began to spread through London. 

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, received many letters of complaint, detailing terrifying encounters with the assailant in and around the city. These “wicked pranks” were rampant.

Reports of the Violent Assailant Sparked National Concern

On February 19, 1838, Jane Alsop answered the door of her father’s house in Bearbinder Lane in East London to find a man asking for assistance, claiming to have caught Spring Heeled Jack. When she handed him a candle, however, the man threw off his cloak to reveal his hideous visage and grabbed Jane with metallic claws.

He wore a helmet and vomited forth blue flame, while his eyes burned like fire, and upon his form he wore a white tight-fitting suit like oilskin. Jane struggled and escaped, running towards the house with her assailant in pursuit. When Jane’s sister arrived, Spring Heeled Jack fled the scene. 

Mere days later, Jack struck again in Green Dragon Alley, Limehouse, where sisters Lucy and Margaret Scales were returning from visiting their brother. A cloaked figure had been waiting in the shadows and jumped out at them, spurting blue flame in Lucy’s face before exiting the scene. Lucy fell to the ground, deprived of her sight. Help arrived quickly, but Lucy suffered fits for hours after the incident. 

A man, Thomas Millbank, claimed to be Spring Heeled Jack and was arrested. Jane Alsop, however, insisted that her assailant could breathe fire, and so Millbank was not convicted. 

These were just a few of the many attacks that happened, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last. The legend of Spring Heeled Jack continued for decades, living long past the real attacks and into the realm of myth, fueled by the media and penny dreadfuls which turned him into a recurring fictional villain. 

The Marquess of Waterford and the Hunt for a Real Perpetrator

While the myth of Spring Heeled Jack as a supernatural being persisted, there were many skeptics who challenged the idea, and fingers were pointed at various suspects. In the 1840s, the Marquess of Waterford, Henry de la Poer Beresford, was a prime suspect. The “Mad Marquess” was an Irish nobleman who had a history of crude pranks, disdain for women and social norms, and a problematic relationship with the law. 

Waterford married and settled down in 1842, and calmed his behavior, eventually dying in a riding accident in 1859. Encounters with Spring Heeled Jack, however, continued beyond the turn of the century. It’s quite believable the phenomenon was not just one person, but a series of copycat pranksters. 

In the 1850s and 1860s, Spring Heeled Jack made appearances all over England, but mostly in the Midlands. In 1877, a soldier in the Aldershot Garrison peered into the darkness at a gentleman approaching him. The man promptly slapped the soldier and bounded away in great leaps, shrugging off gunfire. 

In the same year, in Newport Arch, Lincoln, he was seen and chased by a mob of people who shot at him, but the villain was unhurt and evaded his pursuers, vaulting away to safety. 

By the end of the century, most reports were coming from the northwest of England, and the last sighting was in 1904 in the Everton district of Liverpool.

Who or what Spring Heeled Jack was will likely never be known. Until then, theories abound, with some even claiming he was a demon or an alien. Perhaps he was the result of collective panic fuelling folklore. Either way, Spring Heeled Jack remains firmly entrenched in England’s lengthy catalog of urban legends.

After initially remaining neutral, Benito Mussolini’s Italy entered World War II in June 1940 by invading France. After Italian forces were driven out of North Africa, the Allies invaded Sicily and southern Italy in 1943, resulting in the overthrow of Mussolini’s regime in Rome. Although he escaped his arrest to establish a new government in northern Italy, he had effectively been reduced to the role of a German puppet. This led to his ignominious end in 1945.

Mussolini’s Ouster in 1943

After taking seizing power in Rome in 1922, Benito Mussolini vowed to turn Italy into a world power and a major player in European politics. Mussolini, who began his political career as a socialist, developed the far-right ideology of fascism as the solution for Italy’s post-WWI problems. He also believed that it was his destiny to rebuild the Roman Empire. He jailed and murdered many members of his opposition and ordered invasions of Albania, Libya, and Ethiopia. His ruthlessness and drive made him a role model to many aspiring fascists around the world, including Adolf Hitler.

However, Italy’s role in WWII was a disaster. Mussolini signed the Tripartite Pact and Anti-Comintern Pact, making Italy one of the main Axis powers. Italy’s attempts to conquer Egypt and Greece in 1940 proved to be disasters, and Italian troops had to be supported by German reinforcements to avoid defeat. While the Allies shredded Italy’s Armed Forces on air, land, and sea, dissent at home increased. Strikes became commonplace, desertion increased, and the opposition planned to topple the government.

The invasion of Sicily proved to be the final straw. Mussolini had reshuffled his government repeatedly but failed to convince people that he was not responsible for Italy’s failures. Generals like Vittorio Ambrosio and Pietro Badoglio called on King Victor Emmanuel III to withdraw from the war. After a meeting between the King and Mussolini at Villa Savoia on July 25, 1943, local carabinieri arrested Mussolini and a new government was declared over the radio.

The Italian Social Republic

In September 1943, Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s government signed an armistice with the Allies and formally withdrew from the Axis alliance. As a result, German forces entered northern Italy and occupied the country by force. By this point, Mussolini was being held in the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the Gran Sasso mountains by the military police. On September 12, German paratroopers led by SS Captain Otto Skorzeny landed by glider on the grounds of the hotel and rescued Mussolini. He was spirited north to take over the newly created Italian Social Republic (RSI) from the town of Salò.

Unlike the Kingdom of Italy, the RSI was a mere puppet regime that was controlled by Nazi Germany. Mussolini had to agree with the demand that thousands of Italians work in German factories. Additionally, the Gestapo began to hunt down anti-fascist Italians alongside collaborationist police. The RSI developed its own military to fight alongside the Germans when the Allies invaded Italy. It also used local gendarmes to maintain order in the territory it controlled.

Mussolini vowed to continue to support Germany’s war effort regardless of the cost Italy would bear. The RSI initially only allowed the Republican Fascist Party to operate in its territory; Mussolini allowed another smaller party to exist later on by the end of the war with the hope he would be allowed to rule Italy after the war ended. SS guards kept watch over him and his ministers, meaning that the real power in the RSI was SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff and members of the Wehrmacht.

The Formation of the Italian Resistance

Once German forces began occupying Italy, anti-fascist parties began coalescing to form a movement aimed at overthrowing the RSI and kicking the Germans out. Six parties, led by socialist politician Ivanoe Bonomi, created the Committee of National Liberation (CLN) that aimed to govern Italy once the Germans were pushed out of Rome. They aimed to take control of any Italian military units that refused to fight for the RSI. The stage was set for a civil war.

By April 1945, it was estimated that 185,000 Italians were partisans in the CLN’s ranks. They were divided between center-right Royalist bands such as the Justice and Freedom Brigades, Communists in the Garibaldi Brigades, and Socialists in the Matteotti Brigades. Some of their units were assigned to help the Allies advance northwards towards Rome. Others worked behind German-RSI lines to sabotage Axis supply lines. The CLN was able to garner significant support from Italians horrified by their country’s alliance with Germany and Japan.

On June 4, 1944, Allied troops advancing from the Anzio pocket and the Gustav Line entered Rome and liberated the city. For the next two months, they drove northwards, expanding the territory of CLN-controlled Italy. Partisans in the north waited patiently for the Allied forces to arrive so that they could start taking aggressive action against the RSI. They also worked to hide Jewish refugees and escaped Allied POWs from German roundups in RSI-controlled territory. When the time was right, CLN units would launch an uprising to defeat their enemies and get rid of Mussolini once and for all.

The Resistance Uprising in Northern Italy

In the summer and fall of 1944, the CLN urged partisan units in northern Italy to begin extensive operations against German and RSI forces. The main aim was to establish areas free of Axis control that CLN could then administer. The partisans themselves believed that the best way to resist Axis control of their territory was to set up autonomous republics. Not only did this undermine Mussolini’s position, it also ensured that the partisans could obtain resources and manpower from the areas they controlled.

Some successes were gained by surprise attacks on German and RSI garrisons. For instance, members of several partisan brigades set up the short-lived Republic of Ossola, a month-long period of democratic rule inside RSI territory. Mussolini ordered RSI units, including the infamous Black Brigades, to crush the partisans. By October, the Ossola Republic had collapsed. Other republics were formed by successful partisan units, but faced a similar fate to the rebels of Ossola. The stalling of the Allied advance also compromised matters for the CLN.

Mussolini vowed to preserve as much of his rule as possible and ordered RSI units to annihilate the partisans in northern Italy. He agreed to allow German forces to conduct anti-partisan sweeps through the countryside. This led to gruesome massacres such as the Marzabotto massacre, the largest massacre of Italian civilians in WWII. While the crushing of the partisans in 1944 bought Mussolini’s government some time, it ensured that Italians saw his government as fundamentally evil, and many vowed they would get revenge.

Mussolini Flees as the Allies Advance

Despite the serious setbacks partisans faced in 1944, CLN planned another uprising timed to coincide with the renewed Allied assault on the German lines in northern Italy. With support from Allied intelligence teams dropped behind enemy lines, partisan units planned to seize major Italian cities and ambush Axis forces as they retreated north. When the Allies marched north and finally broke through German lines, the partisans successfully rose up and secured vital ground such as the cities of Ravenna, Bologna, and parts of the Po Valley. The RSI was on its last legs and its forces crumbled beneath the onslaught.

In early 1945, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff made secret contact with American representatives in Switzerland to negotiate a surrender of German forces in northern Italy. He even ordered German units to stop attacking partisan units, ensuring that they could operate openly in the country. This decision doomed Mussolini’s regime because he was reliant on German support. While the Allies surged northward, Mussolini began planning to open talks with the CLN, hoping for a pardon or a leadership role in the new government.

On April 18, 1945, Mussolini moved to Milan with some of his ministers and his lover, Claretta Petacci. He hoped to use the city’s fortifications and the presence of thousands of civilians as a barrier. However, Axis control of Milan was doomed and he was forced to flee when CLN and Allied troops entered the city. His hope was to get to the Swiss border and from there to Germany with Petacci.

Mussolini’s Death and Hanging

Mussolini, Petacci, and other RSI officials left Milan with a Luftwaffe convoy and hoped to dodge any CLN roadblocks. They were initially lucky but on April 27, they had the misfortune to be stopped by a unit of communist partisans near the village of Dongo. The 52nd Garibaldi Brigade had planned to capture as many RSI members as possible and even offered the Germans in the convoy a deal: turn over the Italians and they would be allowed to leave the country. Initially, no one recognized Mussolini and he was detained with the others.

However, partisan commander Urbano Lazzaro soon recognized Mussolini and ordered him be detained in the 52nd Brigade’s headquarters in Dongo. Some of the partisans hoped to bring him to a court so he could be tried publicly. Others worried that he could be rescued by RSI troops still in the area. Thus, both he and Petacci were moved to a rural farmhouse pending a further decision about their fate. To this day, it is not known exactly who ordered his killing. Some sources claimed it was Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. Others claimed local commanders issued the order. Nonetheless, both Mussolini and Petacci were killed in the town of Giulino di Mezzegra by partisan Walter Audisio.

Their bodies were put in a truck and driven to Milan. The partisans there had scores to settle and strung up Mussolini’s and Petacci’s bodies upside down at Piazzale Loreto. Local passersby spit and flung garbage at the bodies until Allied troops arrived to take the bodies away. They were subsequently given an autopsy and buried in an unmarked grave in Milan. In 1957, Prime Minister Adone Zoli allowed for the body to be reinterred and formally buried in his hometown of Predappio, where it remains today.

The people of the English countryside held rights to use and live on common lands for generations, and when landowners began selling off these parcels for profit, chaos ensued. Long standing traditions had given the people a safety net, an agreement that the poorest peasants would still have somewhere to live. Rights to farm, put herds to pasture, hunt and live on the commons were uprooted in mass evictions during the enclosure of these lands, leading to riots, revolts, and full scale rebellion during the Tudor Period.

The Medieval Commons and Open Fields

For centuries, people in England had used variations of the open field system, which held manorial lands and divided them among the lord, paying tenants, and peasants. The lord paid employees to work their lands for the manor’s benefit, exacted taxes from the tenants and labor or goods from the peasantry.

Poorer peasants who could not afford to lease lands were allowed to work the lord’s lands in exchange for a place to live, while smaller parcels of unused lands called “wastes” could be worked by landless peoples as well. Under the feudal system, while peasants had their labor expropriated by lords and were subject to exploitation and abuse, they did manage to retain ancient rights to live and farm on the land.

Traditional rights of use also included fishing, wood gathering, peat and turf harvesting, and these were often governed at the village level to ensure fair and sustainable use. As feudal lords and wealthy landowners looked to expropriate more than the customary goods and labor and found an entrepreneurial yeoman class to rent to for profit, the peasantry actively resisted efforts to sell off the land.

A Violent Transition to Tenancy and Dispossession

Historian Spencer Dimmock has written about the enclosures as a violent, highly contested change, rather than a natural transition. Generations of peasants were accustomed to the old rights to land, and commons served as a safety net for working and poor people to farm, herd and live on. Some lands were open in certain seasons of the year, others were “stinted” allowing limited numbers of cattle to graze on them, and others still, were the freely available “wastes.”

While it was more profitable for lords and the entrepreneurial class to appropriate these commonly held lands and drive the now homeless people into wage labor and market dependence, it was a massive social upheaval. Without the rights to exist and subsist on the land, the working classes lost much of their negotiating power, and were forced to accept wages offered to them in order to feed their families.

There were investigations into the often illegal nature of the enclosures beginning in 1517, and while they uncovered many cases, the trend continued. Entire hamlets could be evicted in one day, pushing masses of people into destitution and vagrancy, which was reinforced as a crime by Henry VIII in the Vagrancy Act of 1531. He began requiring beggar’s licenses for the old and sick, while instituting whippings and even executions for repeat offenders who would not work on the increasingly privatized farmlands in the countryside. The pressures of vagrancy, of dispossession and wage labor were a major disruption to the traditions of the working folk, as they were forced to sell their time to private landowners to eat, rather than being able to sustain themselves on the land.

The Pilgrimage of Grace, and the Enclosures

The year 1536 witnessed the outbreak of the rebellion known to posterity as The Pilgrimage of Grace. While it was led by English Catholics who resisted Henry VIII’s split from Rome over his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon, the economic factors following enclosure played a major role in fanning the flames of rebellion.

Henry VIII had recently shuttered Catholic monasteries, which many destitute and dispossessed laborers had come to rely on for charity. Low wages, increased competition, a new Statute of Uses hardening private landownership and tax burdens, combined with a bad harvest in 1536 to push the people over the edge. Some 40,000 people, led by Lawyer Robert Aske and supported by various lords, took over York and later drafted “24 Articles to the King,” a list of demands also known as The Commons Petition, at Pontefract Castle in December 1536.

Many of the points in the petition concerned the status of the Catholic Church, support for Mary Tudor and condemnations of Thomas Cromwell, but it also included a demand to pull down all enclosures since the reign of Henry VII, except for mountains, forests and parks. Henry VIII agreed to these terms but later reneged on them, prompting a subsequent rebellion by Sir Francis Bigod in 1537 which was brutally suppressed.

Kett’s Rebellion

Twelve years later, another rebellion broke out in Norfolk, almost solely over the issue of common lands. In the summer of 1549, townsfolk had begun breaking down fences, in response to a proclamation from Edward Seymour about illegal enclosures. This trend accelerated until the landowner Sir John Flowerdew bribed the crowd to leave his lots alone and pursue those of a rival, Robert Kett. When the mob reached him, Kett heard their demands, helped them level his fences and hedges, and led them back to Flowerdew’s lands. The group set off towards Norwich, and stormed the town on July 29, occupying England’s second-largest city at the time.

The rebel force had swelled to some 16,000-strong and pushed back two attacks in intense house to house street fighting. King Edward VI dispatched the Earl of Warwick with a royal army of over 12,000 men, supported by around 1,400 German landsknecht mercenaries, which eventually outnumbered and routed the rebels at the Battle of Dussindale. Robert Kett was tried in the Tower of London and hanged in Norwich for defying the Crown.

The Midland Revolt, Levellers and Diggers

Half a century later, another group of workers revolted against land controls in 1607 in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Thousands rose up and destroyed fences and hedges, led by “Captain Pouch” against the Treshams, a deeply unpopular Roman Catholic landholding family.

As they moved through the countryside, the riots escalated to clashes outside of Newton, where local militias refused to call to arms and landowners had their personal retainers quell the rebellious masses. This was the first use of the term “Levellers” in anti-enclosure movements, and though it later became a separate faction in the English Civil War, this group set out explicitly to resist the privatization of their lands.

In 1649, during the height of the English Civil War, a group formed separately from the political faction called the Levellers, and named themselves “the True Levellers” like their compatriots in 1607. This movement, which came to be known as the “Diggers,” took a different approach to direct action. Rather than rioting and destroying fences, they took over lands for themselves and attempted to farm, graze and form communities on them. Across England, they founded settlements to re-establish commons and sustenance farming on the land, but were driven out by gangs, legal action and threats of force.

The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism

The impact of the enclosures on the English economy was massive, and is said by many scholars to have directly led to the formation of capitalism. As dispossessed and now homeless laborers were threatened with capital punishment for vagrancy, they were forced into wage labor at a disadvantage. As their ability to subsist on the land was gone, they were driven to market dependence at the threat of violence, in a coercive, rather than cooperative transformation. These pressures led to the drive for endless growth, as landowners pushed workers to increase profits and compete on the open market, which was now the basis for survival.

This drive led to increased innovation, as more profits had to be extracted from a limited supply of farm and pasture lands. Centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the framework of capitalism had been established, due in no small part to the enclosure of the commons. Landless laborers were forced to rely on wages and markets to survive, and this early agrarian occurrence set the stage for later industrialization and the rise of the proletariat class. The process of enclosure that accelerated during the early Tudor period was formalized by the parliamentary enclosure acts beginning in 1750. Dispossession was no longer a private transaction, but one endorsed by the state.

With varying degrees and success, the English tried to replicate the enclosures as they expanded into Scotland, Ireland and America. Resistance to this privatization of communal land back home was fierce, consistent, and occurred across religious lines, with both Catholic and Protestant groups taking up arms over the centuries. Though ultimately overcome by the wealthy landowning and aristocratic classes, the staunch opposition to the enclosures proved that the shift to privatization was not natural, peaceful or widely accepted throughout England.

In May 1565, the horizon off Malta darkened with the sails of an enormous Ottoman armada. Thousands of soldiers had come to crush the Knights Hospitaller and seize one of the Mediterranean’s most strategically important islands. Standing against them was Jean de Valette, the 70-year-old Grand Master of the Order of St John. But de Valette did not stand alone. Alongside his Knights were soldiers, sailors, and thousands of Maltese defenders. Their survival would depend on sacrifice, endurance, and their refusal to surrender.

The Imbalance of Power in the Mediterranean

By the time the Ottoman fleet appeared off Malta on May 18, 1565, Jean de Valette had spent much of his life fighting.

Born around 1494 in southern France, he joined the Knights Hospitaller while still a young man and experienced the Order’s long struggle against Ottoman power firsthand. He fought during the Siege of Rhodes in 1522, when Suleiman the Magnificent forced the Knights from their island stronghold. He was later captured by Ottoman corsairs and spent time as a galley slave before eventually returning to the Order.

De Valette therefore understood the enemy approaching Malta better than most European commanders.

The odds were daunting. Contemporary manpower estimates differ, but the defenders probably numbered only several thousand men against an Ottoman army several times their size. The Knights themselves accounted for only a fraction of the island’s fighting strength. Several hundred Hospitallers fought alongside European professional soldiers and thousands of Maltese militiamen.

The Great Siege was never simply a battle between the Knights and the Ottomans. Malta’s inhabitants were essential to the island’s defense.

The Ottoman objective extended beyond destroying the Order. Malta occupied a strategic position between Sicily and North Africa. Removing the Knights would eliminate a persistent enemy of Ottoman shipping while strengthening Ottoman influence in the central Mediterranean.

De Valette prepared accordingly. Supplies were gathered, fortifications strengthened, and the defenders concentrated around the Grand Harbor. Birgu and Senglea became the heart of the defense, protected by Fort St Angelo and Fort St Michael.

Yet across the water stood a smaller fort whose fate would shape the entire siege.

Why Fort Saint Elmo Became a Strategic Sacrifice

Fort Saint Elmo stood at the tip of the Sciberras Peninsula, between the Grand Harbor and Marsamxett Harbor. Whoever controlled it could influence access to both harbors.

For the Ottoman commanders, Saint Elmo therefore seemed an obvious first target. They expected the small fort to fall quickly and use it as a springboard for further operations.

Instead, it resisted for about a month.

Ottoman cannon relentlessly pounded Saint Elmo, smashing its walls and turning its defenses into rubble. Assault followed assault. At night, men and supplies crossed the harbor from the main Christian positions to reinforce the exhausted garrison.

De Valette faced a terrible calculation. Every soldier sent into Saint Elmo was desperately needed elsewhere. As the fort deteriorated, its defenders understood that remaining there increasingly meant death.

Yet abandoning it would allow the Ottoman army to turn its full strength against Birgu and Senglea.

De Valette kept Saint Elmo fighting.

Its defenders included knights, professional soldiers, Maltese fighters, and others drawn into an increasingly savage struggle. The Ottoman army suffered heavily for every section of ruined fortification it captured.

On June 23, Saint Elmo finally fell. Most of its remaining defenders were killed.

The fall was a tactical Ottoman victory, but the month-long struggle had badly disrupted their timetable. Instead of collapsing within days, the fort had consumed weeks of campaigning and inflicted severe casualties.

Most importantly, Saint Elmo had bought de Valette time.

Across the Grand Harbor, the defenders of Birgu and Senglea had used those precious weeks to prepare for the assault they knew was coming.

The siege was only beginning.

Holding the Line at Birgu and Senglea

With Saint Elmo destroyed, the struggle became even more desperate as Ottoman attention shifted toward the main defensive positions.

Birgu and Senglea formed densely defended peninsulas jutting into the Grand Harbor. Behind their fortifications were crowded soldiers, civilians, wounded men, and families whose survival depended upon holding the walls.

The Ottomans repeatedly bombarded and assaulted the defenses during July and August. Fighting sometimes descended into brutal hand-to-hand combat at damaged walls and breaches.

De Valette did not command from a distant headquarters. Despite his age, the Grand Master remained close to the fighting. During one Ottoman assault in August, attackers penetrated part of Birgu’s defenses. De Valette reportedly rushed toward the threatened position and joined his men rather than withdrawing to safety.

The defenders had endured weeks of artillery fire, casualties, hunger, exhaustion, and the knowledge that defeat could mean death or enslavement. De Valette’s willingness to expose himself to the same danger helped make him more than an administrator issuing commands. He became the living symbol of the island’s resistance.

Yet focusing exclusively on de Valette risks overlooking the people who made his resistance possible. Maltese soldiers fought alongside the Knights throughout the siege. Local knowledge also proved invaluable, while civilians helped with the immense task of maintaining a fortified community under near-constant attack. The wounded required treatment, damaged defenses needed repair, and ammunition and supplies had to reach the walls, and fires and destruction had to be dealt with.

Even the Città Vecchia of Malta, Mdina, contributed to the resistance. Its cavalry harassed Ottoman forces and threatened their communications, forcing the besiegers to remain alert beyond the main battlefield.

The defenders also improvised. When Ottoman forces attempted to overcome the fortifications through siege engines, mining, amphibious attacks, and repeated mass assaults, the garrison answered with countermines, artillery, incendiary weapons, and close-quarter fighting.

The result was attrition on a terrible scale. Each Ottoman attack might destroy another piece of the defenses, but each failed to deliver the decisive breakthrough. The defenders were being reduced, but so were their attackers.

As summer drew toward its end, the time that Valette had purchased at Saint Elmo was becoming Malta’s greatest weapon.

How a Relentless Stand Forced an Imperial Retreat

By late August, the siege had become a contest of endurance. The Ottoman army had spent months campaigning through the Maltese summer. Disease spread through the camp, casualties mounted, and the determination that had accompanied the fleet in May was being steadily eroded.

The defenders were also approaching their limits. Their fortifications were shattered, many of their comrades were dead or wounded, and there was no guarantee that the relief they had been awaiting from Sicily would arrive in time.

De Valette nevertheless refused to concede. That refusal became divisive when the promised relief force finally landed in Malta in September. The new troops were not an enormous army, but after months of attrition their arrival had an effect far greater than the numbers suggested.

For the exhausted defenders, they represented salvation. For the Ottoman commanders, they threatened to transform an already costly siege into an even more dangerous campaign. The Ottoman army began withdrawing. On September 8, the siege effectively ended. Malta had survived.

Christian Europe immediately celebrated the victory. For the Knights of St John, it transformed what could have been the destruction of their Order into their most famous military triumph. The Ottoman Empire’s expansion, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, was halted.

For Malta, the consequences were equally profound. De Valette emerged as the defending figure of the victory, but his achievement had depended upon a coalition of knights, professional soldiers, Maltese militia, sailors, laborers, and civilians.

The Great Siege demonstrated that fortifications alone could not save an island. Their effectiveness depended upon people willing to defend them after walls had collapsed and hope appeared increasingly irrational.

The siege also reshaped Malta itself. In 1566, construction began on a new fortified city on the Sciberras Peninsula—the same ground the Ottomans had occupied during the siege. It was named Valletta in honor of the Grand Master.

Jean de Valette died in 1568, only three years after the victory and before his new city was completed. Yet his reputation had already been secured. His achievement was not that he devised a single brilliant maneuver that destroyed the Ottoman army. His success came from something less dramatic but perhaps more difficult: keeping an exhausted garrison fighting long enough for the enemy’s advantages to disappear.

At St Elmo, he sacrificed time and men to delay the Ottoman advance. At Birgu and Senglea, he shared the dangers faced by his soldiers. And throughout the siege, he maintained a resistance that depended as much upon the determination of Malta’s inhabitants as upon the military traditions of the Knights of St John.

The Great Siege therefore belongs neither to de Valette alone nor exclusively to the Knights. It was the stand of an entire garrison, and Jean de Valette was the man who refused to allow it to break.

In 1662, Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II of England, renewing and cementing a deep connection between Portugal and England that has lasted to this day. The reason for this marriage was a high-stakes gamble of geopolitical and financial considerations. England needed gold and ports to rebuild its economy, while the Portuguese sought protection through England’s significant military.

The political necessities of this union are no longer relevant, but the legacies it left are apparent today. One of these legacies was in a small wooden box — Catherine’s personal supply of tea, or chá!

The Portuguese Princess Who Became Queen of England

Catherine was born in 1638 on the cusp of revolution, as Portugal threw off the yoke of the Iberian Union and sought to restore facets of independence it had lost to Spain. Her father became John IV of Portugal in 1640 and spent the rest of his life at war with Spain (he died in 1656, and the war lasted until 1668).

Portugal was in need of allies, and Catherine was a powerful way to achieve this. Her mother, Luisa de Guzmán, was the main architect of securing an alliance with England through Catherine, and the marriage to Charles II took place in 1662. As part of the deal, England promised to support Portugal’s claim to independence, and in return, England gained Bombay and Tangiers as well as access to Brazil and the East Indies. Charles also received a large cash payment, although this was never paid in full.

The Queen Who Arrived to a Cold Welcome

First impressions in England were not good. Catherine was Catholic, a factor that had led to much opposition to the marriage. Because of her religion, she also could not be officially crowned in an Anglican ceremony.

Like many women of noble birth in Portugal, Catherine was raised in a convent and spent much time secluded from the outside world. She grew to be pious, but with a gentle and trusting nature. Her fashion sense of dark clothes was in stark contrast to the flowing Parisian styles that were popular in the English court, and her reserved nature did not seem at home amongst the more promiscuous sensibilities of the time. To add to this dynamic, she had taken ill and was consigned to her bed for the first week of her marriage. On the night of her wedding, the marriage was not consummated.

As was common with arranged political marriages, neither party had much interest in the other’s views beforehand, and the marriage was not one where Catherine was given reason to warm to her husband (although there was a certain amount of love that seemed to develop over time). She held bitterness, later claiming she had been sold to England. Indeed, when she had arrived in England, Charles’ brother, James, Duke of York, had been the one to greet her, while Charles, stating he had had parliamentary duties, was likely enjoying his last unmarried moments with his pregnant mistress, Barbara Palmer.

Barbara Palmer (née Villiers) was a married woman, and despite officially separating from her in 1662, Roger Palmer was ridiculed as being “Europe’s most famous cuckold.”

Catherine and Charles were civil towards each other at first, but what little attempt had been made to create a happy marriage during their honeymoon at Hampton Court Palace was intruded upon by Barbara Palmer, who insisted on being there for the birth of her son. The king allowed it. Not only was this an obvious affront to Catherine, but Palmer was made Lady of the Bedchamber, the new Queen’s personal attendant. When this was publicly announced, tears welled in Catherine’s eyes. She then suffered a nosebleed and promptly fainted.

It can be stated in no uncertain terms that the Queen’s life was not a particularly happy one when it came to her relationship with Charles. And the king had made it abundantly clear that he preferred the company of Barbara Palmer to that of his wife. Catherine spent much time in her room, where she found solace in the contents of a box she had brought from Portugal. A box containing tea, an extremely valuable and rare commodity in Europe at the time.

The Little Box That Changed England

Catherine was sidelined, and over the coming years, she had at least three miscarriages, bearing the king no children, while Charles acknowledged 12 (or 13, possibly even 14; accounts vary) illegitimate children with his multiple mistresses, giving each of them land and a title. Palmer bore at least four children from their affair.

Despite calls for divorce, Charles remained married, while Catherine remained humiliated. She did, however, entertain guests and introduced the ladies of the court to the habit of drinking tea.

Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, in their book Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World, state that the popularity of tea in England was not due to a single source, but rather the convergence of virtuosi (scientists, doctors and philosophers), merchants, and elite female aristocrats, who provided a foundation for the tea market and the custom of tea drinking in England. The rise of tea, however, is a topic of considerable debate amongst scholars. It is also argued that tea only became popular with the introduction of sugar. Records mark the rise of tea, but the influences on its popularity continue to be discussed.

While tea was gaining a reputation as a medicinal drink, Catherine of Braganza was instrumental in popularizing it amongst aristocratic circles. Where the novelty of tea had been associated with medical purposes, Catherine introduced the custom of drinking it as a pleasant beverage. Drinking tea as a pastime became extremely popular amongst the ladies of the court, and as it was a commodity of great value, boxes of it were proudly displayed to impress guests. It offered a pleasant, non-alcoholic way to socialize.

The popularity of this phenomenon was greatly aided by Edmund Waller, the court poet, who published the poem, Of Tea, Commended by Her Majesty, publicly endorsing the queen for introducing the “best of herbs.” Thus, tea went from one woman’s way to cope with a terrible set of affairs to being a significant public fashion.

As tea-drinking spread throughout the kingdom, so too did the culture that surrounded it. Teapots, cups, and saucers found their way into English culture, and over the decades and centuries, became staple items in virtually every British home, while in the 18th century, chinoiserie, or Chinese-inspired European art, became popular. This was all triggered, in part, by Catherine of Braganza and her box of tea.

How Catherine Won Respect at Court

Catherine grew to have her own independence, which was not challenged by Charles II. She had a loyal household around her, and she lived with the security she needed, entertaining her own guests without the interference of her wayward husband, although his mistresses sometimes caused a bit of drama. Through those close to her, she accrued respect, affection, and dignity. She took to the duties, presiding over the queen’s circle, a daily gathering in the royal court, which became a most popular and well-attended event. She was praised for her good nature and her morality.

Catherine and Charles did not hate each other. In February 1685, Charles lay dying from an apoplectic fit brought on by kidney dysfunction, possibly the result of mercury poisoning (he had a laboratory where he experimented with the substance). The man was subsequently subjected to torturous treatments that may have exacerbated his condition. Upon visiting her husband on his deathbed, Catherine found his suffering to be difficult to bear. She supposedly rubbed his feet (although this cannot be verified with any certainty), attempting to warm them, before being helped out of the room in great distress. Upon not being able to be by his side for grief, and with his death imminent, she sent him a message asking for his forgiveness if she had offended him in all her life. Charles responded:

Moments before his death, he is said to have converted to Catholicism, a move that was likely to have given Catherine at least some sense of ease in her difficult position.

Despite his obvious sexual liaisons, the king had respect for his wife in a certain way and refused to divorce or separate from her, maintaining that she could not do anything wicked and that abandonment would be a horrible thing to do to her. He defended her in public and took little interest in listening to lies spread about her supposed efforts to poison him — a notorious lie which was part of a plot to kill the king, which would have resulted in a restoration of a Catholic monarchy. The chief fabricator, Titus Oates, was arrested and indicted.

Catherine’s Return to Portugal

In the aftermath of Charles’ death, Catherine became a dowager queen and had to remain in England. As a Catholic in a Protestant court, she felt increasingly isolated and longed to return to Portugal. Meanwhile, Charles II’s brother, James, had ascended the throne and was a harsh ruler and widely unpopular. Catherine eventually returned to Portugal in 1692, where her brother, Pedro II, was king.

In 1704, Pedro made Catherine regent. She died from an attack of colic on December 31, 1705, at the age of 67. She was entombed in the Jeronimite Church in Lisbon, and later, her remains were moved to the Church of Saint Vincent of Fora, where they rest in the pantheon of the House of Braganza.

The Queen Who Created British Tea Culture

In Britain, the imparting of terrible news is generally followed by the listener saying, “I’ll put the kettle on.” Thus, it is certainly fitting that this comforting gesture can be associated with Catherine of Braganza.

Her marriage was a political purchase that benefited both Portugal and England when both countries were in dire need of what the other could offer, and her life thereafter was full of disappointment and sadness. Her most enduring legacy, however, was not in geopolitical gains (or losses), but in the culture of England, which owes a considerable debt to her tea-drinking habits. Catherine played a significant part in shaping English society, as a catalyst for a centuries-old tradition of relaxing with a “cuppa.”

On October 12, 1984 at 2:45 am, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people and injuring 31. Among the victims was a Conservative MP, but not Margaret Thatcher, the IRA’s main target. Nicknamed “the Iron Lady,” Thatcher went ahead with her speech to the Conservative Party Conference the next day. The Brighton bombing sent shockwaves around the world. It was yet another act of violence in the long-standing tug-of-war between the Republican, nationalist (usually Catholic) Irish willing to embrace violence to achieve the goal of a united Ireland, and Margaret Thatcher.

A Bomb Outside the Palace of Westminster

March 30, 1979, was a Friday. Two members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), disguised as workmen, managed to gain access to the underground park of the House of Commons in London. They were carrying a bomb in their toolbox. They identified the car of Airey Neave, a Vauxhall, and planted a 450-gram (16-ounce) bomb on the floor panel under the driver’s seat. The bomb had a mercury tilt switch detonator, meaning it would explode when placed at a certain angle.

Other sources claim that the bomb was planted by one single INLA volunteer when the car was parked outside Neave’s home. At around 3 pm, after lunch, Neave left the House of Commons, got into his car, and drove up the exit ramp of the underground car park. He planned to spend some time at home with his wife Diana.

The angle of the ramp tilted the mercury bomb detonator, turning Neave’s car into a car bomb. The blast severed Neave’s legs and knocked him unconscious, his face burned as he slumped over the steering wheel. He was then rushed to Westminster Hospital where he died within minutes of arrival.

At the moment of his assassination, Airey Neave (1916-1979) was the British shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland and a confidant of Margaret Thatcher. To the British people, Neave was nothing less than a war hero, as well as a writer and politician with close links to the British Secret Intelligence Service. In 1941, during World War II, he managed to escape from Colditz Castle, also known as Oflag IV-C, a German prisoner-of-war camp in Saxony, dressed as a German soldier, through the trap door under the stage during a theater production.

As shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, his “first priority,” as he noted in April 1978, was to defeat Republican terrorism. His death was a deep personal blow to Thatcher, a blow that strengthened her determination to defeat the Irish Republican movement in Northern Ireland. A determination that was, according to Richard Vinen, nothing short of an obsession with terrorism. In his Thatcher’s Britain, Vinen writes: “The passage in her memoirs that deals with Northern Ireland is in large measure a recital of killings and bomb attacks. Often Thatcher seemed to see Northern Ireland as one front in a world-wide battle between democracy and terrorism rather than as a specific place that raised particular constitutional issues for the British government.”

It has been reported that upon hearing of the explosion in Westminster, Thatcher thought, “Please God, don’t let it be Airey.”

Later, when it was confirmed that the victim was indeed Airey, she reportedly told a BBC reporter “Some devils got him and they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph, they must never prevail.” The INLA issued a statement commenting on Neave’s murder: “In March, retired terrorist and supporter of capital punishment, Airey Neave, got a taste of his own medicine when an INLA unit pulled off the operation of the decade and blew him to bits inside the ‘impregnable’ Palace of Westminster. The nauseous Margaret Thatcher snivelled on television that he was an ‘incalculable loss’—and so he was—to the British ruling class.”

 The Other Bomb

On August 27, 1979, five years before the Brighton bombing, Lord Mountbatten was holidaying at his summer home on the Mullaghmore Peninsula in County Sligo, in the north-west of Ireland. Classiebawn Castle was completed in 1874 near the village of Cliffoney, about 15 miles (25 km) from the border with County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland.

Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was the maternal uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria I (1837-1901), and a cousin of  Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022). As a British statesman and Royal Navy officer close to the British royal family, he was widely seen as a legitimate target by Irish Republican groups. On August 27, Mountbatten was lobster fishing in his wooden fishing boat, Shadow V, in the Mullaghmore harbor with his elder daughter Patricia, a third cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, her husband Lord Brabourne, and their twin sons Timothy and Nicholas Knatchbull.

Also on board were Lord Brabourne’s mother Doreen, then 83, and Paul Maxwell, a 15-year-old crew member from Enniskillen, in County Fermanagh. Little did they know, as they fished a few hundred yards from the shore the night before, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) from the South Armagh Brigade, Thomas McMahon, had planted a radio-controlled bomb weighing about 23 kg (about 50 pounds) on the boat.

McMahon, who some believe had spent time in Libya training with timing devices, was considered one of the IRA’s most experienced bomb makers. When the bomb exploded, Paul Maxwell and Nicholas Knatchbull were killed instantly. Doreen, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, survived the explosion but died the next day from her injuries. When local fishermen managed to pull Mountbatten out of the water, he was alive, but his legs had nearly been blown off. He died shortly afterward.

The IRA claimed full responsibility for what it called “the execution of Lord Louis Mountbatten,” describing the operation as “One of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country.” Mountbatten’s death and “ … the tributes paid to him will be seen in sharp contrast to the apathy of the British Government and the English people to the deaths of over three hundred British soldiers, and the deaths of Irish men, women, and children at the hands of their forces.”

It is believed that the assassinations of Neave and later Mountbatten prompted Margaret Thatcher’s government to take a tough and intransigent stance against the IRA. Commenting on Mountbatten’s assassination, Thatcher said: “His death leaves a gap that can never be filled. The British people give thanks for his life and grieve at his passing.”

The Bomb at the Grand Hotel

At 2:45 am many of the guests staying at the hotel were asleep in their rooms. In the Napoleon Suite (three sea-facing rooms on the first floor), Margaret Thatcher had just finished working on her conference speech. She had just returned to her desk at 2:45 am when the bomb exploded. The conference, which began on October 9, was scheduled to last four days.

More than three weeks earlier, on September 15, IRA member Patrick Magee had registered at the Grand Hotel under the name “Roy Walsh.” He paid for three nights’ stay and asked for a room on the sixth floor. He was given room 629. Before checking out on September 18, he placed a long delay time bomb, wrapped in several layers of plastic to mask the explosives’ almond-like smell, in the bathroom of the room.

On October 12, the day of the attack, room 629 was occupied by Donald Maclean, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, and his wife Muriel. In the adjacent room, 628, was Lady Jeanne Shattock, aged 55, the wife of Sir Gordon Shattock (1928-2010), Western Area Chairman of the Conservative Party. She was in the bathroom when the bomb exploded, destroying the wall between her room and Maclean’s and decapitating her. Her husband was injured but survived. Donald Maclean also survived, but his wife, Lady Muriel Maclean, didn’t. She was blown sideways by the explosion.

In his book Killing Thatcher, Rory Carroll writes that “In the room above, 729, Harvey Thomas found himself flying through space. He thought he was dreaming about asteroids. The blast wave continued upward through the eighth floor and exploded through the roof, shooting tiles into a starlit sky. A flagpole snapped off and arced over the promenade onto the beach.”

The force of the explosion ripped out one of the hotel’s chimneys, which weighed five tons. Amid the chaos, darkness, and an avalanche of debris, bricks, glass, and timber, the chimney came crashing down through several floors, leaving a trail of death in its wake. Carroll describes the dislodged Victorian chimney as a “monstrous guillotine” that “sliced through concrete, steel, and wood, all the way to the ground floor,” destroying all the hotel rooms ending in 28.

Eric Taylor, the North-West Area chairman of the Conservative Party, was staying in room 528. Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry (1925-1984) was sleeping in room 328. John Wakeham, Parliamentary Treasury Secretary, and his wife Roberta were in room 428. The chimney killed all but John Wakeham.

Thatcher and her husband, who were staying two floors below Berry’s room, were unharmed, but the bathroom—where Thatcher had been just a few minutes before—was badly damaged.

“What saved Thatcher was the path it took,” Carroll writes, as “it toppled through the blast hole, then veered sideways and plunged down a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 8. It merely clipped those rooms, including Thatcher’s Napoleon Suite, with numbers ending in 9. Had Thatcher still been in her bathroom she would have been cut to ribbons, perhaps fatally.” 

Just above Thatcher’s room, in 228, Norman Tebbit and his wife Margaret were badly injured but survived. “Debris was scattered over the promenade and the beach,” reported The Guardian the next day, with the blast scattering “Government papers and Cabinet documents, with their red boxes which were collected quickly by the rescue teams and driven away in a police Land Rover.”

The Tug of War With the IRA

The most famous hunger striker in recent Irish history is probably Bobby Sands (1954-1981)—Roibeárd Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh, in Irish—a member of the Provisional IRA and MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone who died on May 5, 1981, while imprisoned at HM Prison Maze, County Down, Northern Ireland. He was 27 years old. He had been on hunger strike for 66 days. Nine other men died of starvation because of Thatcher’s steadfast refusal to grant them Special Category Status—the status which gave them some of the privileges of prisoners of war and which had been granted to them by William Whitelaw (1918-1999) in July 1972 and revoked in 1976, at the height of the Troubles.

The IRA admittedly began planning the assassination of Margaret Thatcher after the 1981 hunger strikes. Before the INLA assassination of Neave in 1979, Thatcher believed in the concept of “integration.”

By her own admission, Thatcher’s approach was profoundly Unionist and, as she wrote in her autobiography, “Any Conservative should in his bones be a Unionist too. Our party has always, throughout its history, been committed to the defence of the Union.”

Her ultimate goal, in addition to the defeat and disbandment of the IRA, was the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, with no separate laws and no separate parliament. If Neave’s death led her to abandon this position, it also led her to take a hardline approach to Northern Ireland.

Commenting on Margaret Thatcher’s approach to the “Northern Irish problem,” Vinen writes in his Thatcher’s Britain, that “Throughout her government, Northern Ireland continued to exist in constitutional limbo with its status, as well as the anti-terrorist legislation that had most effect on people from Northern Ireland, being renewed every year. Far from seeking clarity about the status of Northern Ireland, Thatcher often seemed intent on generating the greatest possible degree of ambiguity.”

The IRA and the INLA responded to Thatcher’s ambiguity with bombs, first targeting her colleagues and friends, and eventually Thatcher herself. Thatcher, Vinen notes, “ … repeatedly suggested some border adjustment that would put all Catholics into the Republic and bring all Protestants into the six counties; she had repeatedly to be reminded that most Northern Irish Catholics lived nowhere near the border.”

The bomb planted by the IRA in the Grand Hotel in Brighton was intended to take out Margaret Thatcher and her government. Since the 1981 hunger strikes, Irish Republican paramilitary groups such as the IRA and INLA had seen Thatcher as a legitimate war target. On the other hand, since the INLA killed Airey Neave in his car in March 1979 and Lord Mountbatten in his fishing boat in August 1979, Thatcher took an even harder line against Northern Irish Republicans. Not only was she the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but she was also a committed Unionist.

In October 1984, in the aftermath of the Brighton explosion, the IRA addressed Thatcher directly: “Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” The Troubles in Northern Ireland would continue for more than a decade after the IRA’s attack on Margaret Thatcher.

At the height of the Troubles, bombs were normal for many people in Northern Ireland, particularly in Belfast and Derry. For people living and working in London, they were anything but normal. When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) unit led by Dolours and Marian Price, two sisters from Belfast, planted four bombs in the British capital in 1973 (two of which were defused in time), the news shocked the world. The conflict that had raged in Northern Ireland for almost five years had finally reached London, the heart of the British Empire. It was only the beginning. IRA bombings would continue to rock London again and again until the official end of the Troubles in 1998.

1. 1975, the London Hilton Hotel Bombing

When Dolours Price, her sister Marian, and the other members of her active service unit (ASU) of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were caught trying to fly back to Ireland on March 8, 1973, after bombing the Old Bailey in London, the IRA leadership realized they had made a tactical error. As a result, they upgraded the bombing campaign in England by deploying a smaller, highly trained ASU to act as a sleeper cell based in London, carrying out various attacks on military and symbolic targets across London and southern England.

The cell became known as the Balcombe Street Gang. Joe O’Connell, from Kilkee in rural County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, was the unit’s bomb-maker. He flew from Shannon Airport, County Clare, to Heathrow in early August 1974, along with Glasgow-born Hugh Doherty, Eddie Butler, and Harry Dugan, and rented a flat in Fulham, West London.

Ironically, Duggan was born in Kilburn, north-west London, to Irish parents from Feakle, County Clare. Over the course of 15 months, from October 1974 to December 1975, the Balcombe Street Gang (also known as the Balcombe Street Four) carried out around 40 bomb and gun attacks in London, sometimes twice a month (as in December 1974) and sometimes hitting the same targets twice. One of these attacks was the bombing of the London Hilton Hotel on September 5, 1975.

At 12:18 pm, a homemade bomb was detonated in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lake, a 28-story hotel in the Mayfair district and overlooking Hyde Park. 43 years later, on January 15, 2018, Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan (1971-2018) was found dead in the bathtub of one of the hotel’s rooms. About 20 minutes before the explosion, the IRA called the offices of the Daily Mail to warn them.

The warning was received by switchboard operator Albert Prick, who later recalled: “A man with a soft Irish voice said, ‘A bomb will explode at the Hilton Hotel in 10 minutes’. I tried to hold him on but he merely repeated: ‘Hilton Hotel in 10 minutes.’” The Daily Mail immediately contacted Scotland Yard and three officers were sent to evacuate the building. Although the bomb went off some 20 minutes after the warning, neither the hotel nor the surrounding area had been fully evacuated.

The New York Times reported at the time that about 100 people were in the lobby when the explosion shattered the front entrance. One of the hotel’s cashiers, Judith Halt, reported “There was a huge explosion and part of the ceiling came down on our heads. The air was full of dust, and when it cleared everything was in complete shambles.” Two people were killed and dozens were injured. One of the victims was a woman, 38-year-old Dutch tour operator Grace Lodhuis. The other was Robert Anthony Lloyd, a casino manager with a wife and two kids.

2. 1982, Bombs in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park

Late on the morning of July 20, 1982, the soldiers of the Household Cavalry (HCAV) were riding down South Carriage Drive, from their barracks in Knightsbridge, south of Hyde Park, to the Horse Guards Parade off Whitehall in central London, as part of their daily Changing of the Guard procession. What they didn’t know was that the IRA had planted a nail bomb placed in a blue Morris Marina parked on South Carriage Drive, in Hyde Park. The bomb went off at 10:43 am.

The Household Cavalry is made up of two regiments: the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals. The four soldiers who died in Hyde Park on July 20 were all from the Blues and Royals. Two of them, Jeffrey Young and Simon Tipper, were 19 years old. Dennis Daly was 23 and Roy Bright was 36. Three of them died instantly, while another, their standard-bearer, was badly injured and died three days later. Seven horses also died. Most of them had to be put down because of their injuries.

One of the horses, Sefton, survived, as did his rider, Michael Pedersen. 30 years after the attack, in September 2012, Pedersen committed suicide after killing two of his children. He reportedly suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

That same day, at lunchtime, 30 military musicians from the Royal Green Jackets were performing a concert on the open-air bandstand in Regent’s Park, in north-west inner London. They were playing music from Oliver! to an audience of around 120 people when a bomb placed under the bandstand exploded at 12:55 pm. Six band members were killed instantly. A seventh died on August 1. Two of them, George Mesure and Laurence Smith, were 19 years old. Graham Barker was 36, John Heritage 29, Robert Livingstone 31, John McKnight 30, and Keith John Powell was 24.

34 years after the blast, Keith Powell, the son of one of the Regent’s Park’s victims, wrote: “I want to know why, after the first IRA blast at Hyde Park this gig was allowed to go ahead. With members of the Royal Green Jackets playing the musical piece to Oliver Twist to many civilians whilst a mile down the road there is total carnage.” His written evidence was submitted to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee’s inquiry into British Government support for British victims of IRA attacks using weapons supplied by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011) and used by the Provisional IRA in various bombings in the 1980s and 1990s. That day, Powell’s father was standing directly under the bomb. He was killed instantly.

3. 1983, the Car Bomb Outside Harrods

December 17, 1983, was a Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas. Shortly after lunch, members of the IRA parked a 1972 blue Austing 1300 car in Hans Crescent, outside the side entrance to Harrods, the popular British luxury department store. It contained 25 to 30 lbs (11 to 14 kgs) of explosives. At 12:44 pm, an IRA man phoned the Samaritans to warn them of a car bomb outside Harrods and, as usual, gave the registration plate of the car. About 40 minutes later the bomb exploded.

The blast was so powerful that it damaged five floors of Harrods. A shower of glass rained down on the cars parked in Hans Crescent. 24 of them were badly damaged. One of the attack’s survivors, Mina Jadeja, specifically remembers “a lot of glass from the windows of the Harrods shop flying around” as plumes of smoke rose again over London.

In the days that followed, Prince Charles and Lady Diana (1961-1997) went to the hospital to meet with Jadeja’s nephew, Rajan Parmar, who had also been injured in the blast. In the end, six people were killed. One was a 24-year-old journalist, Philip Geddes. Another, Kenneth Salvesen, was a 28-year-old American citizen. The third bystander was Jasmine Cochrane-Patrick, aged 25. The other three victims, Sergeant Noel Lane (28), Constable Jane Philippa Arbuthnot (22), and Inspector Stephen Dodd (34), were Metropolitan Police officers. Dodd died from his injuries on 24 December.

Around 90 people were injured, including another police officer, Constable Jon Gordon, who lost part of a hand and both legs. One of Arbuthnot’s colleagues, Pamela White, was evacuating the street when the bomb went off. In 2015, she recalled the “kind of daze” she was in for many weeks after the attack, despite not being seriously injured.

She also remembered the feelings of exclusion and isolation from her colleagues, as well as the guilt towards her colleagues who had died. She was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. The day after the attack the IRA Army Council issued a statement claiming responsibility for the bomb, and regretting “ … the civilian casualties, even though our expression of sympathy will be dismissed.”

The statement also claimed that the “Harrods operation” had not been authorized by the IRA and that they had “ … taken immediate steps to ensure that there will be no repetition of this type of operation again. The volunteers involved gave a 40 minutes specific warning, which should have been adequate. But due to the inefficiency or failure of the Metropolitan Police, who boasted of foreknowledge of IRA activity, this warning did not result in an evacuation. […] Finally, we remind the British Government that as long as they maintain control of any part of Ireland then the Irish Republican Army will continue to operate in Britain.”

A week after the attack, on December 24, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) flew to Northern Ireland. During her six-hour visit, she visited members of the security forces in County Tyrone and County Armagh, before meeting Christmas shoppers in Newtownards, County Down, a small town about 10 miles (16 km) east of Belfast on the Ards Peninsula. On December 21, her husband, Denis Thatcher (1915-2003), went to Harrods, which had just reopened, and declared: “It wasn’t as crowded as it normally is, but no damned Irishman is going to stop me going there.”

4. 1992, Baltic Exchange

Ten years after the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings, and almost twenty years after the first IRA attacks in London, bombs continued to explode and claim victims in the British capital. The one that exploded outside the Baltic Exchange building at 9:20 pm on April 10, 1992, was the most powerful to ever hit London and mainland Britain since the German Luftwaffe raids of World War II.

“The whole place shook under our feet,” one witness told the police. The bomb’s components, prepared in South Armagh and assembled in England, included Semtex, the highly powerful and almost undetectable plastic explosive supplied by Libyan dictator Gaddafi.

The IRA chose the time and place of the explosion carefully. The day before, a general election had re-elected Conservative MP Sir John Major, who had consistently refused to openly enter into peace talks with Sinn Féin until the IRA agreed to a ceasefire.

In the same election, Gerry Adams, who had represented West Belfast as a Sinn Féin member, lost his seat in the Westminster Parliament. To quote Ed Moloney, author of Voices from the Grave, at this point “Gerry Adams and the small group of advisers around him had, with one hand, approved an ambitious plan to end the IRA’s war while, with the other, and in concert with hardliners on the Army Council, given the go-ahead to important hundreds of tonnes of modern weaponry from Libya which they planned to use to launch a Vietnam War, Tet-style offensive designed to sicken British public opinion and stimulate withdrawal sentiment.”

The attack on the Baltic Exchange, a London-based organization providing shipping and trading services for marine transport, and the Baltic Exchange building, a historic landmark in the City of London, Britain’s financial heartland, was both a symbolic and political act with economic repercussions.

The IRA bomb, consisting of a fertilizer device wrapped in a Semtex detonation cord, weighed one tonne and was placed in a white Ford Transit van just outside the Baltic Exchange building at 24-28 St Mary Axe. As usual, the IRA issued a telephone warning 20 minutes before the explosion. However, the warning was wrong, as the caller claimed that the bomb was in a van outside the Stock Exchange, not the Baltic Exchange. Three people were killed. Danielle Carter, 15, was waiting in a car parked in St Mary Axe, near the Baltic Exchange. 29-year-old Paul Butt was walking down the street. Thomas Casey, 49, was an attendant at the Baltic Exchange.

In Making Sense of the Troubles, McKittrick and McVea write that the destruction caused by the Baltic Exchange blast and the bomb that exploded a few hours later at Staples Corner in north London “ … actually inflicted more financial damage than all the 10,000 bombs which had ever gone off in Northern Ireland. When the smoke and dust cleared it was found that the two bombs had caused more than £700 million in damage. The total paid out in compensation in Northern Ireland at that point was just over £600 million.”

The unprecedented scale of the economic damage caused by the Baltic Exchange bombs opened up what McKittrick and McVea call a “new avenue” for the IRA, namely, “… the possibility of inflicting serious damage on the entire British economy.”

5. 1996, London’s Dockland

Two and a half years after the bombing of the Baltic Exchange, the IRA issued a statement announcing the complete cessation of military activities, “Recognising the potential of the current situation and in order to enhance the democratic process and underlying our definitive commitment to its success.” In 1995, the death toll was the lowest in decades: “only” nine people had died that year, an incredibly low figure compared to the 69 the previous year and the 90 in 1993. The peace talks were beginning to bear fruit. At the same time, however, there was growing discontent among Irish republicans, as the British government, led by John Major, was adamant in demanding full IRA disarmament—“prior decommissioning”—as a precondition for further talks and before Sinn Féin would be allowed to take part in the peace negotiations.

In January, the International Commission for Disarmament in Northern Ireland recommended “parallel decommissioning,” meaning that decommissioning should take place alongside peace talks. The British government refused to drop this demand.

At around 5 pm on Friday, February 9, 1996, the IRA parked a truck bomb, a blue Iveco Ford Cargo flatbed lorry, in the Docklands near South Quay station. Particularly after the success of the Baltic Exchange bombing, the IRA considered the whole area, packed with towering buildings housing television stations, banks, and newspaper offices, a high-profile target.

Concealed in the back of the truck was a bomb consisting of plastic bags filled with a mixture of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and sugar, wrapped around booster tubes attached to a detonating cord filled with Semtex. Two days earlier, an IRA man had driven the lorry from Northern Ireland to Scotland and then all the way south.

At around 5:30 pm, the IRA sent out the first of six telephone warnings about “… a massive bomb beside South Quay station, Marsh Wall, Isle of Dogs.” Not far from where the Iveco truck was parked was a newsagent’s shop. A car was parked outside the shop with a British-Moroccan family inside.

Police officers ordered the 29-year-old shop owner Inam Bashir, and his employee, John Jeffries (31), to evacuate. As they were closing the shop, the bomb went off, killing both men instantly. It was 7:01 pm. The explosion completely destroyed the car outside the shop, and while all the members of the British-Moroccan family survived, the father suffered permanent brain damage. The explosion shook the Canary Wharf Tower, then the tallest building in Europe, and destroyed the Midland Bank building as well as South Quay Plaza I and II.

On the evening of the attack, the IRA issued a statement: “Time and again, over the last 18 months, selfish party political and sectional interests in the London parliament have been placed before the rights of the people of Ireland. […] The blame for the failure thus far of the Irish peace process lies squarely with John Major and his government.” After the Docklands bombing, Major dropped the demand for prior decommissioning. Peace talks resumed.

James McArdle, the South Armagh IRA sniper who drove the truck bomb from Northern Ireland into London’s Docklands, was convicted in June 1998 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Two years later, in June 2000, he was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The same was true of the IRA members of the Balcombe Street Gang, responsible for various attacks in London in the mid-1970s, including the London Hilton Hotel Bombing, who were arrested during the so-called Balcombe Street siege in December 1975.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the IRA launched a bombing campaign aimed at forcing the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland, which eventually spread to England. London, the center of the British economy, quickly became a primary target. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, IRA bombs continued to explode across London, outside Harrods and the Baltic Exchange building, in the capital’s main parks, and in the lobbies of its major hotels.

In 1999, Pamela White, one of the officers on duty on December 17, 1983, when the IRA bomb exploded outside Harrods, visited Northern Ireland for the first time and “ … met with a former IRA member and a former member of a Loyalist paramilitary organisation who were actively involved in peace and reconciliation work.” She has also been vocal on the issue of compensation, stating that “Every victim of an IRA bomb is a legitimate victim regardless of what they were doing at the time of the detonation and is entitled to fair treatment and justice.”

The origins of the paratrooper came about in the 1920s. Paratroopers introduced a revolutionary concept of soldiers behind the enemy’s defenses. Such units surprised the enemy by attacking from behind or securing targets before an attack began. Development gathered steam in the 1930s with the Soviet Union, and Germany latched on, creating new units.

In Germany, the first Fallschirmjäger units formed in 1938 under Kurt Student. Despite initial misgivings, Student convinced skeptics of his paratroopers’ value. The value added by the Fallschirmjäger came from several areas. First, the selection process chose only one in four volunteer candidates, and the rigorous training covered demolition, infantry tactics, and parachute training.

Rigorous Selection and Specialized Gear

With an average age of 18, these troops needed to be smart, physically fit, and highly motivated. The Fallschirmjäger needed to be aggressive and adaptable because once dropped, situations changed rapidly. The Fallschirmjäger, as part of the Luftwaffe, received specialized equipment such as a distinctive rimless helmet. This decreased wind resistance and prevented neck injuries. Each also carried a pistol, grenades, smocks over their clothes and weapons to avoid lines tangling. The paratroopers deployed their rifles and other weaponry in a separate container, which they retrieved upon landing.

The 71-Man Gamble That Opened the Gates of Western Europe

On April 10, 1940, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. Fallschirmjäger dropped onto two airfields near Stavanger, quickly seizing them and resisting Norwegian counterattacks. German troop transports flew in reinforcements, quickly building their numbers. Smaller drops happened at different points during the invasion. Norway was a mixed success for the Fallschirmjäger—the country’s military being small and antiquated. The elite Fallschirmjäger’s proper introduction came in June 1940.

At 4:25 AM on May 10, nine gliders emerged from the sky and slewed across the grassy top of the formidable Belgian Eben Emael fortress. This marked Hitler’s “Fall Gelb” or “Case Yellow” plan for invading the West. The key to its success was eliminating Eben Emael, and thus came the Fallschirmjäger. The huge fortress consisted of 1,200 troops, pillboxes, bunkers, and artillery emplacements. It guarded three key bridges into Belgium.

As the German paratroopers stormed from the gliders, they achieved total surprise. Using only about 71 men, the Fallschirmjäger attacked the defenses with explosives or flamethrowers. As the Belgians retreated, the Germans entered Eben Emael, trapping the garrison in the lower levels. By 6:30, the Fallschirmjäger controlled the fortress, which surrendered at 11:30 AM. Other Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger troops captured the three bridges during the landings, opening Belgium to the German Wehrmacht. The Fallschirmjäger’s western debut was a successful one.

The Bloody Victory at Crete That Appalled Adolf Hitler

Just over a year later, on May 20, 1941, the Fallschirmjäger dropped into Crete. Held by remnant Greek and Allied forces evacuated from Greece, Crete was strategically important. Occupying it allowed access to the Eastern and Central Mediterranean. General Student convinced Hitler and Goering that Operation Mercury must be an airborne invasion. The Luftwaffe’s supremacy helped that decision, given Britain’s naval strength. By late April, the British, via Enigma intercepts, knew these crack troops were coming in mid-May. The Battle of Crete was not what either side expected. 

With their customary elan, at 8 AM Tuesday, May 20, the Fallschirmjäger dropped onto multiple airfields from several hundred transports. But these tough soldiers smashed into veteran Allied troops instead of raw Belgian conscripts. Heavy anti-aircraft fire and vicious counterattacks killed hundreds, or locals slew them as they landed. A second wave came in with gliders and transports hours later, surprising the British. 

Non-airborne reinforcements aboard JU-52 transports themselves hit by anti-aircraft fire, many crashing in flames. In all, 22,500 Fallschirmjäger attacked, carried by more than 500 aircraft or by boat. After 11 days of bloody fighting, on June 1, the Fallschirmjäger controlled Crete. 

But Crete shattered the “Fliegerkorp”—or “Air Corps” in English. The battle became a Pyrrhic victory for the Fallschirmjäger. Though they proved paratroopers could take on prepared ground forces, they suffered crushing losses. The British inflicted 5,500 casualties, with some 3,500 killed in action or missing. 284 Junker transports were wrecked from landing or simply blasted from the sky. Hitler, appalled by the destruction of his elites, forbade any further mass Fallschirmjäger drops. For the rest of World War II, the Fallschirmjäger became ground troops with few combat jumps. The Fallschirmjäger later inspired the Allies to create their airborne troops. These men, too, were elite volunteers with a rigorous selection process.

Nothing happens overnight or in a vacuum. Every action has a reaction, and when the oppressed stand up to their oppressor, it is often violent—but not nearly as violent as the oppressor. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is no exception. While it did begin quite literally overnight, late on October 22, just one day after the students began organizing the protest, the spark of resistance had been ignited long before. Several critical events between 1953 and 1956 directly influenced the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in their plight for freedom.

1. March 5, 1953: The Death of Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the USSR, died of a brain hemorrhage after suffering a stroke. After 29 years in absolute power, his death ended the era of Stalinism, arguably the most ruthless and brutal period of the USSR’s history. On the surface, citizens of the USSR were distraught about his death, but many believed that a positive change was on the horizon. In their satellite states like Hungary, people longed for that change, and it seemed within reach by 1956.

Stalin held the position of Premier (prime minister, or leader) and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful position in the USSR. His successor for the premiership, Georgy Malenkov, did not make many strides, but his successor for the First Secretary position, Nikita Khrushchev (later the premier as well), began the process of de-Stalinization to reverse the oppressive policies and create reforms that would not have been possible under Stalin. Without Khrushchev’s “thawing” out of the USSR, revolutionary change would not have been thought possible in satellite states like Hungary.

2. June 16-17, 1953: The East German Uprising

After Stalin’s death, the citizens of East Germany rose up in protest against the Soviet occupiers on June 16, 1953. They sought self-determination and freedoms that people enjoyed in the West. The uprising began when construction workers went on a strike in opposition to the production quotas the communists required of them without an increase in their wages. By the following day, at least one million people were demonstrating in the streets in about 700 cities and villages across East Germany. They were also protesting the declining living conditions and the Soviet oppression, and the rest of the Eastern Bloc watched in anticipation. East Germany’s uprising sparked the Polish and Hungarian uprisings three years later.

It was an intense event; many of the protestors became violent, martial law was enacted, and the Soviets and German police suppressed the protests. Up to 300 protestors were killed, and although they were crushed, it was the spark that ignited the idea of resistance against the Soviet regime across the Eastern Bloc. The United States even offered to give East Germany food assistance so they could continue striking in protest and still have enough to eat, but the government did not allow that assistance to reach the citizens.

Aside from that, the US did not attempt to intervene on behalf of resistance movements in Eastern Bloc countries. The US later created a policy of standing on the sidelines and allowing rebellions such as the East German Uprising to occur in Soviet-occupied countries without shutting them down or giving them assistance. The assumption was that the rebellions would be crushed by the Soviets, which would give the USSR bad PR and continue fueling the Red Scare.

3. May 14, 1955: The Warsaw Pact

The Warsaw Pact—officially called the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance—was signed by the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The pact was created to oppose the newly signed NATO pact, an attempt to gain more international diplomacy, to unify military organization among the USSR and its satellites, and a method for the Soviets to keep a tighter grip on their satellite states.

On the eve of the revolution, Hungarian student revolutionaries created a list of 16 demands for political and economic reform and presented it to the government on October 23, 1956. One of their demands was to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and declare Hungary neutral. Both Poland and Hungary protested the Warsaw Pact in 1956, and the Soviets brutally crushed both, partly because the resistance did not receive international assistance.

If the Soviets invaded any of their satellite states, it would be considered an internal affair, like a family fight, and other countries—especially NATO countries—could not come to the rescue, or else they would risk a war with the USSR. Hungary’s revolutionary prime minister, Imre Nagy, announced that Hungary was declaring itself neutral on November 1, day ten of the revolution, making it possible, if not likely, for international intervention.

Because of that, the Soviets wavered with the decision to invade, fearing an international conflict. However, after Nikita Khrushchev spoke with several other communist leaders, they mostly all encouraged him to invade and crush the resistance. The Soviets were also confident that international intervention from NATO countries would not happen, as they were involved in the Suez Canal Crisis in Egypt at the time, so their attention was divided. Khrushchev was also confident that the US would not risk a confrontation with them.

4. February 25, 1956: The Secret Speech & Khrushchev Thaw

Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin in a confidential speech to a select group of delegates in the Communist Party congress titled “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences.” On March 1, the speech was printed and distributed to officials in the USSR. However, a spy for Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, obtained a copy of the speech and passed it along to the US.

Khrushchev criticized Stalin, the cult surrounding him, the imprisonment and detention of millions of people in gulags, and Stalinist policies that had reigned terror in the USSR for decades. His speech appalled some, and there were rumors of illnesses like heart attacks and suicides afterward. There were many rumors in the USSR, but what was not just a fanciful rumor was the political purges that marked the Stalinist regime, something of which Khrushchev was critical. By denouncing Stalin, he paved two paths: the first was for people to criticize Khrushchev for his process of de-Stalinization, and the second was for people to start openly criticizing Stalin rather than keeping quiet.

This was during the Khrushchev thaw of the USSR, a period from Stalin’s death in 1953 to the mid-60s, during Khrushchev’s time in power. After nearly three decades of limited freedoms, political and social purges, famines, and general oppression, the boot was finally lifted. It was a crucial period of reform that allowed Soviet and satellite states alike to dream of freedom.

5. June 28-30, 1956: The Polish Uprising

On June 28, 1956, almost three years exactly since the East German Uprising, the citizens of Poland began protesting the Soviet regime. Instead of going to work, industrial employees started striking early in the morning, protesting the work quotas, tax increases, recent laws that diminished working conditions, the cost of food, and worsening living conditions. By the afternoon, roughly 100,000 Poles had joined the spontaneous protest in the city of Poznań, Poland.

The protests turned violent when the local police were unable to tame the crowd, and the Soviets stamped out the protest within a day. This, however, sparked more protests across the country, lasting several months. The communists realized that political reform was quite necessary and made some of the concessions demanded by the protestors, such as wage increases and providing a new, more moderate leader: Władysław Gomułka. This was a pivotal moment in Poland’s history, and the communists attempted to censor historical documents about this transitional period.

The students who organized the protest that triggered the Hungarian Revolution on October 23 were directly inspired by the Poles; they hoped that if the Poles were able to achieve change, then they could, too. In fact, when the Hungarian Revolution began, protests broke out in several Eastern Bloc countries in support of the Hungarians as well, including in Poland.

6. July 14, 1956: Seven Hungarians Hijacked a Plane

The Soviets had imposed harsh restrictions on the citizens of their satellite states regarding the influence of the capitalist West. They did not allow access to consumer imports, citizens could not listen to radio stations broadcast from the West, they could not communicate with people in Western nations without the secret police reading the letters, and they were not able to travel freely. It was also difficult—if not impossible—for Hungarians to travel to Western countries. Life in Hungary was severely oppressed, and young citizens, especially, were unhappy with the extreme rule of the puppet government.

The Soviets also put a wire fence around the border, planted landmines in the no-man’s land between countries, and placed guards everywhere, making an escape by foot highly unlikely to succeed until 1956. Between May and October 1956, a large project was undertaken to remove the minefield and the fences that the Soviets installed. This made it much easier to escape by foot, and roughly 190,000 refugees fled Hungary after the Revolution of October and November.

Then, seven Hungarians hijacked a plane to flee to the west on July 13, 1956. A twenty-five-year-old industrial laborer named Frank Iszak, his wife Anais, and their co-conspirators successfully commandeered a plane and flew west, desperate to escape Soviet oppression.

After a mid-air fight among them, the crew, and the KGB agent on board, they realized the plane was low on fuel. They needed to land before they crashed. Miraculously, as they emerged from the fog in the Alps, they saw a landing strip below them. They were prepared to commit suicide if they landed in a country like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, or even Austria because they would surely be returned to Hungary and executed for their crime. But, by sheer luck, they landed on a NATO air force base under construction in Ingolstadt, West Germany. When they landed, they were given medical attention and offered asylum, and Hungarians back home started dreaming about the possibility of escape from the iron grip.

Frank Iszak wrote about his experience in two books, Freedom Flight (2016) and Free For All to Freedom (2011).

7.  October 6, 1956: The Reburial of László Rajk

Paradoxically, the reburial of László Rajk fueled the resistance. He was despised by citizens while he was alive because he was a powerful communist, he helped organize the Hungarian secret police, his policies impeded and dissolved freedoms of religion and speech, and he initiated the first show trials in Hungary.

Show trials were a commonality; they were essentially a theatrical production in which the judge and jury had already decided that the defendant was guilty, regardless of evidence. In the USSR during the Great Purge (1937-1938) alone, about 1.5 million political opponents, religious leaders, kulaks, and Red Army leadership were arrested, tried, and at least 700,000 of them were executed.

When the prime minister of Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, felt threatened by Rajk’s popularity and influence, Rákosi accused him of being a spy (a common tactic) to eliminate him. Rajk and his wife were imprisoned, and Rajk became a victim of a communist show trial. They executed him on October 15, 1949, and he ascended to the status of a national hero.

Rajk was a victim of betrayal, something that many Hungarians despised about the communists, so they viewed him as a patriot, even a martyr. They did not necessarily expunge him of his crimes, but he became a victim of the regime, so they ignored his past.

He was reburied almost seven years later, on October 6, 1956, in the Kerepesi Cemetery. About 100,000 people went to mourn in the reburial procession in the pouring rain. Afterward, around 500 students marched to protest against the communist regime. The police dispersed the small demonstration, but just 17 days later, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 would begin, and it would not be stamped out as easily.

References

Iszak, Frank. (2011). Free For All To Freedom. Create Space.

Korda, Michael. (2006). Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. HarperCollins Publishers.

Mertz, Dawn-Eve. (2024). Young Men Go West: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and One Teenager’s Risky Escape. Kleo Press.

Michener, James. (1957). The Bridge At Andau. Random House, Inc.

Molnár, Miklós. (2001). A Concise History of Hungary. Cambridge University Press.

Rayfield, Donald. (2004) Stalin and his Hangmen. Random House.

Sebestyen, Victor. (2006). Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Pantheon Books.