With penetrating insight, Kochanski reveals that the single quality that defined resistance across borders was resilience: despite the constant arrests and executions, resistance movements rebuilt themselves time and time again. Why resist at all? Who is the real enemy? What kind of future are we risking our lives for? These and other questions animated those who resisted. For Jews under Nazi rule, meanwhile, the stakes at every point were life and death resistance was less about national restoration than about mere survival. For many people, resistance was not an occupation or an identity, but an activity: a person would deliver a cache of stolen documents to armed partisans and then seamlessly return to their normal life. Kochanski also covers the sheer variety of resistance activities, from the clandestine press, assistance to Allied servicemen evading capture, and the provision of intelligence to the Allies to the more violent manifestations of resistance through sabotage and armed insurrection. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were not supermen and superwomen, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life who would not have been expected-least of all by themselves-to become heroes of any kind. Bringing to light many powerful and often little-known stories, Resistance shows how small bands of individuals took actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the liquidation of their families and their entire communities. Halik Kochanski’s panoramic, prodigiously researched work is a monumental achievement: the first book to strip these disparate national histories of myth and nostalgia and to integrate them into a definitive chronicle of the underground war against the Nazis. And every country that endured occupation created its own fiercely nationalist account of the role of homegrown resistance in its eventual liberation. ” -Dutch resister Herman Friedhoff In every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, a resistance movement against Nazi domination emerged. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way. it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.” -Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK) Resistance is the first book of its kind: a monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony in Europe into a single, sweeping narrative of defiance. So much romantic twaddle is still published. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. “This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. For WWI historians, it's the "holy grail"." "BBC History - Archaeologists are beginning the most detailed ever study of a Western Front battlefield, an untouched site where 28 British tunnellers lie entombed after dying during brutal underground warfare. Other sites open to the public, in particular the Wellington Cave, are also explained and put into context.
The text is illustrated with numerous diagrams and maps, in particular from the British and German records, and there is an exhaustive guide to the Grange Subway. The narrative draws on French and German archival material and personal descriptions. There are extensive descriptions of mining on and around Vimy Ridge, including photography and explanations of systems that have been accessed recently but are closed to the public, such as the Goodman Subway. It concentrates on mining, in the area of Vimy Ridge, in Arras itself and at the use of ancient underground quarries, taking Roeux as a good example. It does not aim to be a complete treatment of the intensive mining operations along this front. This volume looks mainly at the central Artois, the environs of the whole line of the Vimy Ridge to the River Scarpe and Arras.
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Each book in the series has a short description of the formation and development of Tunnelling Companies in the BEF and a glossary of technical terms. Three other volumes will follow, covering the Somme, Ypres and French Flanders. The subject has fascinated visitors to the battlefields from the very beginning of battlefield pilgrimages in the years immediately after the Armistice, and locations such as Hill 60 and the Grange Subway at Vimy have always been popular stops on such tours. This is the first part of a planned four-volume series focusing on a hitherto largely neglected aspect of the Great War on the Western Front - the war underground.