...and of course it's utterly inconcievable that you might ever find yourself in Europe at any point in the future? :roll: We know you're Australian, it says as much right by "Location", somehow I don't think that response was specifically aimed at you.
I was only being funny. I would like to travel to Europe sometime and see some of the WW2 sites though.
. Commando , Belgium is heaven for beer drinkers ,they have hundreds of beers we had a bit of a tread on it a while back , they have a proud tradition of inventing great guns , love mussels cooked in white wine and have invented chips ( fries in U.S. ) their civilization is based on great drinking , eating , partying in the streets wearing silly costumes and waiting for somebody to invade them , As for paratroopers , there was a lot of talk about it between the wars and the soviets had whole brigades of them , the taking of the fort Eben Emanuel was as far as I know the first successful example of the paratroops potential , there could have be some actions during the soviet Finnish war of 39 , to be checked .. during the fall of France and the waiting for sea lion , there was a certain para hysteria behind the line , one of the function of "dad's army" was to counter this threat . There was two type of use -the German doctrine of direct assault by dropping directly on the objective , it maximize surprise and speed at the cost of fire density - pretty much everybody else did a drop away from the objective , regrouping , arming and a structured assault The British tried to make the regrouping as short as possible , the soviets at the other extreme would cover large areas over a period of days , due to a wide variety of reasons except lack of bravery ,most soviets airborne operations were very bloody failures , the worst being the Dnieper's drop in 43 The Crete operation was grossly optimistic ,the Germans winning the contest by a whisker , having failed to take the airfields defended by the aussies and the brits , they scrapped through due to a New-Zealander officer who , having no idea what was going on ( he was winning in fact ) withdrew his command from one of the three airfields , thus starting the long kiwi tradition of choking on victory at the last moment .
finally, someone who understand Belgians We weren't waiting to be invated, they just came to the party uninvited
. You don't understand the glory that is Belgium they have white beer for children and pregnant women ( very good too ! ) they probably make some for non-drinkers If they played rugby and had sunshine , I would be there !! .