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In 1940 the Germans occupied the airfield at Gilze-Rijen and during the war they enlarged it to become one of the larges...
03/24/2026

In 1940 the Germans occupied the airfield at Gilze-Rijen and during the war they enlarged it to become one of the largest air bases in Europe. Houses close by were demolished and the new neighbours saw what was taking place on the airfield from close quarters every day.

Maria Ligtvoet-Maas lived with her husband Thomas in Molenschot, to the west of Gilze-Rijen Fliegerhorst (military airfield). Tommes and Mie, as they were known to the locals, had no children and Mie spent her days as a housewife in and around the home. Tommes worked during the day at the Noord-Brabander leather factory in Rijen. Despite having a huge air base next to their house, life went on as normal for the couple.

From 30 August 1943 Fliegerhorst Gilze-Rijen also served as a labour camp for 150 prisoners from Camp Vught. The prisoners were required to perform strenuous tasks, such as repair work after a bombing raid. Despite the hard work, conditions were better for the prisoners than they were in Camp Vught. They received better food and drink, roll calls were shorter and the security was less strict.

The German airfield was an important target for the Allies. When the airfield was bombed for the umpteenth time, the German guards and the airfield workers took cover in the air raid shelters. The security guards were so busy running for cover that they did not seem to notice what was going on around them, or where the prisoners were. This gave them the perfect chance to try to escape. Some of them decided to grab this opportunity and headed for the perimeter fence, which had been badly damaged in the bombing raid. They crawled under the fence and ran towards freedom.

Mie was busy with her housework when suddenly a couple of men in striped clothes appeared at her door. Their clothes immediately gave away the fact that they were escaped prisoners from the airfield. She ushered them into the house and asked them to remove their clothes. The men looked at each other somewhat surprised, take off their clothes? ....

Khamenei’s last journey abroad took him to China in May 1989, where he enjoyed Peking duck. Just one month later, he suc...
03/02/2026

Khamenei’s last journey abroad took him to China in May 1989, where he enjoyed Peking duck. Just one month later, he succeeded his predecessor as Iran's Supreme Leader—a position he has held without ever leaving the country since.

The funny looking man is the most dangerous man.Pic: Cre Sarcasm
03/02/2026

The funny looking man is the most dangerous man.
Pic: Cre Sarcasm

Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” tells the story of a U.S. military raid that went disastrously wrong when optimistic pl...
02/11/2026

Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” tells the story of a U.S. military raid that went disastrously wrong when optimistic plans ran into unexpected resistance. In Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, 18 Americans lost their lives, 70 more were wounded, and within days President Bill Clinton pulled out troops that were on a humanitarian mission. By then some 300,000 Somalis had died of starvation, and the U.S. purpose was to help deliver U.N. food shipments. Somali warlords were more interested in protecting their turf than feeding their people–an early warning of the kind of zeal that led to Sept. 11.

The movie is single-minded in its purpose. It wants to record as accurately as possible what it was like to be one of the soldiers under fire on that mission. Hour by hour, step by step, it reconstructs the chain of events. The plan was to stage a surprise raid by helicopter-borne troops, joined by ground forces, on a meeting of a warlord’s top lieutenants. This was thought to be such a straightforward task that some soldiers left behind their canteens and night-vision gear, expecting to be back at the base in a few hours. It didn’t work out that way.

It was Francois Truffaut who said that it’s not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their e...
02/11/2026

It was Francois Truffaut who said that it’s not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see “Platoon,” the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie that regards combat from ground level, from the infantryman’s point of view, and it does not make war look like fun.

Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” is more like a book of short stories than a novel. Many of the passages seem self-...
02/10/2026

Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” is more like a book of short stories than a novel. Many of the passages seem self-contained, some of them are masterful and others look like they came out of the bottom drawer. This is a strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material.

Greyhound worked about as well as it could have. I don’t know how it would have worked for someone who hadn’t read The G...
02/09/2026

Greyhound worked about as well as it could have. I don’t know how it would have worked for someone who hadn’t read The Good Shepard, but we saw as much of Krause the conflicted man as you could reasonably get in a very different medium, along with a decent portrayal of the tension of fighting submarines. My only issue with the last part was the Germans tapping into the TBS (as far as I know, that never actually happened) but I did really like the response of calmly switching channels. On the whole, it worked, but this probably wasn’t the best story to make a movie out of, because of how much the book was concerned with Krause as a character, which doesn’t make the transition to the screen that well. Still worth a watch if you get a chance, although I really wish I could say to go see it in theaters.

The contribution to history of Black women has often been overlooked, so it’s always heartening when a film-maker attemp...
11/07/2025

The contribution to history of Black women has often been overlooked, so it’s always heartening when a film-maker attempts to redress the balance. Theodore Melfi did it with Hidden Figures (2016), which dramatised the role played by three Black female mathematicians in Nasa’s 1960s space programme. Now writer-director Tyler Perry (best known for Diary of a Mad Black Woman and the Madea series) takes a similarly stirring, if slightly less glamorous true story: the clearing of an immense backlog of second world war mail to and from US troops fighting in Europe by a battalion of dedicated Black women from the Women’s Army Corps, who faced widespread institutional racism and sexism.

The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam...
11/07/2025

The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.

Nolan’s Dunkirk has that kind of blazing big-screen certainty that I last saw in James Cameron’s Titanic or Paul Greengr...
11/06/2025

Nolan’s Dunkirk has that kind of blazing big-screen certainty that I last saw in James Cameron’s Titanic or Paul Greengrass’s United 93. It is very different to his previous feature, the bafflingly overhyped sci-fi convolution Interstellar. This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war p**n in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen.

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