Archive for January 2021
The London Irish officer killed in Tunisia who lost two brothers in the Great War
On 20 January 1943, Captain Sydney Montrose Ekin was walking in the footsteps of two brothers who had fought and died in the First World War when he crossed the attack Start Line on the Bou Arada to Goubellat road, 50 miles south west of Tunis, A Cambridge University law graduate who had been commissioned…
Read MoreA Pictorial History, from Algeria to Austria
We shall be adding links to photographs tracking the progess of the Irish Brigade’s fighting journey from the time of their arrival in Algiers during November 1942 to the brigade’s crossing into Austria in early May 1945. These photographs are reproduced from the Imperial War Museum’s archives. The first series covering the Tunisian campaign can…
Read MoreDeserters in North Africa and Italy
On 4 February 1943, a Sergeant in the 6th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (the Skins) was sent to Bone (now Annaba in Algeria) to collect three deserters caught trying to get a boat back to Britain. They had managed to make the 150-mile journey from the Irish Brigade’s positions in Tunisia undetected. It suggests they…
Read MoreThe London Irish Rifleman who walked to freedom
January and February of 1945 were among the coldest winter months recorded in Europe in the entire 20th century. In Silesia, then part of the Third Reich but now in Poland, temperatures fell to 25 degrees centigrade below freezing. These were the conditions that faced Prisoners of War (POWs) at the Stalag VIII camp near…
Read More2 LIR in North Africa, June 1943
A photograph taken in the summer of 1943 in Algeria shows twenty five officers of the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles (2 LIR) as they prepared to join the Allied invasion of Sicily. It was a little more than six months after the Battalion had landed in Algiers as part of Operation Torch,…
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