Of the various bombing strategies the Germans used against Britain in the months following the fall of France (they switched plans about half a dozen times), the most effective one was to attack RAF bases.  That strategy nearly put Fighter Command out of business before the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London.  (I can't recall if the Luftwaffe also attacked the Chain Home radar stations along the coast, or even realized how important they were, but if I had been Hermann Goering -- a mental image which gives me a serious case of the giggles -- I would have hit them hard.)

That said, however, it's been speculated that if the Luftwaffe had had the good sense to keep bombing RAF bases, to the point where Fighter Command would have started to crack, the RAF would have responded by withdrawing its fighters to the north and to the west, out of Luftwaffe bomber range.  This would have left southeastern Britain unprotected against air attack, and would thus have created the air superiority conditions which Germany needed to launch the Sea Lion cross-Channel invasion.  At first glance, one would therefore think that such an RAF withdrawl would have been a disastrous move.  Its purpose, however, would have been to "save the furniture" so that the RAF could then be thrown back into the fight at the critical moment: when the Sea Lion operation started.  The RAF's aim under those circumstances wouldn't have been to shoot down the Luftwaffe in the air (as was the case during the Battle of Britain); the prime objective would have been the destruction of the invasion forces at sea. 

[the war]

These days they always have to combine some love story in order to sell us a proper war movie. Before 1980, a war movie could be made where the actual story was the war, not used as a backdrop to develop something else.

"It makes me sore...I go out and sweat blood to make a swell picture. and then the critics and the exhibitors all say, 'If this picture had a love interest it would gross twice as much.'"

-- Carl Denham, King Kong (1933)

Armored Trains [...] Would be a cool unit though to ferry Lenin to Saint Petersburg.

Yes, though sadly:

a) He supposedly used a "sealed" train, not an armoured one.
b) The whole story about the sealed train later turned out to be just an invention.

But yes, armoued trains are cool.  One of the neatest designs I've ever seen was in the James Bond movie GoldenEye.  The front of the locomotive looks vaguely like an Easter Island statue.

Two additional effects of the raid which the article didn't mention:

- The RAF unit formed to drop the bombs, 617 Squadron, was retained in service during the war as an elite unit which specialized in precision drops of unusual bombs (like the Tallboy and the Grand Slam) on exceptionally tough and high-value targets.  It took a few cracks at the Tirpitz, ultimately capsizing it, and it also attacked some of Germany's massively constructed concrete U-boat pens in France.  It can be viewed as a British cousin of the USAAF's 509th Composite Group, which was established and trained to drop with great precision a single very heavy bomb of a special type (which its members ultimately learned was the A-bomb).

- The Dambusters Raid inspired a classic movie whose theme march became quite popular in Britain, and whose climactic attack sequence directly inspired the Death Star trench run sequences at the end of the original Star Wars film.  Required viewing for any Star Wars fan who hasn't seen it yet.

Also, who are the grognads?

It's a typo.  The correct word is grognard, a reference to the elite members of Napoleon's Imperial Guard.

I've always been intrigued by the fact that:

- Alexander was Macedonian, not Greek

- Napoleon was Corsican, not French

- Hitler was Austrian, not German

- Stalin was Georgian, not Russian

Is here some sort of pattern at work here?

I am afraid I have never seen Scotland.

I've been to Scotland several times (some friends of mine live there) and on one occasion I managed to get all the way up to the Orkney Mainland to have a look at Scapa Flow.  Owing to lack of time, I wasn't able to reach the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum at Lyness, but I did visit the Stromness Museum where I got to see some German-language plaques salvaged from the WWI German High Seas Fleet and part of one of the torpedoes which sank the Royal Oak in 1939.  Well worth the long train trip and the ferry ride across the Pentland Firth.

How about when Paris is taken Normandy-Bordeaux, Southern France, the navy in Mediterranean and the french force in North Africa joined the Nazis, but half of the units in France is moved to UK represents Free French forces who fled and the rest of the French territories in Africa and around the world remains unde Free French control.

It would have to be considered an alternate-history scenario.  The French Navy and the French colonial forces never joined the Nazis, and the number of French forces who crossed the Channel from France to England to form the Free French was nowhere near large enough to represent half of France's military units.

On the other hand, it's perfectly accurate to have some of France's colonial territories go over to the Free French side soon after France is occupied becauset that's what happened in reality.

I have just had a reminder of his life and political history, as we spent a few days in London and we visited The Churchill War Rooms.

I've been there too.  (It was about fifteen years ago, so we didn't exactly miss each other by a narrow margin.)  Another interesting place that I've seen which you may want to visit if ever you're up in Scotland is the so-called Secret Bunker (http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/), which can be found easily by following the big roadside signs which advertise it.

One of the ironic things about Churchill's time in office during WWII is that he lost the PM job in 1945 for pretty much the same reason that he got it in 1940.  After the Norway fiasco, Chamberlain lost the confidence of the House of Commons and had to be replaced as PM, the House having finally come to the conclusion that he wasn't by nature a war leader -- a job for which Churchill semed better suited.  By the time of the July 1945 election, however, Germany had surrendered two months earlier and Japan was at the end of its tether.  British voters were already looking ahead to the post-war world, and they seem to have felt that Churchill, who was so closely associated with the war, was as unsuited to lead a peacetime government as Chamberlain had been to lead a wartime one.

An American World War ll veteran who lost his military dog tag in France nearly 70 years ago has finally been reunited with it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22476767

That picture of J.B. is the visual equivalent of the unendurably bad poetry readings which the Vogons use to torture their enemies in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Get adhesive backed stiff felt.  Take it from experience, that's the way you want to go!

Yes, definitely.  The vertical part of my tower is made of aluminum; the felt which I used to line the interior is self-adhesive on one side, and for good measure I put some double-faced tape on the inner walls of the tower before applying the felt.  It's held up fine and has never given me any problems.  The receiving tray is made of wood, and here too I used self-adhesive felt to line it.  I can't recall if I bothered adding double-faced tape to it because the tray isn't subject to any stresses, so the felt doesn't need to stick in a particularly solid way.   By contrast, the felt inside the tower had to stick strongly because one of its functions is to help hold in place the plastic coat hooks which serve as dice randomizers -- so it has to be able to absorb those repeated small impacts without pulling away from the walls of the tower.

When you design your tower, you should consider making it in such a way that it can be broken down for easy transportation if you're going to be gaming outside your own home.  I've seen some very neat designs in which the tower can be laid horizontally into the receiving tray to save space.  Mine doesn't do that, but it does break down into three components.  Most tower assemblies have just two parts (the tower and the tray), but I had to make mine in three parts because of the limitations within which I was working.  I don't have the tools or the talent to do any kind of woodworking, so I built my tower by adapting various inexpensive things I purchased at a local hardware store.  The tower itself is a square aluminum tube, open at both ends.  Dice towers typically have a slot cut out of their base on one side, to serve as an exit route for the dice when they hit to diagonal ramp at the bottom of the tower -- but in my case, I didn't have the necessary equipment to cut the aluminium to make the slot.  So I made the ramp separately, as a cube-shaped component.  The tower sits in the ramp cube, and the ramp cube sits in the receiving tray.  I jokingly refer to the three components as the vertical randomizer, the lateral deflector and the horizontal receiver.  The colour scheme is silver and black, so the design looks sleek and modern, but in reality the whole thing was cobbled together very cheaply.  I actually much prefer some of the professional-looking wooden towers I've seen on the Web, especially the ones made of dark-stained varnished wood.

Sounds like a cool project.  I don't have any suggestions on the specific point of making it A&A-related, but one recommendation I'd have would be for you to make sure that the tower design gives you good randomization.  A tower typically contains some felt-covered angled platforms which change the direction of movement of the dice as they fall, thus (supposedly) randomizing their movement.  The problem is that the felt (which is very necessary to muffle the sound) can cushion the dice and reduce their tendency to bounce, with the result that the dice might slide from one platform to the next without rolling very much.  Part of the solution is to make sure your tower is reasonably tall (short ones aren't as effective).  A further idea is to use an internal scrambling mechanism that gives more random bounces than simple platforms -- for instance a maze of felt-covered dowels dense enough to produce lots of strikes on the way down, but also open enough to prevent jams.  The tower that I built for myself has its interior walls lined with small-sized plastic self-adhesive coat hooks projecting at various angles into the centre; because they're made of soft plastic, they don't damage the dice and they don't make as much noise as hard wooden platforms, so I didn't need to cover them with felt (although the interior wall surfaces themselves are felt-covered).

A good receiving tray at the bottom is a must too.  Its rim has to be tall enough to prevent dice from flying out when they shoot out of the tower base, and its inside has to be felt-covered to reduce bouncing and to absorb sound.

It may be a new book, but it's an old conspiracy theory.  It even inspired a suspense movie called Brass Target, released way back in 1978.