Number 4 from the top is Soviet Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky.
Before the storm
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As I sit here in CT as this massive storm rolls in I was thinking, what places would you like to go see before history’s great battles forever changed it?
For me there are two and the first one is a total cop-out.
1. I would love to have spent the summer of 1913 to the summer of 1914 touring around Europe. I would go see all the major capitols, Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna, St. Petersberg in winter, as well as the future sights of major battles. Take a picnic along the Marne, walk around the fields in Flanders, shopping at the market town of Ypres, wondering along the forts near Verdun, hiking the Isonzo river valley, wandering the Masurian lakes, and what have you. The scenic views, the people, the lifestyle, all would never be the same after those two shots in August 1914.
2. Stalingrad. I’m reading Anthony Beevors book and the way he describes the city before the way, it’s parks, wide boulevards, shops, the picnic grounds on the Mamev Kurgen, the Shanghai restaurant along the river bank landing pier, the rows of modern white apartment blocks, it is described as a modern “model” city of the day. Considering what it turned into I think it would be amazing to see it before it became “that fateful city”
What do you guys think?
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Rome before Hannibal.
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2. Stalingrad.
Both of your choices are extremely compelling, but the second in particular. This is an interesting topic. I have read about how the Normandy beaches were significantly different looking 70 years ago, and it is time more than war that changed them. Time changing a battlefield is something I have contemplated before, because it is unlikely that a given one exists as it did when history was written there. Tragic I guess; how time alters the world and leaves little to recognize the past by. We can get lost in such musings though…
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Hiroshima…
Or maybe even Chernobyl.
But only as long as I got to see the before and after.
I’m not brave enough to want to see Soddom or Gomorrah…
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Berlin.
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Carthage. Salt. Enough said.
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I once visited Brest and I bought as a souvenir a picture book filled with then-and-now comparative shots of various locations in and around it. Old Brest was quite a charming place, but the wartime bombing it endured (there was major U-boat base there) and the tough fighting that was needed to liberate it in (I think) September 1944 destroyed about 90% of the town. Brest was rebuilt very quickly, with much use of concrete and little attention paid to architectural niceties, so today it’s rather dreary in appearance.
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Tenochtitlan before Cortes got to it.
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Pearl Harbor before Dec. 7.
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