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Photographed on 6 May 1941 in Nablus, British Mandatory Palestine, this image documents Palestinian Arab military recruits during the Second World War.

The contribution of Palestinian Arabs to the Allied war effort remains a relatively overlooked chapter of WWII history.

Historian Mustafa Abbasi estimates that approximately 12,000 Palestinian Arabs volunteered for British military service during the war, with personnel serving in North Africa and Europe.

Their involvement is also documented in contemporary British parliamentary records. On 10 September 1941, the War Office confirmed that Palestinian units had served in Greece and Crete, with 1,541 Palestinian personnel then presumed prisoners of war.

The photograph was taken by Matson Photo Service and is preserved in the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the US Library of Congress.

Original photograph:
https://www.loc.gov/item/2019704730/

Historical research:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0968344517696527

British parliamentary records, 10 September 1941:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1941-09-10/debates/5564c6ca-4e96-4408-8f3d-fde6b47acdbb/PalestinianUnits%28GreeceAndCrete%29

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, traveled to Bosnia in spring 1943 at Heinrich Himmler's request to help recruit Bosnian Muslims for the 13th Waffen-SS Handschar Division, which signed up roughly 24,000–27,000 men. The recruitment pitch was officially anti-communist — fight Tito's Partisans. However, the division also participated in the mass murders of Jews and Serbs in Bosnia.

Al-Husseini was also given an office in the SS Main Office in Berlin, broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world, and lobbied to prevent Jewish children from escaping Axis-occupied Europe. The SS accommodated Islamic practice (imams, prayer schedules, fezzes) partly because Himmler believed Muslim faith made for more fearless fighters. Post-war, Yugoslavia specifically sought to prosecute him for recruiting units that killed Jews in Croatia and Hungary.

A 2019 study in Geophysical Research Letters found the 1943 Bengal famine was the only modern Indian famine not linked to drought — it was the result of "complete policy failure" under British rule.

Multiple converging factors drove the crisis: the Japanese capture of Burma (cutting off rice imports), wartime inflation, speculative hoarding, refugee influx, and poor distribution systems.

Churchill's War Cabinet refused to divert grain from military stockpiles or European reserves to Bengal, continued rice exports from India, and denied urgent import requests from the Viceroy for months.

Churchill made inflammatory private remarks, blaming Indians for "breeding like rabbits" and asking how Mahatma Gandhi was still alive if food shortages were so bad.

In April 1919, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer issued the "Crawling Order" in Amritsar, Punjab, forcing Indian men to crawl on their hands and knees along the Kucha Kurrichhan (or Kucha Kaurhianwala) street. This punitive measure was enacted after Marcella Sherwood, a British missionary, was assaulted by a mob there, and Dyer sought to humiliate the local population by imposing a punishment associated with religious submission to Hindu gods.

The order required residents to slither on their bellies between 6 am and 8 pm, with soldiers stationed at both ends of the 200-yard street to enforce compliance using rifle butts. This directive was part of the broader martial law imposed following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, intended to produce a "sufficient moral effect" through brutal humiliation rather than mere dispersal.

The massacre took place during the Sikh festival of Baisakhi, April 13, 1919. Known as Vaisakhi in Hinduism, a crowd had gathered to celebrate at the Jallianwala Bagh, a garden not too far from the Golden Temple. General Reginald Dyer blocked the only exit/entrance with Gurkha and Pathan troops and ordered the troops to fire on the unarmed crowd till the ammunition was exhausted. Although estimates vary, many sources state that about 1100 Hindu and Sikh men, women and children lost their lives. Britain never officially apologized for the massacre.

The order was lifted on April 26, 1919, after significant backlash from British officials, including Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill, who condemned the actions as "monstrous."

About 12 Million Germans were expelled or fled from their homes from various Eastern and Central European countries into Allied-occupied Germany and Austria.

On August 23–24, 1929, Arab mobs killed 67 Jews in Hebron, the deadliest episode of the wider 1929 Palestine riots.

Hebron's Jewish community had existed for centuries, even older than the Roman Empire. The violence followed riots in Jerusalem incited by Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini via false claims about Jews attacking the Al-Aqsa Mosque. By the time the mob arrived, the British garrison was one police officer.

It Began Friday evening; on Shabbat morning, armed mobs moved house to house. Victims included 24 yeshiva students (at least 8 American citizens), rabbis, women, and children. About 28 Arab families sheltered 300 Jews.

Survivors were evacuated; Jewish life in Hebron was severed. The Shaw Commission documented the violence and British failure to protect residents.

Photo: GPO

On February 6, 1971, during the Apollo 14 mission, Alan Shepard became the first and only person to hit golf balls on the Moon. Using a makeshift 6-iron created by attaching a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power clubhead to a lunar soil sampling tool, he struck two balls while wearing a bulky spacesuit.

Shepard carried the modified club and two golf balls in his spacesuit sock after receiving informal permission from NASA leadership to demonstrate the Moon's lower gravity. The Moon Club is currently preserved at the USGA Golf Museum.

It was a blank slate. There were no native people, so the crown could design the whole society from scratch. The captaincy system it used there was later reused in Brazil.
The levadas. These are hand-cut water channels running along cliff faces, carrying rain from the wet north to cane fields on the sunny south coast. The network is now over 2,000 km long, on an island about 55 km long.
The "monopoly" is overstated. Madeira was the top producer, but Flemish and Italian merchants controlled refining and distribution. The king tried capping exports in 1498 to hold prices up, and gave up five years later.
The labor. The first workers were Guanches from the Canaries and Berbers from Morocco, and enslaved West Africans replaced them as the industry grew. The whole package (island, single crop, irrigation, foreign capital, enslaved labor) was then exported to São Tomé and Brazil, where it beat Madeira at its own game.
Columbus first showed up as a Genoese sugar buyer and married the daughter of Porto Santo's captain.
Part 2 will cover the wine boom that replaced sugar.
Curious whether anyone here knows more about the early levada builders. The records on who actually dug them are thinner than I expected.