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Originally Posted by Dan D
...or possibly you had no interest in submarines back then.
Shame on you :-).
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I can sympathise with him.
I'm embarrassed to say that when I was 19 I actually marched across Nijnmegen bridge without knowing it's WW2 history (and me a US Army Paratrooper
) until years afterwards.
I had always been interested in the history of warfare, but with so many dates and events in far off foreign sounding places to remember, and being 19 with other things on my mind, I discovered it was all too easy to miss the historical significance of anything, expecially when one runs into it unexpectedly. All I knew was we were going to Holland to march in some kind of 100 mile parade. Imagine my horror when I re-read "A Bridge too far" later on and realize that I had all that history at my fingertips and instead of taking advantage of it blindly spent the time drinking and partying in my off hours.
I will say however that when you know the history of a place or a thing it makes the experience of being there or seeing it a lot more rewarding, or like the time I visited the Nurenburg stadium and stood where hitler actually gave his rally speeches, freaking creepy.
One of my life goals is to go back to Europe someday and make what I call the battlefield tour of places I have read about over the years. It'll cost me an arm and a leg i'm sure and that sting certainly won't be lessened by the fact that 30 years ago I could have visited most of them on day trips.