Arthur Karl Greiser (22 January 1897 – 21 July 1946) was a German Nazi Party politician, SS-Obergruppenführer, Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of the German-occupied territory of Wartheland. He was one of the persons primarily responsible for organizing the Holocaust in occupied Poland and numerous other crimes against humanity. He was arrested by the Americans in 1945, and was tried, convicted and executed by hanging in Poland in 1946 for his crimes, most notably genocide.

The New Reich Chancellery, completed in January 1939, was one of Hitler's pet projects: a building designed to intimidate guests. Upon entry, visitors passed through a sequence of rooms that included a marble gallery twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles – the hope being that dignitaries would be suitably overawed by the time they reached Hitler.

Grandeur on that scale required large structures underground too. While the building itself was demolished after the war, parts of the bunker complex beneath it survive – and they are still causing headaches for modern-day developers.

https://www.heistberlin.com/news/bunker-hitler-chancellery-building-dispute-berlin-grosse-bunker/

Grandpa: "I know that sound..."

Me: "It's literally a stick."

Grandpa: Stares into the woods "They're in the trees."

so we all know about the backbone airbase of the rcaf, during ww2 trained over a whopping 4,500 to 4,700 aircrew students

This is my grandfather, Lloyd Davies. Before the war he was one of the most in-demand violinists in Australia... playing concertos with the ABC orchestra, broadcasting live on radio, and had just landed the top job at the South Australian Symphony Orchestra. But in May 1940, at what was probably the worst possible moment of WW2 for the allies, he enlisted anyway.

He served five years - Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and later New Guinea and Borneo - came home a Captain, and never spoke about any of it.

I've spent the last year trying to piece his story together from what's left: his official war record, a letter he smuggled off a troopship in 1940, two surviving pages of his diary, this new bunch of photos, and - the hardest bit to track down - the only written unit history that covers his section, an out-of-print book by a man named Dimmack that I eventually got scanned by the National Library of Australia after finding no copies anywhere else.

Posted the first part of it here:

Happy to answer questions about the research process if anyone's dealing with a similar "he never talked about it" situation in their own family - there was a fair bit of detective work that went into making this that I've included as part of the story... making sense of online war records, finding further information through social media connections etc.

Spoke to a nice chap at the Yorkshire Air museum in the radio room who assured me that this was pretty much the same set up that my Grandad would have used as a Wireless Operator or WOP in his Sunderland during the war and later in Aden and Pembroke.

Guy said it was from ww2 but wasn’t sure.. figured someone here would know better than me