About the Book
The twentieth century began fairly peacefully, and the sun actually never set on the British Empire. The peace, however, only lasted a few years, and then anarchists (terrorists) started to appear everywhere in Europe. The 28th of June 1914 is the day when everything changed. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo started a chain of events that has lasted one hundred years. This is not a history book per se. Historians have written a multitude of books, about the wars of the last century and periods in between. This book points out the major blunders and appeasements by well meaning, ignorant politicians of the "Western" world, who kept repeating the same mistakes. Whether one talks about the loss of China, throwing the Shah or Mubarak under the proverbial bus, entering wars without enough troops to do the job, allowing Vladimir Lenin to travel back to Russia, the ultimate result is the same - consequences that are not to the benefit of the appeasers. In the last chapter of the book, the author lays out what he considers the biggest blunder(s) of all and why.
About the Author: Richard Mervyn Osborn was born in 1937 in Wembley, England, less than a year after Edward VIII abdicated in favor of his brother King George VI. He was raised in England during and after the Second World War. He survived the German bombs by camping out at nights, in an air raid shelter, near Richmond Bridge and the River Thames. Richard went out into the garden after an air raid and picked up "chaff" (called window by the British and duppel by the Germans) that the Germans dropped to jam the radars. He was educated at Canterbury Cathedral Choir School and the King's School, Canterbury, where he listened extensively to the BBC radio and its accounts of post war Europe, including the Berlin airlift of 1948. He also became aware of the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, Dr. Hewlett Johnson (also known as the Red Dean). It was a known fact that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of Mao Zedong and the Communist Chinese. Richard is a veteran of the British Army and served in the Royal Artillery, during the Cyprus Emergency of the late 1950's. After emigrating from England to the United States in 1958, he served in the United States Air Force and worked on the Bomarc, a long range anti-aircraft missile. He is a graduate of California State University at Los Angeles in Marketing and of the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management. He worked at General Dynamics on the Terrier/Tartar, Mauler and Standard missiles, Ford Aeronutronic, Hughes Aircraft and Tektronix. He is a licensed pilot and was the international marketing and sales manager for a Tektronix Inc. business unit. He has travelled extensively around the world and visited the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Turkey, Norway Sweden, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, The Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. Richard has always been a "student" of international affairs and the way nations have had successes and failures in their international relations with other countries. He understood what appeasement was from an early age, since Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister) gave away Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in an attempt to persuade the German dictator not to absorb or attack other countries.
