The Battle of the River Plate took place on December 13th 1939. The battle in the South Atlantic was the first major naval battle of World War Two. Ships from the Royal Navy's South American Division took on the might of Germany's Graf Spee which was successfully attacking merchant shipping in the South Atlantic.

Ferdinand Foch became supreme commander of Allied forces in World War One. Foch, along with Joseph Joffre and Philippe Pétain became one of the three most prominent French military officers in the war. Ferdinand Foch Ferdinand Foch was born in 1851 in Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenees. Foch fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and became an artillery specialist.

The murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is accepted by historians as the immediate cause of World War One though serious trouble - long term causes - had been brewing for sometime. On June 28th 1914, the heir to the Austrian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Bosnia was in the very south-east corner of the Austrian empire and some people there wanted to be independent from Austria and set up their own state which could run itself.

Rationing was a priority for the government at the very start of World War Two. World War One had shown the impact of U-boats and the British government wanted to be prepared for the worst. September 29 th 1939: National Registers were set up and identity cards were issued. January 8 th 1940: Food rationing began.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was de facto head of Germany during World War One. When World War One broke out in August 1914 Wilhelm was emperor with great power. When the war ended it ended for Wilhelm with a self-imposed exile in the Netherlands and little if any influence in Weimar Germany. Wilhelm was born in 1859.

While pilots from abroad fought with distinction in the Battle of Britain, the majority of pilots were from Great Britain. No official record of Battle of Britain pilots survived World War Two - only those who had died, and it is their names that are on a memorial in Westminster Abbey, which was unveiled in 1947.