This was Hitler's favourite song. Or rather it wasn't.

Last night I was due to climb every mountain – well, head down the Lower Bristol Road – and go to Bristol to watch The Sound of Music onstage.

It was amazing to me the effect this had on some of my colleagues when I casually mentioned the news. As it is not the sort of music that people usually associate with me, I expected to be ribbed mercilessly but within minutes of mentioning it several hard-bitten hacks were heard to be singing about lonely goat herds and troublesome nuns.

It is just one of those shows that seems to ‘get’ everyone.

Having thought I’d done well to keep my credibility intact, however, I then completely ruined it with a chance remark. Someone said that their favourite song in the film was Edelweiss and I retorted: “Well, you may like it less when you realise it was Hitler’s favourite song”.

“Are you sure?” said someone.

“I am,” I replied. Firmly. Ish.

Two minutes later I was peeling egg off my face when I realised (or rather Wikipedia proved to my ‘doubter’) that the song was actually written in, err, 1959. I then weakly tried to regain my wrecked credibility in the ‘things-you-don’t-know-about-Hitler’ stakes by saying: “Ah well, did you know he designed the Volkswagen Beetle?”

Wikipedia – which you soon realise can be your biggest enemy as well as your best friend – found that this was nonsense too. The dictator had asked in 1933 for a ‘people’s car’ to be designed but his pencil never touched paper.

So once again I’d fallen for an urban myth.The truth is we can often fall of these and that is why Stephen Fry’s QI is an invaluable way of stopping us from repeating “truths” which are actually nonsense.

So, can I stop all of you from making similar mistakes by assuring you, for example, that Humphrey Bogart never said “Play it again Sam” in Casablanca, Sherlock Homes was never quoted in the novels as having said “elementary, my dear Watson”, Captain Kirk never uttered the line “beam me up Scottie” and Darth Vader never said the phrase “Luke, I am your father”.

And, to save you wasting a good ten minutes of your life hearing a long, urban myth story, can I assure you that David Beckham NEVER paid off somebody’s mortgage so his son could have a party at Alton Towers. If the elements of that story sound at all familiar then I’m not surprised because I’ve been told it in three different offices over the last few years or so by sincere people who claim they even know whose house was paid off by the generous footballer. But it never happened.

Trust me. I’m a journalist.

The only problem with de-bunking urban myths is that they do take some of the fun out of life. I love the story of how NASA apparently spent millions trying to develop a pen that would write upside down in space while the Russians just used a pencil. But, sadly, it wasn’t true.

Just like the moon landings, in fact.

Why I respect, admire and support our servicemen

The context for this piece is that in the Chronicle letters two weeks ago a writer, Tony Culver, said we should be ashamed of our British military history and he said our armed forces did not deserve our respect. He has since repeated that claim in a new letter this week - and this was the response I made in my column, printed on November 12.

Whenever I talk to local community groups it is usually only a matter of time before the Bath Chronicle’s famous (or should I say infamous)? letters pages are discussed.

I know that our pages are avidly read by people and the contents are widely discussed and debated.

This is because, by and large, we have an exceptional letters section which allows our readers to pontificate on all manner of hot topics which really gets their debating juices flowing.

I am just like everyone else in that a number of the letters that appear are ones I fully agree with and others are totally against my own personal view. And that is fine, because they are your letters pages – not mine.

However, occasionally, just occasionally, one letter gnaws away at me so I cannot ignore it. And that is what has happened this week with the second letter we print by Tony Culver who has attacked our armed forces and their long history.

It is his view, one he passionately believes, and he has every right to be heard (and printed). But so do we who fundamentally disagree.

I could talk at some length about many of the issues Mr Culver raises about war, peace and our armed forces generally but I just want to focus on one core subject, one which I think challenges everyone who believes in ‘peace at all cost’.

And that is the Second World War.

You could make a fairly powerful argument against nearly every war that has been fought but the Second World War was different – very, very different. When you are growing you play games with goodies and ‘baddies’, and this was a war when those terms genuinely (and uniquely?) apply.

Yes, there are many innocent German people who lost their lives in that conflict, but there is no denying that the Nazi regime that led them to war was pure evil. And pure evil can not – and must not – be ignored.

Mr Culver’s plea of peace is absolutely commendable – but it only works if both sides sign up. As we know Britain did everything it could to appease Hitler – and all he did was to sneer at our weakness.

Had we ignored his growing militarism to keep our own ‘purity of peace’ we would have seen Europe enslaved, Britain completely overrun (the Nazis would hardly have respected our ‘neutrality’) and we would probably have seen the total and utter destruction of the Jewish race on our continent.

I visited Auschwitz last year and saw for myself the appalling effect of Hitler’s insane beliefs and anyone that can possibly think he would have been stopped in his evil plans to create an Aryan master race by ‘peaceful methods’ is almost dangerously naive. Hitler had to be stopped – and the only way, sadly, he was going to be stopped was at the end of a gun.

In his latest letter, Mr Culver also said that the freedom we have now isn’t worth the price of the millions who died for it. He is wrong. Freedom, like democracy, is something that we in the west take for granted – ask the millions in the world who don’t have it how much they were prepared to sacrifice to gain it and you may not see such a flip attitude to freedom. And that has been earned mainly by our brilliant, committed and dedicated armed forces for whom we all owe our pride, respect and loyalty.

I will, as editor, continue to print Mr Culver’s words and those of people who support him but as an individual I feel nothing but incredible pride for the people who lost their lives in British uniforms so that I, and Mr Culver, can have the right to debate these issues.So, yes I will remember them all.

And with genuine pride.