We will celebrate another anniversary of Pearl Harbor tomorrow. It turns out that my dad died on December 7, 2015, or an anniversary of that fateful day. Over the years, I asked him a lot of questions about that time period, or the buildup to the attack and the U.S. entrance in that war.
I knew what Truth & Treason was about before I watched it. I thought I’d seen enough movies about Nazi Germany to be able to get through it in one piece. But no: by the end of this thing I was in tears.
Truth & Treason is based on the true story of Helmuth Hübener, who, as the closing title cards tell us, was “the youngest resistance fighter in Nazi Germany to be sentenced to death for taking a stand against Hitler.” He was 16 at the time of his arrest, and 17 when he was executed.
For the best part of three years, Friedrich Karl Vialon was one of the archetypal “writing-desk murderers” who kept the bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust ticking over.
Deployed to Nazi-occupied Riga in 1942, his job was to strip the Baltic states of every asset his staff could lay their hands on: jewellery, boots, winter coats, musical instruments, de facto slaves and gold fillings stripped from the mouths of executed Jews, one of which was reimplanted into the mouth of one of his secretaries.
Vialon performed this task with grim thoroughness, raising the number of Jewish forced labourers in the region from 6,000 to 13,800 and personally supervising the confiscation of belongings at house raids and the nearby SS concentration camp at Salaspils.
With the passing last week of the 80th anniversary of the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (on August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (three days later), familiar questions once again arise about our having done so. These include whether it was absolutely necessary in order to bring an end to the war, and whether or not there was any alternative to the two bomb attacks?
Addressing the second question first, an alternative option had been discussed. It involved providing the Japanese with a demonstration by dropping an atomic bomb on an uninhabited island. But such a demonstration involved risks.
There is no room for presentist moral narcissism.
This week marks the 80th anniversary of President Harry Truman’s fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (respectively, Aug. 6 and 9, 1945). To date, those two bombings represent the only instances in which nuclear weapons have been deployed in war. At least 150,000 Japanese perished — a majority of them civilians. But the bombings were successful in achieving their intended effect: Japan announced its formal surrender to the Allies six days after the second bombing, thus finally bringing the bloodiest conflict in human history to an end.
At 08:15 on August 6, 1945, as a nuclear bomb was falling like a stone through the skies over Hiroshima, Lee Jung-soon was on her way to elementary school.
The now-88-year-old waves her hands as if trying to push the memory away.
“My father was about to leave for work, but he suddenly came running back and told us to evacuate immediately,” she recalls. “They say the streets were filled with the dead – but I was so shocked all I remember is crying. I just cried and cried.”
Victims’ bodies “melted away so only their eyes were visible”, Ms Lee says, as a blast equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT enveloped a city of 420,000 people. What remained in the aftermath were corpses too mangled to be identified.
Few people have heard of Captain Kermit Beahan.
Beahan was the bomb-aimer on the B29 that dropped the plutonium bomb, known as Fat Man, on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, an act that ended possibly the cruellest war in history.
Except that he didn’t drop Fat Man on Nagasaki: He dropped it to the north, 2.18 miles short of the city –— on tennis courts belonging to the managing director of Mitsubishi, next to what had been the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in Japan, in the hilly suburb of Urakami.
A piece of Canadian naval history has been recovered from the bottom of the English Channel and is now destined for a museum, but not everyone is celebrating.
British diver and YouTuber Dom Robinson, a 53-year-old military veteran and project manager, located the bell from HMCS Trentonian, 67 metres below the surface. The ship, a Royal Canadian Navy corvette, was sunk by a German U-boat in February 1945. Six sailors were killed in the attack, and the vessel went down in just 10 minutes.
Robinson, who has been exploring shipwrecks for more than 30 years, called the discovery “emotional” and “unbelievably exciting.
War grave desecration? Understandably yes.
In Asian waters the wrecks of Allied WW II vessels lost in battle have been plundered for scrap metal by the grateful natives our forces liberated from the yoke of Imperial Japan.
Though the Second World War was never fought on British land, only in the skies overhead, the country’s fabric is marked by the conflict in innumerable ways. Near my home is a stretch of woodland I often run through with the dog. In 1945, an Allied plane crashed among its trees, killing several of the men on board. To this day, local legend has it that visitors to the crash site will hear voices or coughing, or smell smoke.
But for how much longer will we remember those ghosts? This week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day — the moment the war ended in Europe. The youngest surviving veterans are now at least 98. And of the millions of British people who served in the war, only tens of thousands remain: perhaps 0.01% of Britain’s total population.
There is a street named after him in a British town.
A plaque at the local hospital tells the story of how the 29-year-old pilot saved many lives while sacrificing his own during the Second World War.
There are even talks of building a statue of Darlington’s “Gallant Airman” to honour his life and death.
But William Stuart McMullen, a Canadian pilot officer from Ontario, is little known in his own country.
Nope. Not today’s “Canada”.
For years, ever since the footage appeared in TV documentaries and online, the identity and fate of the so-called ‘Lost German Girl’ has proved captivating.
Dressed in a nondescript uniform and with a swollen face betraying that she had been savagely beaten, she was seen walking down a road in liberated Czechoslovakia.
The date was May 7, 1945, the very day that Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies after the suicide of Adolf Hitler in his Berlin Bunker.
This is the closest I could find to the original footage shot by Haglund it is only available on YouTube.
The footage shows living SS men who were later filmed dead by the road side having been the subjects of reprisal.
As a former Spitfire pilot who flew 60 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War, George Brewster is not one to be rattled easily.
But he says experiencing the warmth and gratitude of the Dutch people who have come out to cheer him and other Canadian Second World War veterans this weekend has left him speechless.
Well done.
A military parade marking the eightieth anniversary of VE Day has been rejected by councillors because it is “too elitist”.
Dacorum borough council in Hertfordshire has eschewed hosting any formal event to mark the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8.
This is despite the Lib Dem-run council holding a day-long event last year called “50 Fest” – which included a colourful parade through Hemel Hempstead – to mark its 50th birthday.
A Second World War bomber, shot down by the Nazis with a British airman aboard, has been found after 82 years.
Leslie Norman Row, from Gravesend, Kent, was flying a mission over the Mediterranean when his Baltimore Bomber was attacked. The aircraft, part of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), crashed off the Greek island of Antikythera, with Mr Row and two comrades losing their lives.
After almost 82 years of uncertainty, divers discovered the bomber 61 metres beneath the Aegean Sea.
When Daniel and Victoria Van Beuningen first toured their future home, a quiet villa in the Polish city Wroclaw, it had been abandoned for years, its windows sealed up with bricks. But something about its overgrown garden spoke to them. They could imagine raising chickens there, planting tomatoes and cucumbers. They could make something beautiful out of it, they thought — a place where their children could run and play.
They moved in knowing very little about what happened at the villa before World War II, when Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, was still part of Germany; or what occurred there during the war, when Soviet forces held the city under a brutal siege; or even what became of the house during the war’s aftermath, when hundreds of thousands of local Germans were forcibly resettled from what was now Polish territory. All their neighbors could tell them was that the villa had once housed a Communist newspaper.
Still, the couple wanted to know more, and their inquiries eventually led to the Meinecke family in Heidelberg, Germany, elderly siblings who said they were born in the home. Over a long afternoon, they showed the couple pictures of the place from happier times before the war, but they also offered the Van Beuningens a surprising warning: The couple might find the remains of some German soldiers buried in the garden. Maybe a few, maybe more; they couldn’t be certain.
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