The American pilot felt his aircraft wobble in the sky near the coast of West Sussex, England, where the beach gleamed below him, and the emerald meadow pastures lay ahead on June 22, 1944.
He and nine other crew members aboard a B-24 Liberator had just been jolted by a shell from a German antiaircraft gun that tore through the plane’s metal, forcing the pilot, First Lt. William B. Montgomery, into a dire situation as he tried to fly from Paris back to base camp in Britain.
Last survivor of the White Rose movement who was twice arrested by the Gestapo but liberated three days before her trial for treason
On February 18, 1943, Traute Lafrenz was walking to a neurology lecture at Munich University with her friend Willi Graf when she spotted Sophie and Hans Scholl hurrying through the empty courtyard. The siblings looked purposeful, if a little frazzled, but it was the leather suitcase that caught Lafrenz’s attention.
In 1940, during the twilight between peace and war, a divided Congress passed a law to conscript young men into the Army—the first federal “peacetime” draft, which lasted throughout American participation in World War II. Congress accommodated young pacifist men whose consciences wouldn’t let them take part in the fighting: If they could convince the government that their pacifism was sincere, conscientious objectors would be assigned to either noncombatant military service or noncombatant civilian service.
They were a bit more direct in WW I.
Following Germany’s latest refusal to pay war reparations to Poland, Polish officials are calling on the US and the UN for support. The government also aims to have its demands “clarified” to Germans.
“Germany’s response is astonishing to us in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as for the Polish state. The German government cannot answer a question that was never posed. Neither negotiations nor conciliatory discussions took place.” That’s what Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk had to say about Germany’s newest refusal to pay Poland reparations for World War II. Mularczyk made the statement on Wednesday in Warsaw.
OMMEREN, the Netherlands, Jan 6 (Reuters) – An old map believed to mark the spot where German soldiers hid treasure worth millions of euros during World War Two sparked the imagination of amateur treasure hunters in the Netherlands this week.
Armed with metal detectors and shovels, groups wandered through the fields surrounding rural Ommeren in the east of the country after the map was made public by the Dutch National Archive on Tuesday.
There are potentially thousands of unexploded World War Two bombs around Wales, with emergency services still dealing with up to 20 callouts a year.
With the coastal towns of Cardiff and Swansea key German targets, many are thought to be in these areas.
At the start of the war, the authorities were “utterly unprepared” how to deal with unexploded bombs, according to historian Steve Day.
A bomb disposal officer was expected to live for two months.
This man helped the Soviets shape U.S. policies that undermined negotiations with Japan.
While most Americans commemorate the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 — what President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy” — most Americans are probably not aware that the infamy of Pearl Harbor included a Soviet covert operation designed to influence Japan to attack the United States instead of the Soviet Union so that the Soviets would not face a two-front war. The covert operation was code-named “Snow,” and it involved a high-level Treasury Department official named Harry Dexter White.
Poland is ratcheting up the pressure on Germany over reparations for the Second World War, with Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk giving Germany a new ultimatum to pay up or face Poland bringing the matter to a range of international forums, a move that may harm Germany’s international reputation.
“Now, Germany has a choice: Either it sits down with Poland at the negotiating table, or we will raise the issue in all international forums — in the UN, in the Council of Europe and in the European Union,” he said, according to German news agency dpa.
…“If Germany had been treated as it was in many plans formulated not in the Soviet Union but in the West, today they would be a very, very poor and much less numerous country than they are,” he claimed, adding that the defeated German nation was “treated extremely kindly” given the circumstances.
“Let them thank God that is only so. They owe us, they have to pay,” he insisted.
Long but interesting related reading…
Fears of Retribution in Post-War Germany
Three groups were at the heart of post-war German fears of revenge: Jewish Holocaust survivors, Eastern European Displaced Persons, and American occupation officials.
One morning in the next few months, a 98-year-old man living somewhere near Coburg, in Bavaria, may be visited by the ghosts of the distant past.
Nearly eight decades ago he is believed to have joined the SS, Nazi Germany’s sprawling paramilitary apparatus of terror, which posted him to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in April 1943.
Local prosecutors are weighing up whether to charge the man, whose identity has not been made public, with aiding and abetting hundreds of murders that took place within the camp’s barbed wire perimeter over the following two years.
I WROTE recently in TCW how victory for Britain in the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was a turning point in the war against Germany.
Commenting on the article, one of our American readers, D A Christianson, noted that the pivotal moment of the war in the Pacific for the US also came in 1942, with the battle for the key island of Guadalcanal.
He was right to remind us. The hard-won victory there after a bitter six-month struggle from August 1942 to February 1943 is probably little remembered now in Britain, but it halted Tokyo’s military juggernaut, which until then had seemed unstoppable.
Trauma of fighting in the Second World War remains a peculiar taboo because its heroism is so woven into our identity
… Some of the first SAS soldiers, notably Lieutenant Blair “Paddy” Mayne, were recruited precisely because they were unstable, unruly and prone to extreme violence. Mayne’s behaviour was sometimes close to psychotic. Several of the early SAS recruits exhibited increasing irrationality and symptoms of mental illness, as the strain of a particularly brutal form of warfare took a toll.
We’re losing touch with its lessons just as they struggled to commemorate the Civil War
With worries about inflation, the war in Ukraine, and tension over Taiwan, it’s easy for Americans to forget that we are now deep into the four-year period marking the eightieth anniversary of World War II. Last December marked eighty years since the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, while this June passed the date of the critical victory at Midway. In a little less than two years, it will be eight decades since the greatest invasion in history, on D-Day. Soon after will follow commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and both V-E and V-J Days. Each year, living memory of that global struggle continues to fade, with the passage of both time and the Greatest Generation.
EIGHTY years ago tonight, the silent darkness of the Egyptian desert erupted in flame and hellish noise as the Second Battle of El Alamein began.
A four-hour artillery and aerial bombardment starting at 9.40pm opened the massive assault by the Eighth Army against their German and Italian foes.
Although the bulk of the troops going forward were British, their comrades in arms included divisions from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, as well as soldiers from Greece, Poland and the Free French.
Historians writing about the years immediately before Adolf Hitler’s war have to contend with two problems: hindsight and the common and dangerous conflation of Germans and Nazis. It was the German state, not the Nazi party, that went to war in 1939 (though of course the state was under Nazi control) and the vast majority who were not Nazis kept their heads down to avoid ending up in a concentration camp or worse. Almost all of those who ended up at the end of a rope at Nuremberg, took the suicide pill or escaped to South America, were committed party members – with all that entailed.
A row has erupted in France over plans for a new D-day attraction near the landing beaches, which critics have likened to a Disney-style theme park.
The multimillion-euro project to retell the story of le débarquement of 6 June 1944 and the subsequent Battle of Normandy in a hi-tech 45-minute “immersive show” has sparked a furious war of words, with opponents describing it as disrespectful to those who died and their families.
