WW II

Troops were fighting for democracy at home as well as abroad.

Shortly after midnight on 6 June 1944, Operation Neptune, otherwise known as D-Day, began.

Thousands upon thousands of planes and ships bombed and shelled Nazi defences in Normandy. The Allies then sent in 23,000 men in three airborne divisions and mounted, with 4,000 landing craft, what remains the world’s largest ever amphibious assault: five divisions, attacking five separate beaches.

Amateur archaeologists have unearthed five human skeletons missing their hands and feet under the former home of the Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair military headquarters in present-day Poland.

The remains, believed to be that of a family, were discovered as part of a dig at the site near the north-eastern town of Kętrzyn, where Nazi leaders spent large stretches of the second world war.

Mystery surrounds the chilling find, first reported by Der Spiegel, including the identity of the victims, the circumstances of their burial, and whether the Reichsmarschall knew the bones were there while he lived in the house.

The Great Escape wasn’t so great in the end. Almost all the Allied participants in the famous breakout from a German prisoner-of-war camp were captured and most were killed.

It has always looked as if the plan went wrong — but what if something more sinister was at work? Had the Great Escapers been betrayed?

A newly uncovered document in the National Archives has revealed that Flight Lieutenant Desmond Plunkett, the map-maker and unlucky 13th man out of the camp, believed the Great Escape had been brought down — by its own side.

A teenage cook whose heroics onboard a warship helped shorten the Second World War has been honoured in his home town after a public vote.

The regenerated centre of North Shields, North Tyneside, has been named after Thomas Brown, who was awarded the George Medal for helping to retrieve codebooks from a sinking German U-boat in October 1942.

The books were later used to crack the Enigma code by experts at Bletchley Park, enabling the British to decipher Nazi messages.

Since 2009, Indian and American teams have scoured the mountains in India’s north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, looking for the wreckage and remains of lost crews of hundreds of planes that crashed here over 80 years ago.

Some 600 American transport planes are estimated to have crashed in the remote region, killing at least 1,500 airmen and passengers during a remarkable and often-forgotten 42-month-long World War Two military operation in India. Among the casualties were American and Chinese pilots, radio operators and soldiers.

The operation sustained a vital air transport route from the Indian states of Assam and Bengal to support Chinese forces in Kunming and Chunking (now called Chongqing).

“It’s often surprising how limited the knowledge about the Nazis’ medical crimes is in today’s medical community, maybe with the exception of Josef Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz,” said Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

That’s why Czech and his colleagues suggested establishing a new commission to the editor-in-chief of renowned medical journal The Lancet three years ago.

They planned to raise awareness of the Nazis’ medical crimes and enable today’s medical professionals to draw conclusions for the future.

Archaeologists have found evidence of a mass execution of German prisoners who were forced to dig their own graves and then shot by the French Resistance a few days after D-Day, during World War Two.

French and German teams discovered bullets and cartridges, as well as coins, at a remote site in central France identified by the last surviving witness.

After France surrendered to Hitler’s Germany in 1940, the underground Resistance movement gathered force over years of occupation and by June 1944 was poised to help the Allied invasion in Normandy.

In the early going of this marathon film, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context also is important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.

Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Josef Stalin’s Communist forces invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” marks November 30, 1939.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic Oppenheimer is wowing critics and selling out cinemas across the world. It’s already threatening to eclipse the disappointing Indiana Jones remake and even Tom Cruise’s raved about latest installment of the Mission Impossible series. But it’s a worldwide hit with one notable exception: the film hasn’t been released in Japan yet, and no word has been given of when it will be. Some are speculating that there may be no Japanese release at all.

Klaus Fuchs says nothing in Oppenheimer, but by giving the Russians atomic secrets he maintained a balance of power

There is a character in Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer who lurks in the background of many scenes; a tall, balding, shadowy figure without a single line of dialogue. But he is the second most important person in the story of the atomic bomb.

J Robert Oppenheimer built the bomb. And Klaus Fuchs stole it.

The Manhattan Project, and the Los Alamos Laboratory under Oppenheimer, produced the first nuclear weapons. The project cost some $2 billion (about $21 billion today) and employed 130,000 people. One of them was Fuchs, a brilliant physicist and a KGB agent, who passed those dangerous scientific secrets to Stalin, enabling the Soviet Union to build its own bomb.

Not an honourable act in my view.

On July 20, 1944, at 12:42, a bomb went off in the conference room of the Wolf’s Lair military headquarters in East Prussia, the easternmost province of the German Reich until the end of World War II. It was supposed to kill Adolf Hitler, and had been planted by German army officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The former ardent National Socialist now no longer saw any other option apart from murdering the dictator. “There is nothing left but to kill him,” he had told his closest confidants a few days earlier.

Stauffenberg was not only the assassin, but also the most important organizer of a large-scale coup attempt by people from conservative circles, which included high-ranking military, diplomatic and administrative officials.