WW II

The full horrors of the only Nazi concentration camps to exist on British soil will finally be investigated in an official government inquiry, the Observer can reveal.

Eighty years on from one of the darkest episodes in British history, the government is to carry out a review into the numbers of prisoners murdered by the Nazis on Alderney, the tiny Channel Island and British crown dependency.

It has now been established that the SS ran two of the camps on Alderney during the second world war, and new evidence of the scale of Nazi barbarity on the island has emerged over recent years. The number of victims has been contested, with some claiming thousands were killed with many buried in mass graves on the island.

On July 21, the biopic “Oppenheimer” will drop in theaters. It dramatizes the story of “the Father of the Atomic Bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film is being criticized for a lack of racial diversity. Far more problematic is its whitewashing of the physicist’s communist sympathies.

In the movie, Oppenheimer is called “the most important man who ever lived,” an absurdity unmatched in Hollywood razzle-dazzle but one that is gaining traction as the zeitgeist moves left, popularized by such bizarre fiction as “real communism has never been tried.”

If your code name is cropping up in the Venona transcripts there could be a problem.

As for the movie being too “White” it was called The Manhattan Project, not The Harlem Project but I agree Lizzo would have made a credible Oppenheimer.

SINGAPORE—In the spring of 1944, Second Lt. Thomas V. Kelly Jr.’s mother received a one-page letter at her home in Livermore, Calif., informing her that her son was killed in action. His plane was hit by antiaircraft fire and disintegrated midair during a mission in New Guinea, his commander wrote.

“Unfortunately this is the only information we can furnish,” the letter read.

In a storage room in Buenos Aires, an Argentinian investigator made a discovery that would reverberate through a boardroom more than 7,000 miles away.

Pedro Filipuzzi unearthed what researchers claimed were files that revealed the names of 12,000 undercover Nazis who lived in the Latin American country during the 1940s and had bank accounts at a Swiss lender: Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, later to be renamed Credit Suisse.

SYDNEY (AP) — A team of explorers announced it found a sunken Japanese ship that was transporting Allied prisoners of war when it was torpedoed off the coast of the Philippines in 1942, resulting in Australia’s largest maritime wartime loss with a total of 1,080 lives.

The wreck of the Montevideo Maru was located after a 12-day search at a depth of over 4000 meter (13,120 feet) — deeper than the Titanic — off Luzon island in the South China Sea, using an autonomous underwater vehicle with in-built sonar.

God be with them.

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.

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.