Part 3

DECLARATION. On December 11, 1941, the US Senate declared war on Germany and Italy. With only one short speech, the Senate voted 88-to-0 for war against Germany, 90-to-0 for war with Italy. There was one abstention, Republican Pacifist Jeannette Rankin called out 'Present' - a refusal to vote. The House of Representatives voted war with Germany, 393-to-0. After the vote was taken the chamber was filled with the noise of stamping feet from the galleries as the public stomped out. It seems that the war with Italy vote (399-to-0) wasn't worth waiting around for.

AMERICAN SERVICEMEN IN AUSTRALIA. The first US troops arrived in Australia at Brisbane, Queensland, on Christmas Eve, 1941. Almost one million American servicemen passed through Australia during the war. About 7,000 Australian women married their American boy friends and travelled to the USA as war brides.

CASUALTIES. In the first five months of 1941, British civilian casualties from German bombing raids amounted to 18,007 killed and 20,744 injured. April and May, 1941, saw the heaviest death toll with 11,459 killed and 12,107 injured. In the next seven months, till the end of December, 1941, 1,637 deaths were reported and 1,829 injured.

AMERICAN SERVICEMEN IN BRITAIN. In Britain, the Yanks were said to be "overpaid, oversexed, overfed and over here". The Americans countered this by saying the Brits were "underpaid, undersexed, underfed and under Eisenhower".

1942
DOUBLE AGENTS. In January, 1942, Britain had a total of 19 German spies working as double agents. These had been 'turned' under threat of execution and agreed to work against their homeland. Others, who were of the more fanatical type, were hanged at Wandsworth Prison.

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE. At the request of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi Reich Main Security Office, heads of various organizations assembled in a villa on the shores of the Wannsee Lake in Berlin on January 20, 1942. Here they discussed the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question', in other words, the ways and means to kill off the Jews of Europe, a total of around six million! In the event, the Nazi's succeeded in disposing of just under five million Jews in the concentration camps of Europe. (The Villa, at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee, was built in 1914 and in January, 1992, the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, the Villa was opened to the public as a memorial and education center).

MARKED FOR EXTERMINATION. On a list of countries drawn up by Adolf Eichmann and presented to the Wannsee Conference, England is mentioned with its 330,000 Jews and political figures, all marked for deportation to the Nazi extermination camps in Poland after the proposed German takeover of the British Isles. On top of the list is the name, Winston Churchill.

ASPIDASTRA. The codename given to the powerful 500 KW transmitter which was purchased from America for use in broadcasting propaganda on the German controlled wave-lengths. It cost Britain £111,801, 4 shillings and 10 pence to buy the apparatus from the RCA factory in Camden, New Jersey. Another sum of £16,000 was spent to prepare the site and erect the masts near Crowborough in Essex. The transmitter first became operational on November 8, 1942.

DEPORTED. Between 1942 and 1944, a total of 25,257 Jews were shipped out of Belgium on twenty eight train convoys. Among them were 5,430 children under the age of sixteen, the youngest only thirty-nine days old. At the end of the war only 1,207 were still alive when the concentration camps in Poland were liberated. A further 5,034 managed to escape across the border to seek refuge in France. Unfortunately these were rounded up after the fall of France in 1940 and deported, via Drancy, to Auschwitz. Of these, only 317 survived.

CAVALRY CHARGE. The last Cavalry charge in history took place on August 23, 1942, at Izbushensky on the River Don. The Italian Savoia Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Bettoni, and consisting of 600 mounted Italian troops, charged against 2,000 Soviet troops who had opened a breach between the German 6th Army and the Italian Army. The Italian Lancers destroyed two Soviet Infantry armoured vehicles before being forced to withdraw with slight losses, about thirty-two casualties.

GOOD IDEA? An attempt by the Americans to cause a volcano to re-erupt ended in failure. In 1942, the Tavorvur volcano on Matupi Island, Rabaul, erupted and caused great concern for the Japanese occupation troops. To cause greater concern, the Americans purchased from the British Government two 'earthquake' bombs of the type invented by Barnes Wallis for the Ruhr Dams raid. The two bombs, together with a number of 2000 pounders, were dropped on the gaping mouth of the still smoking volcano. Both bombs missed the target and buried themselves in the sand near the end of the runway on the nearby Lukunai airstrip. In 1970, the two bombs were discovered unexploded. The Australian Navy was informed and the bombs were detonated.

LIQUIDATED. Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, had his nephew, SS 1st Lieutenant Hans Himmler, demoted and sentenced to death for revealing SS secrets while drunk. The sentence was commuted and he was sent to the front as a parachutist. He was again charged with making derogatory remarks about the regime and sent to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich where he was finally 'liquidated' as a homosexual.

TRAGEDY. On March 3, 1942, Royal Air Force bombers attacked the Renault car factory in Paris which was manufacturing engines for the German Panzer Divisions' tanks. Poor bomb aiming caused many of the bombs to land on the workers' homes nearby. A total 367 French workers died in this tragedy and around 1,500 were wounded.

DESERTERS? On March 3, 1942, the FBI was ordered to round up about 8,000 foreign seamen who had deserted their ships while in US ports. They included around 3,000 Norwegians and 3,000 Greeks. The rest were Swedes, Dutch, Danes and British. They were asked to return to their ships or face deportation or internment.

SORRY NO REQUESTS. American disc jockeys were banned from playing listeners requests in 1942. The War Department explained that enemy agents might use the format as codes to pass military information on to their superiors.

OPERATION 'CHARIOT'. Code name for the British commando raid on the French port of Saint Nazaire on March 28, 1942. The 356 metre long Normandy Dry Dock and surrounding installations was the target for the 257 Army Commandos and 345 Royal Navy men who took part. The plan was to blow up the lock gates by ramming a ship, packed with explosives, straight into the gates themselves. The ship chosen for this task was an old lend-lease 1919-built American destroyer, USS Buchanan, renamed HMS Cambeltown. Internally she was stripped of all unnecessary equipment to accommodate four and a half tons of explosives made up of 24 depth-charges timed to explode at a certain time. At 1.30am, and racing full speed ahead, the Cambeltown ploughed through the anti-torpedo nets and crashed into the lock gates with such force that her bows were peeled back some forty feet. Firmly wedged on the gate, her bows projecting over the top, crew and commandos made a hasty departure to wreck havoc on electrical and pumping installations around the dock. As daylight broke, scores of enemy officers and men swarmed all over the ship but failed to find the explosives. At 10.35am a terrific explosion rocked the dockside as the Cambeltown exploded, ripping the ship and the lock gates apart and killing most of the Germen officers and men on deck. The Normandy Dock was not brought back into operation until 1948. Of the 611 Commandos who went into action, 169 lost their lives. Some 200 were captured and made prisoner, the rest made it safely back to England. Five men were awarded the Victoria Cross, one posthumously, for outstanding heroism during Operation Chariot.

TRAGEDY AT IMBER. The area around Imber on the Salisbury Plain in England, comprising of around 91,000 acres, is the traditional training ground for the British Army. On April 13, 1942, during a demonstration of fire-power from a squadron of Hurricanes, the pilot of the 6th plane to make the attack inadvertently fired into the crowd of invited military spectators. He had mistaken the spectators for the rows of dummy soldiers placed on the ground as if in marching order. The demonstration was immediately cancelled and all aircraft ordered to return to base. Fifteen minutes later some thirty military and civilian ambulances arrived to convey the dead and injured to hospitals. Twenty five officers and men were killed and seventy one injured. The Hurricane pilot, just approaching his 21st birthday, was found guilty of an error of judgement by the Court of Inquiry. (On June 28, 1942, seventy-six days after the tragic incident, he was shot down and reported missing in a sortie over Cherbourg).

THE BRAVEST. A total of 64 American nurses were captured when Bataan and Corrigidor fell to the Japanese on May 7, 1942. None took part in the Bataan Death March but were sent to the big civilian internment camp at Santo Tomas University on Rizal Avenue and the Los Banos Internment Camp in Manila. In the camps, 3,768 American and Allied male and female civilians, including survivors of US merchant ships, were interned during the war. Around 390 of these prisoners died from starvation and disease. They were liberated on February 3, 1945, by elements of the US 44th Tank Battalion whose lead tank crashed through the locked gates of the compound and accepted the surrender of the camp from the Commandant, Colonel Hayashi. The Los Banos Internment Camp, containing 2,147 prisoners, was liberated on February 23, 1945, by troops of the US 11th Airborne Division supported by Filipino guerrillas. All the nurses survived the war. Altogether eighty-three US Army and Navy nurses became prisoners of war while serving in the Pacific area. Throughout World War II over 59,000 American nurses, including 479 black nurses, served in all theatres. A total of 201 nurses died, sixteen died as a direct result of enemy fire.

TARGET COLOGNE. On the night of May 30/31, 1942, the Royal Air Force launched its first 1,000 bomber raid of the war. The cathedral city of Cologne was attacked by a force of 1,046 bombers that took off from 52 airfields in England. A total of 1,455 tons of bombs was dropped by the 898 planes which actually attacked the city. Forty-two British planes were lost and twelve badly damaged never to fly again. In the blazing city 486 people had died and 5,027 injured, 18,432 buildings of all kinds were destroyed resulting in 59,100 citizens being made homeless. Next day, RAF Mosquito fighter/bombers flew over the still burning city on their first operational mission to photograph the damage.

OPERATION PASTORIOUS. Between June 12 and 16, 1942, eight German secret agents were landed on the US east coast. Four were sent ashore from the German submarine U-202 near Amagansert on Long Island. Another four were landed on Florida's Atlantic coast from the U-boat U-584. Their mission, to destroy a cryolite factory in Philadelphia. All had arranged to meet on July 4th in Cincinnati. A number of these agents were German-Americans trained by the Abwehr at their sabotage training school near Berlin. However, one of the team, a greedy unscrupulous ex-waiter named George Dasch, and his team-mate Ernest Burger, betrayed the whole operation to the FBI. Dasch carried on his person the sum of $160,000 which was to be used for expenses during their stay in the US. He was determined that the cash would stay in his own pocket. Soon after contacting the FBI, all eight agents were arrested. At their secret military trial, Dasch and Burger received lengthy jail sentences but the money was taken off Dasch and deposited in the US Treasury Department vaults. The other six agents met their date with destiny in the electric chair at Washington's District Jail. In 1948, after serving six years of their sentence, Dasch and Burger were deported back to Germany.

UNDERWATER GIANTS. In 1942, Japan commenced building the world's biggest submarines. The 400 foot long I-400 series had a displacement of 3,530 tons and were intended to destroy the Pacific exit of the Panama Canal. They could cruise 37,500 miles and dive to a depth of 325 feet. Each of the I-400s could carry three specially designed seaplane bombers which were dismantled and stored in a watertight hanger inside the submarine. Only three were completed before the end of the Pacific war. All three were captured and destroyed by the Americans in 1946.

CAPTURED. On July 12, 1942, one of Stalin's favourite generals, General Andrey Vlasov, was captured by the Germans. He was decorated with the 'Order of the Soviet Union' for his defence of Moscow. In the POW camps, while a prisoner of war, Vlasov, seeing a great future for himself only in the event of a German victory, began to raise an army of volunteers from other Russian prisoners who were willing to fight alongside the Germans against Stalin. It was called 'The Russian Army of Liberation'. Many of these volunteers were forced by the Germans to join, it was either a case of join the Vlasov army or starve to death. Many of Vlasov's troops, while fighting in Czechoslovakia, deserted their German masters and joined up with the Czech Resistance movement. After the war, General Vlasov was returned to the USSR where he was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and hanged.

WOMAN FIGHTER PILOT, Olga Yamschchikova of the Red Air Force, became the first woman night fighter pilot to score a kill. On September 24, 1942, she shot down a JU-88 bomber over Stalingrad. Olga was a member of the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, an all women unit which during the war flew 4,419 combat missions and shot down 38 enemy aircraft.

OPERATION JUBILEE. Code name for the seaborne assault on the town and port of Dieppe on the French coast on August 19, 1942. The plan was to test the German defences, destroy certain military targets and to occupy the town and surrounding area for one day and then re-embark and return to England. The troops chosen for this action were around 5,000 Canadians from the Canadian 2nd Division who were becoming bored and wanted to see some real action. Some hundreds of British and fifty American commandos were to accompany them and land on eight different points on the enemy held coast. Landing on the shingle covered Puys beach at daylight, with no smoke cover, men of the Royal Regiment of Canada were cut to pieces by machine gun fire from pillboxes manned by the German defenders. Out of 27 officers and 516 men, only 3 officers and 57 men survived to get back to England. Twenty-eight Churchill tanks, intended to support the infantry, were all lost in the sea or bogged down on the shingle beach. By 9am, realising that the assault was a failure, the Army Commanders decided that the only alternative was to withdraw. By the afternoon, after nine long terrible hours, the survivors were on their way home leaving behind 215 officers and 3,164 men, some 2,000 being taken prisoner including 570 wounded. The commandos lost 24 officers and 223 other ranks. In the air the Royal Air Force lost 106 aircraft, the Luftwaffe 48 planes. The lessons learned at Dieppe were put to good use during the coming Allied invasion of North Africa in November and later at Salerno. (On September 1, 1944, the 2nd Canadian Division returned to Dieppe to take over the town after the Germans had given up without a fight. Survivors of the 1942 raid staged a victory march-past over the ground they had once fought for. The wheel had turned full circle).

OCCUPATION. On November 5, 1942, Troops of the British East African Command completed their occupation of the French colony island of Madagascar. Fearing that Vichy might hand over the island to the Japanese in case Ceylon fell, Churchill ordered 'Operation Ironclad' to proceed on May 5th when the naval base at Diego Suarez was secured. Hostilities against French Vichy forces on the island ceased at 1400hrs. Madagascar was loyal the the Vichy French.

PETROL SPILL. On December 5th 1942, three naval trawlers, the Canna, Bengali and the Spaniard were berthed in the harbour at Lagos when a petrol spill caught fire engulfing the three ships. One by one they exploded and in the process killed around 200 people. Fishing trawlers were used extensively during the war on escort duties and mine sweeping.

ULTRA. Code name for the Bletchley Park operation in which coded messages from the German secret military cipher machine Enigma were decoded and read. (Codes were first read by the Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski as early as 1934). The military version was adopted by the German Army in 1929 and the Luftwaffe in 1934. Any reference to Ultra in the press was officially banned until 1974. Would our great commanders in the field have been so successful without the influence of Ultra? It is not generally accepted that at the same time the Germans were reading the British naval code and had been doing so since 1936! Up till late 1942, neither side knew that their naval codes were being read. When it finally dawned on them, new ciphers were introduced. A veil of secrecy still hangs over Ultra. Until the official records in the Public Records Office are opened the many hidden secrets of the Enigma story must remain just that ... an enigma!

CASUALTIES. For the first five months of 1942, air raid casualties in Britain were 1,526 killed and 1,572 injured. The next seven months till the end of December the casualties were 1,754 killed and 2,531 injured.

1943
EMERGENCY LANDINGS. In 1943, when an increasing number of British and American planes were returning crippled and low on fuel, Britain built a special Emergency Landing Ground (abbreviated to E.L.G.) in the county of Suffolk. Named RAF Woodbridge E.L.G. it handled a total of 4,115 emergency landings by the end of the war.

PROTEST IN BERLIN. For one whole week starting on 27th of February, 1943, German women in Berlin staged the only public protest against the deportation of its Jews. This was something unheard of in Hitler's Germany. During the 'final roundup' of Berlin's Jews, around 10,000 were arrested and within days transported east to the death camps in Poland. Among those arrested were about 1,700 male Jews who were married to non-Jewish German women. They were separated from the others and incarcerated in the Jewish Community Center at 2-4 Rosenstrasse in the Berlin suburb of Mitte. When the wives of these Jews realized what was happening they gathered in force in front of the Center shouting 'Give us back our husbands'. Each day the crowd grew larger and even in the face of SS thugs armed with machine-guns they refused to give up. Exasperated at the turn of events, Joseph Geobbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, realized he was facing a public relations nightmare and ordered the release of all intermarried Jews in the Center. These unsung heroes, German women married to Jews, won an astonishing victory over the deportation of their Jewish husbands. Almost all of the released Rosenstrasse Jews survived the war. Over 90 percent of German Jews still alive after the war were married to non-Jewish Germans.

THE BAUM GROUP. This Berlin group was composed mainly of young Communist Jews and operated in Central Berlin and the districts of Kreuzberg and Neuköln. Their main activity was the distribution of anti-Nazi posters and helping the slave workers who worked in the Siemens factory. In May, 1942, Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had organized an anti-Russian exhibition called 'The Soviet Paradise'. As an act of protest, the group decided to set the buildings on fire. However, the resulting fire was soon put out by firemen and a few days later the Gestapo succeeded in arresting 27 of the participants. Brought before the Peoples Court on the Potsdamer Strasse, they were found guilty of treason and on May 27, 1943, were executed. Three women members of the group received prison sentences and sent to Auschwitz from where the never returned. Herbert Baum, the leader of the group died after being tortured by the Gestapo but never betrayed his comrades. A monument, bearing the names of all twenty-seven members stands at the western entrance of Berlin's Weissensee Jewish Cemetery where some of the group lie buried.

SUICIDE? Stalin's son, Jakov Dzhugashvili, a 2nd Lieutenant in the artillery corps, was captured on May 16th, 1942 and interned in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where he was later shot while trying to escape. (Some sources say he committed suicide). In 1943, an attempt was made by the Germans to exchange Jakov for Field Marshal Paulus who was captured after the fall of Stalingrad. The request was refused by Stalin. Although he grieved for his son he is quoted as saying 'I will not exchange a private for a Field Marshal'. Over two million Soviet prisoners of war were liberated by the Red Army. All were to suffer at the hands of Stalin who always maintained that Russia had no POWs, all were considered traitors to the Motherland for allowing themselves to be captured.

WILHELM KUBE, Gauleiter of Brandenburg, anti-Semite and deputy in the Prussian State Assembly, was removed from office in 1936 for suggesting that Frau Buch, Martin Borman's mother-in-law, was half Jewish. During the war he became District Commissioner in the Occupied Eastern Territories where, in 1943, he was murdered by his White Russian housekeeper, Yelena Mazanik, who had placed a bomb under his bed. Mazanik was a member of the Belorussian partisan movement. The reprisals were swift and horrific, whole villages being wiped out and around 1,000 males were rounded up and either shot or hanged.

STARVATION. Nearly three million people died of starvation in the Honan province of China during 1942 and 1943. Due to drought, the crops of 1942 failed. Another factor was the war with Japan and the uneasy alliance between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communist forces. Hungry peasants raided the homes of the wealthy seizing anything they could eat in an effort to stay alive.

CATASTROPHE. On March 3, 1943 near the Bethnal Green underground station in London, an army defence unit was using a new type of rocket launcher. The whining noise they made sounded like falling bombs. Hearing this, many families in the area rushed to the underground tube shelter for safety. A woman carrying a baby tripped and fell at the bottom of the stairs. The rushing crowd behind was unable to stop and fell in a heap on top of her and the baby, suffocating each other. In all, 178 persons died.

BOMBING ERROR. The bombing of the MINERVA car factory in Antwerp on April 15, 1943, turned out to be one of the major tragedies of WWII. The factory was converted to repair workshops for Luftwaffe planes and therefore on the priority list for attention by the US Eighth Air Force. The bombing run was poor, due to evasive action being taken to avoid German fighters. The bombs were released too late and fell on the residential part of Mortsel, a suburb of Antwerp, over a mile away from the target. In all, 936 civilians were killed including 209 schoolchildren. A total of 1,342 people were injured and 220 houses destroyed.

SABOTAGE ATTEMPT. On April 21, 1943, a Wellington bomber took off from Hendon enroute to Glasgow. On board was 6ft 4in General Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle. On the runway, the plane failed to respond to the elevator control. The pilot, Flt. Lt. Peter Loat, DFC, brought the plane to a halt. It was then found that the control rod had been burned through with acid. Another plane was selected and De Gaulle arrived safe in Glasgow. He returned to London by train and never flew in Britain again.

OPERATION 'MINCEMEAT' (April, 1943). One of the war's great deception schemes, launched to convince the German High Command that the Allied landings would take place on Sardinia and not on Sicily, the obvious choice. The body of an unknown man who had died recently was dressed in the uniform of a major of the Royal Marines and given the name of Major William Martin. A briefcase was attached to the body containing highly confidential documents that foretold future Allied war plans in the Mediterranean. Major Martin's body was transported from Loch Ewe in Scotland by the submarine HMS Seraph to a point just off the coast of Spain and there committed to the sea. It eventually washed ashore and into the hands of German intelligence agents. Within days the contents of the briefcase was being analyzed in Berlin. Winston Churchill, then in the United States, received the coded message 'Mincemeat Swallowed Whole'. The body of 'Major Martin' lies buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Huelua, Spain. Official files on Operation Mincemeat are not searchable until 2043 but in November 1995, some of the top secret files were released to reveal for the first time in 52 years, the true identity of 'Major Martin'. He was a Glyndwr Michael, born February 4, 1909, in Aberbargoed, a small mining village in Wales. He had committed suicide by taking rat poison containing phosphorus when sleeping rough in a disused London warehouse. (The real Major Martin, whose name and identity was used for the deception, moved to the USA after the war and settled in Virginia. He died there on December 10, 1988, his ashes scattered over the Gulf Stream so that eventually they would arrive in his country of birth, Scotland).

SAD LOSS. General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881-1943), Poland's former Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, set up the Polish Provisional Government in London. When the Soviet Union was invaded he tried to persuade Stalin to release the thousands of Polish officers captured by the Soviets in 1939. (their bodies were later found at Katyn) Stalin remained silent on their fate and broke off all dealings with Sikorski. The Soviets then set up their own puppet government in Poland. Weeks later, General Sikorski and some of his staff, including his daughter, were killed when their plane, a Liberator, crashed seconds after take off from Gibralter, enroute to England, on July 4, 1943. The body of the General was laid to rest in the newly established Polish Cemetery at Newark, Nottinghamshire. The pilot, Flt. Lt. Edward Prchal of the Czechoslovakian Air Force, was the only survivor. The body of General Sikorski's daughter, Zofia, Chief of the Polish Women's Auxiliary, was never found. The remains of General Sikorski were returned to his beloved Poland in 1993. His cap and uniform, recovered from the sea at the site of the crash, is displayed in the Sikorski Museum, in the Polish Institute at 20, Princess Gate, Londo. ( Flt. Lt. Edward Prchal died in 1984 in Calistoga, California and his ashes interred in the Czechoslovak plot in the Brookwood Cemetery in England.

RUHR RAID (May 16, 1943). On this day in 1943, nineteen Lancaster's of RAF Squadron 617, bombed the Mohne, Eder, and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr. The main attack on Mohne was led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, his aircraft carrying the new 'bouncing bomb' invented by Dr. Barnes Wallis. The breach in the wall caused flooding which drowned 1,200 people, including 700 Russian prisoners of war whose camp was washed away in the flood. At the Eder Dam, 68 people were drowned. Eight aircraft crashed or were shot down. Seventy seven crew members died, fifty six survived. Thirty three decorations were awarded including the Victoria Cross to Guy Gibson.

GOMORRAH. The code name for the bombing of Hamburg during the ten days of July 24 to August 3, 1943. Around 3,000 British and American bombers dropped 9,000 tons of bombs on the city destroying some 277,330 dwellings. It produced a fire-storm, the first in history, in which the flames reached a height of three miles above the city. Temperatures in the center of the conflagration reached 1,400 degrees F (800 degrees C) and as the inferno sucked in more oxygen, winds reached an incredible 150 miles an hour. Thousands were caught in this heat, their bodies exploding in a ball of flame. After the war, the terrible toll was revealed, 30,482 people died but the most regrettable fact was that 5,586 children also died in the flames.(During the war around 63,000 men from Hamburg died while serving in the German armed forces).

DEPORTATION. On January 21, 1943, a train carrying 1,000 Jewish adults from a mental institution in Apeldoorn, departed Holland for the east. Also on the train were 74 boys and 24 girls from a nearby home for the physically handicapped. Fifty Jewish nurses accompanied the transport under a promise they would be returning to Holland after the delivery of their patients. The promise was never kept. Every single one on the train met their death at Auschwitz.

STALINGRAD. (February 2, 1943). The German Army, under the command of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, surrenders to the Soviet Union's superior forces.

147,200 German and Romanian soldiers were killed.
91,000 were taken prisoner, including 24 Generals and 2,500 officers.
(Only about 5,000 of these prisoners survived the war)
24,000 sick and wounded escaped by airlift.
1,000 crewmen and 488 transport planes were lost in the supply and evacuation.
After the surrender, Germany began a 3 day period of national mourning.
GENERAL HANS CRAMER. Last German Commander of the Afrika Korps, was captured in May 1943. Imprisoned in a POW camp in Wales, his deteriorating health caused him to be repatriated to Germany through the Swedish Red Cross. He was brought from Wales to the London Cage, the route taken brought him through the south and south-western England. He was allowed to see the massive build up of tanks, planes and ships getting ready for the D-Day invasion. What he didn't know was the exact area of England he was being driven through. He was told it was southern and eastern England and this is what he reported to his seniors in Berlin when he arrived there on May 23, 1944, adding emphasis to the Allied propaganda that the invasion would take place in the Calais area.

FORBIDDEN. On January 20, 1943, a young Polish farm worker from Ebersbach, near Wurttemberg, Germany, was hanged because of sexual relations he had with the farmers daughter. All slave workers from five kilometres around, were rounded up and brought in to witness the penalty for such a crime. About the same time, ten German women in Augsburg were jailed for terms of four to ten months for having sexual relations with French prisoners of war. In Duisburg, a twenty-two year old woman was sent to a concentration camp for the same crime, her twenty-six year old Polish friend was sent to the camp at Neuengamme and hanged on June 18, 1942. Between May and August, 1942, the Gestapo dealt with 4,960 cases of forbidden relations between Germans and foreign slave workers.

OPERATION 'GUNNERSIDE.' On the night of February 27/28, 1943, one of the most daring undercover operations of WW II took place in southern Norway. The destruction of the heavy water plant at the Norsk Hydro Electrisk factory at Vermork was given highest priority at headquarters of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The first attempt (Operation Freshman) ended in failure when two Halifax bombers, both towing gliders with thirty-four commandos on board, crashed in bad weather over Norway. Forty-five men lost their lives, some in the crash, the others were shot in cold blood after capture by German forces. Another attempt (Gunnerside) was made by SOE, this time by parachuting a commando force of volunteers, trained in Scotland, on to the frozen surface of one of the lakes on the 3,500 square mile Hardanger Plateau. A fourteen man Norwegian Army Commando group eventually reached Vermork and forced entry into the seven storey factory building through windows on the first floor and placed explosives near the eighteen electrolysis cells in the basement. Mission accomplished, the saboteurs retreated back the way they had come. At 1.15 am, the explosion did not destroy the building but about a ton of heavy water was released to pour down the drains. Two months production was lost. On 17th of April the plant started production again. It was now the turn of the US 8th Air Force when 140 bombers attacked the plant causing immense damage and killing twenty-two Norwegian and German workers. Production at the plant stopped for a second time. In February, 1944, the heavy water apparatus was then to be dismantled and transported to Germany by the railway ferry Hydro. This included 157 electrolysis tubes containing 607 kilos of heavy water packed into thirty-nine large drums. Members of the Gunnerside team, which had been hiding in the snow covered mountains throughout the past year, and with help from local partisans, placed explosives on board the ferry which was docked at Meal ready to sail next morning. At 10.30 the ferry blew up half way across Lake Tinnsjö. Fourteen Norwegian civilians and four Germans went down with the vessel. Twenty-seven persons were rescued. (Four drums of the heavy water were salvaged). The destruction of the most important military target in Europe was the cause of Hitler's failure in his most ambitious war project, the production of an atomic weapon.

TREASON? When the SS announced on March 3, 1943 that an SS Division was to be formed in Latvia to fight the Russians, around 32,000 Latvians volunteered. They formed the 'Waffen Grenadier Division der SS (No.1) During the winter offensive they fought bravely against the Soviets. Pulled out of the battle zone to avoid encirclement, they were sent back into Prussia. Gradually pushed westward by the advancing Red Army they eventually surrendered to the British. Not so lucky was the 2nd 'Waffen Grenadier Division der SS' formed soon after the first. It failed to escape to the west and was overtaken by the Red Army. As Latvia was annexed by the USSR, they were classed as Soviet citizens and therefore guilty of treason and being guilty of treason, they were all executed.

ASSASINATION ATTEMPT. On the 13th of March, 1943, General Henning von Tresckow and his ADC, Fabian von Schlabrendorf, placed a bomb on board Hitler's plane (after his visit to the Russian front). Disguised as two gift wrapped bottles of Cointreau liquor, they were intended as a gift for General Helmuth Stieff at Hitler's HQ. When news of Hitler's safe arrival reached the plotters, Schlabrendorf immediately flew to the HQ and retrieved the package and exchanged it for two genuine bottles. It was found that the detonator became defective in the high altitude cold air. From September 1938 to July 1944, there were seventeen assassination attempts plotted against the German Führer.

RESISTANCE IN GERMANY. The anti-Hitler movement inside Germany, which included German communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, was the largest indigenous resistance movement of any country during the whole war. Only in Germany was an attempt made to assassinate their leader. Around 800,000 were sent to prison at one time or another for active resistance to the regime. While the western allies did all in their power to help other resistance movements, ie in France and the Netherlands, they did nothing to help or encourage the movement in Germany which in all probability could have ended the war sooner. But the Allies were intent on unconditional surrender and refused to make any deals at all with Germans. Accordingly the Allies viewed all Germans as bad, not only Nazis.

PALM SUNDAY. Fifty one Luftwaffe tri-motor air-transport planes and sixteen escorting fighters, were shot down in a little over ten minutes by a group of seventy US and British fighters. The pilots were guided to their flight path by messages received from the German enigma codes (Ultra). The slow Junker 52 transports were on their way with supplies to the German Army in North Africa. This disaster became known as the Palm Sunday massacre. Seven Allied planes were also lost.

COINCIDENCE. On July 30, 1943, a Sunderland flying boat, U for Uncle, from the Australian 461 Squadron, spotted and attacked a German U-boat in the Bay of Biscay. The U-boat, commanded by Korvkpt. Wolf-Harro Stiebler, sank taking the lives of 53 of her crew. There were fifteen survivors. By a strange coincidence, the submarine was the U-461.

TRAITORS. About 25,000 Dutchmen were pro-nazi and fought for Germany. Around 10,000 of them were killed during the war and although many fought bravely on the Allied side, it is a sad fact that more went into battle wearing the field grey uniform of the enemy than in the British khaki.

DISASTER AT PORT MORESBY. In September, 1943, three battalions of US paratroops and some Australian gunners were dropped near Lae on the Huon Peninsula and secured the airfield at Nadzab. Back at Port Moresby, a US Liberator bomber crashed and exploded among troops of the Australian 7th Division waiting to be airlifted to Nadzab. This disaster took the lives of 59 soldiers and wounded 92.

BRITISH FREE CORPS. Also known as The Legion of St. George. The idea that British POWs be recruited to form an infantry SS unit was first put forward by the self-styled fascist, John Amery, son of a minister in Churchill's war cabinet. In 1943 the SS expressed interest in the idea and created the Legion of St. George. Despite promises of an easy life of luxury, only about thirty prisoners responded. Lieutenant William Shearer was the only officer to volunteer but was soon diagnosed as a schizophrenic and repatriated to England on medical grounds. The unit included three Canadians, three South Africans, three Australians and one New Zealander. Many changed their minds and were returned to their POW camps. By March, 1943, only six remained as part of the 11 SS Panzergrenadier Division 'Nordland'. After the war, John Emery was tried for treason and received the death penalty. The remaining members received periods of imprisonment.

TOP SECRET. Fifteen kilometres north-west of Frankfurt-am-Oder in the former East Germany, lie the remains of a massive underground factory built by the Ordnance Department of the German Wehrmacht in the late 1930s for the manufacture of the nerve gas Tabun. In 1943 the manufacture of a later generation of nerve gas, Sarin, was started and during its operational life about 25 tons of chlortifloride for the gas was produced. The five storied underground factory, which also produced the deadly V-weapons, was captured by the Red Army in February, 1945 as they advanced through the thickly wooded Falkenhagener Heide. In the 1970s, the Soviets converted the whole complex, installing steel doors one metre thick, for use as a command bunker in the event of a nuclear or biological war. (In 1946 and 47, the British military dumped around 40,000 tons of poison gasses, including Tabun, into the Baltic Sea. These gasses were discovered in Germany after the war).

THE BIGGEST LOSS to the US 8th Air Force was when 229 B17s and B24s raided the German ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt for the second time on October 14, 1943. A total of 60 planes were shot down or crashed on returning to base. A total of 599 airmen were killed and 40 wounded in the largest and most sustained air battle of the European war. The bomber crews claimed to have shot down 288 German aircraft. The actual figure, obtained after the war, was ... 27. In Schweinfurt, 276 civilians were killed.

THE BIGGEST LOSS for the Royal Air Force was on the Nuremberg raid of March 30, 1944, when, of the 795 aircraft taking part, 62 were shot down by German fighters, 14 shot down by flak, 2 were lost in collisions and 16 listed as missing. Of the total aircraft lost, 64 were Lancasters and 30 were Halifaxes. In the city itself, 74 people were killed and 122 injured. Of the RAF crew members, 545 were lost.

DEATH BEFORE DISHONOUR (November 10, 1943). A macabre incident involving the American destroyer USS Spence occurred just south of Bougainville. The crew spotted a raft with four live Japanese on board. As the Spence drew along side to attempt a rescue, the Japanese opened fire with a machine-gun. Rather than face the shame of surrender the Japanese officer in charge of the raft then put his pistol in each man's mouth and blew out the back of each man's skull. He then turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. All four bodies fell into the water to be devoured by sharks. The Japanese Bushido creed dictated that surrender was shameful and instilled in the soldier that self-destruction was preferable to capitulation.

DEATH RAILWAY. By the end of 1943, the 15,000 Australians imprisoned in Changi had left for slave labour on the Burma-Siam Railway. The first group, 'A' Force, consisting of some 3,000 men, boarded the Japanese hell-ships Tohohashi Maru and Celebes Maru. Packed like sardines they could neither stand nor lie. Soon most were suffering from diarrhea and the smell and conditions can only be imagined. The prisoners were unloaded at Margui and Tavoy in Burma. Ahead lay a 35 km walk to the base camp at Thanbyuzayat many prisoners dying on the way. Within weeks around 61,000 Allied prisoners, Dutch, British, Australian and Americans (700 from the USS Houston) were scattered in camps throughout Burma and Siam (Thailand) near the 265 mile long railway they were about to construct. It was completed in October, 1943, after 14 murderous months. For every mile of track, 393 men died. Also in the workforce were around 200,000 Asian labourers. Work on the railway took its toll, estimates putting the Asian death toll as high as 80,000. The Allied death toll was nearly 13,000. Today, three beautifully laid out cemeteries lie along the route of the railway line. At Kanchanaburi lie the remains of 6,982 POWs including 1,362 Australians. At Thanbyuzayat there are 3,771 graves and at Chungkai 1,329 graves. The names of those with no known grave are commemorated on memorials in Rangoon, Hong Kong and Singapore.

PUBLIC EXECUTION ( December 19, 1943). Three German Gestapo officers and a Russian accomplice, were hanged in the market square of KHARKOV in the USSR. Captain Wilhelm Langheld, Hans Ritz, Reinhardt Retelav and Mikhail Bulanov were found guilty of war crimes by a Russian Military Court. A crowd of around 40,000 watched as lorries on which they stood were driven away, leaving them hanging from the scaffold. The Nazis themselves often used this method for executions in the Soviet Union as in the case of Kieper and Kogan, two members of the Russian Regional Court who were hanged on August 17, 1941, at Zhitomir. Forced to watch the hangings, 400 Jews were rounded up in the city. After the executions, the Jews were taken outside the town and shot into a pit ten to fifteen metres wide and four metres deep.

THE LONDON CAGE. The name given to the headquarters of the War Crimes Investigation Unit and the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center located in a mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Scotland, all high ranking German prisoners were interrogated here after their capture.

GRATEFUL. After the Italian armistice on September 3, 1943, around 100,000 Italians volunteered to help the Allied cause. After a slow transition period, from being a defeated enemy to being a willing ally, some 150 Italians actually enlisted in the US Army landing force at Anzio as ammunition carriers and interpreters. On April 18, the Italian Liberation Corps was formed. Consisting of 25,000 men, the Corps occupied such important towns as Chieti, L'Aquila, Teramo and Ascoli Piceno . The eastern side of the Italian Peninsula, including cities such as Bologna and Venice , were freed by Italian troops under Allied command. About 600,000 disbanded Italian soldiers from the German occupied north of Italy were crammed into cattle cars and transported to Germany for forced slave labour. In 1944, the Italian Co-belligerant Air Force was formed and equipped with US and British built planes. Its primary function was to support the Italian troops fighting in Greece and Yugoslavia and to attack German ships sailing in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. By April, 1945, around one million Italian soldiers, sailors, airmen and partisans were taking a direct role in the Allied war effort. Around 480,000 Italians died from all causes during the war.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT. By the middle of 1943 approximately 90,000 British and Allied soldiers were incarcerated in POW camps throughout Italy. When the Allies invaded the south of Italy, members of the Italian underground took this opportunity to arrest the fascist dictator, Mussolini (whom Italy's King Victor Emmanuel had dismissed on July 25, 1943) whom they found living at the Hotel Albergo-Rifugio on the Gran Sasso mountain. A new government, headed by Marshall Badoglio was formed and immediately sued for peace with the Allies. In POW camps all over Italy cries of 'finito, finito, viva Badoglio' could be heard loud and clear. Prisoners now prepared to await their imminent release. On September 12, SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and his soldiers rescued Mussolini from his mountain retreat and by the end of the month had re-established his authority in Northern Italy. Allied authorities ordered all prisoners to 'stay put' for the time being. A few days later the POWs awoke to find German soldiers everywhere. Marched to various train stations they were soon on their way to Germany to undergo a further eighteen months, in some cases, under appalling conditions, in POW camps and in concentration camps in Germany and Poland. There can be few examples of utter disappointment on such a massive scale as that of the Allied POWs in Italy.

ITALIAN POWs. The Italian soldiers transported to Germany after the armistice, were treated abominably and had to survive on starvation rations. Hundreds died of hunger and overwork, tuberculosis and pneumonia. Their living quarters were primitive, 250 men in barracks designed for 100. Those still loyal to the Fascist government of Mussolini were treated far better in the camps. The worst cases of TB were sent back to Italy but when the Italian mothers saw their sons, living skeletons and dying, their hatred for the Germans knew no bounds. Back in the internment camps volunteers were asked for to form an SS Division and thousands volunteered encouraged by the promise of better food and clothing. When the Italian SS Division finished its training it was sent to Italy to try and stem the Allied advance. Once in Italy, the volunteer soldiers deserted in their thousands and joined the partisans.

THE JEWS OF ITALY. At 5.30 am on October 16, 1943, a forty-four man SS unit under the command of SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, rounded up 1,259 Jews in Rome. Many of these were baptized Christians and following a protest from Pope Pius X11 some 218 were released. The other 1,041 were put on a train to Auschwitz and at war's end only fifteen survived to return home to the Holy City. To protect other Jews from the same fate, the Vatican opened its doors and gave shelter to 477 men, women and children. Another 4,238 were sheltered in over 100 monasteries, convents and private homes in and around Rome. In the whole of Italy some 32,000 Italian Jews and about 12,500 foreign Jews lived in fear of their lives. Before the Italian surrender a total of 8,369 of these had been arrested and deported. Only 979 survived the death camps. The majority of Jews who survived in Italy were saved by the Italian people themselves who risked their own lives in helping them hide or flee across the border into Switzerland.

MUTINY AT SALERNO. On September 20, 1943, one of the saddest episodes in British military history took place: a mutiny by some 300 replacement troops from the 51st Highland Division and the 50th Northunbrian Division. These veterans of the North African campaign had been convalescing in a hospital in Tripoli while their parent Divisions were returned to the UK. Sent to Salerno as replacements they believed that their officers had broken a promise to them that they would be sent to Britain to rejoin their own regiments. Disembarking at Salerno they sat down on the beach and three times refused to report to their assigned units. The Corps Commander, General Richard McCreery, addressed the men and some agreed to join their assigned units but 192 men still persisted on disobeying. They were put under arrest and sent back to Constantine where they were court martialled. The three leaders of the mutiny, all sergeants, were sentenced to death, the others to jail sentences ranging from 7 to 10 years. In the Official British History of 1943, the Salerno Mutiny is not even mentioned but is reported in Hugh Bonds' book 'Salerno' published in 1961.

THE BARI DISASTER. The port of Bari, on Italy's east coast, suffered the most devastating air raid of the war since Pearl Harbor. On December 2nd, 1943, scores of German JU-88s blasted the harbour to smithereens and in the process sank seventeen ships and damaged six others. About thirty ships were in the harbour waiting to unload war supplies. One American ship, the USS John Harvey, whose cargo included 2,000 M47-A1 mustard gas bombs (intended for retaliatory use in case the enemy started using it) exploded, killing all 74 persons on board. A total of 628 military p

Appreciate all this stuff man i will read it when i have time , but alittle easy on the new threads dude....

Sigh... There's just no pleasing everyone.

Another little known thing, there was a massacre in Lviv or L'viv, Ukraine by the Russian NKVD, the same force responsible for the massacre at Katyn (which is another little known thing over here at least) there is not a lot of mention of either in a lot of history books, or just about any other atrocities of Poles or Ukrainians. This I don't really get, I know some of these were not disclosed intil recent years, but some were known for several decades now. I wonder why it is this way, it seems as if the Communist way is leading our perception!

There was a special about that on the Canadian version of the History Channel a few years ago.

They were doing forensic archeology on the mass graves. If I remember right, it was part of Stalin's Purges early in the first half of the war on the Eastern Front.

I've got some Ukrainian in my background, so things like that catch my interest when I hear about them.

Thanks for posting that CW !

" AMERICAN SERVICEMEN IN BRITAIN. In Britain, the Yanks were said to be "overpaid, oversexed, overfed and over here". The Americans countered this by saying the Brits were "underpaid, undersexed, underfed and under Eisenhower". "

lol

No problem DarkAutumn, I looked into it but I couldn't find any really good links on the subject since it is generally unknown, I did find one though, but it is pretty much factoids.
http://www.ukar.org/magocs02.html

It is a shame that it is not more known than it is, to me atleast. I think both Poland and the Ukraine got the s**t end of two powers fighting with each other, the Russians and the Germans both killed them in mass executions, plus the Germans thought of them as "sub-humans" because of their slavic background.

About what you wrote, are you refering to the Katyn massacre that you saw on the History Channel, because if so I think I saw it also, about how the Russians said is was the Germans, the Germans said it was the Russians and so on, and how the Russians didn't even tell anyone until in recent years? Anyways I found a link on it that isn't that bad.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/contacts.html
Enjoy.

Hey CW - Yes, I think we're talking about the same History Channel show.
And thanks for those links. Looks like I've got me some reading to do!

Do you get History International, or the normal History Channel? About those links, I did not even come close to reading all of the Katyn one BTW.

Hmm. Good question, CW.
I don't know what you'd call it.

It's just called'the History Channel' and there's a wad of Canadian content (History of War Thursdays, hosted by a former Canadian tv news anchorman).

As for the link you posted to about a bazillion other links, I've been working my way through them trying to back-check, cross-reference, and otherwise verify and confirm various accounts rather than take them at face value.
And that's not an easy task to say the least...

I would say you get the regular channel then, one thing I have to say is that it is a very good channel there are times when I simply cannot stop watching it because the programs are so d*mn interesting, they tell the stories from different view points in different programs. Do you get these programs, Mail Call, Heavy Metal, Tales of the Gun? Because they are amoung my favorites.

And those links, good luck and I think it is a good thing you don't take them at face value and actually question them.

I wish I had history international, I only get the regular history channel

cw, I know you weren't talking to me but those are my favorite shows too

Thanks Used, yea international would be a good channel to have(I don't have it either) though I am not sure what they have on it. Those shows teach you a lot sometimes and I forgot to mention battlefield dectetives which is another show that I enjoy.

PS your picture doesn't show up on my comp.