WWII

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:54 pm

Quite possibly the deadliest day of the entire war for any nation and it is largely forgotten.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Wed Mar 09, 2016 2:20 pm

Wasn't that the fire bombing of Tokyo? Incendiary bombs dropped to burn the city down?

Like noted, that damage was worse that the nuclear bombs.

Not going to get into post-war judgements, but will say it's too bad for all involved that Germany and Japan didn't surrender when both of them had no chance of winning.

Been reading a bit about the Battle of Berlin. Seriously Hitler, took you that long?

All those poor teen Hitler Youths left to defend the city, and 100,000 women raped by Russians just in Berlin alone.

ghostwhitehorse · Post by **ghostwhitehorse** » Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:42 pm

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Tue May 10, 2016 7:58 am

Click on the WWII pic and it morphs into what it looks like today.

http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/201 ... l?ww2-dday" target="_blank

Daryl Zero · Post by **Daryl Zero** » Tue May 10, 2016 8:53 am

azgreg wrote:Click on the WWII pic and it morphs into what it looks like today.

http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/201 ... l?ww2-dday" target="_blank

That's a really great find.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Tue May 10, 2016 9:18 am

That is cool. Love how they restored the old buildings instead of tearing them down.

Favorite pic is the paratroopers waiting for the French locals to get their water before they do. Don't think the Germans or Russians would do that.

Imagine those German POWs are quite relieved the war is over for them being alive and not captured by the Russians.

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Tue May 10, 2016 10:23 am

I love that that church was restored. I'm not religious, but I love the architecture.

Frybry02 · Post by **Frybry02** » Tue May 10, 2016 6:25 pm

Just finished watching The Last Heroes documentary on Netflix. I like it. I enjoy most WWII documentaries.

Puerco · Post by **Puerco** » Wed May 11, 2016 7:58 am

I'm amazed by how little European villages change over the decades.

Frybry02 · Post by **Frybry02** » Mon May 16, 2016 7:36 pm

Finishing up re-watching Band of Brothers. So good.

rgdeuce · Post by **rgdeuce** » Tue May 17, 2016 7:58 am

scumdevils86 wrote:I found some info that I pm'd about a mission on June 25, 1943 with the 379th Bomb Group.

My aunt moved from Sierra Vista to the midwest, so she passed on the last box of my grandfather's and grandmother's stuff to me because she is not going to have a stable place to live for a while. A TON of my grandfather's military and WWII stuff in there. I scanned through it rather quickly a month ago due to time constraints, but there is paperwork from what appears to be physical screenings, military IDs, some card that looks like it was an official POW documentation card. There's plenty more that I am forgetting. There is also a spiral bound book that contains (as I recall) all of the American POWs from Stalag Luft that the author found in his research, and has a bunch of their details. My aunt said the author was a member of a military message board and was selling them. Also a bunch of her research and requests for medals. According to my aunt, there are two medals she believes he is entitled to, but there was a fire that destroyed a ton of records, including his, so they were unable to find official documentation. She was in the process of trying to obtain the needed proof but began going through her divorce and never picked things back up. One of them is a purple heart. That book indicates he was shot down and took shrapnel to his knee and had some other injury. If I recall, that was the only documentation of that in the box, but that guy got that info from somewhere and everything else was spot on from what I could tell. Hopefully things will slow down in the upcoming weeks so I can go through things in more detail and share.

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Tue May 17, 2016 9:38 am

rgdeuce wrote:
scumdevils86 wrote:I found some info that I pm'd about a mission on June 25, 1943 with the 379th Bomb Group.
My aunt moved from Sierra Vista to the midwest, so she passed on the last box of my grandfather's and grandmother's stuff to me because she is not going to have a stable place to live for a while. A TON of my grandfather's military and WWII stuff in there. I scanned through it rather quickly a month ago due to time constraints, but there is paperwork from what appears to be physical screenings, military IDs, some card that looks like it was an official POW documentation card. There's plenty more that I am forgetting. There is also a spiral bound book that contains (as I recall) all of the American POWs from Stalag Luft that the author found in his research, and has a bunch of their details. My aunt said the author was a member of a military message board and was selling them. Also a bunch of her research and requests for medals. According to my aunt, there are two medals she believes he is entitled to, but there was a fire that destroyed a ton of records, including his, so they were unable to find official documentation. She was in the process of trying to obtain the needed proof but began going through her divorce and never picked things back up. One of them is a purple heart. That book indicates he was shot down and took shrapnel to his knee and had some other injury. If I recall, that was the only documentation of that in the box, but that guy got that info from somewhere and everything else was spot on from what I could tell. Hopefully things will slow down in the upcoming weeks so I can go through things in more detail and share.

That would be awesome! And yeah you're right about the fire, really has hindered a lot of research for people. In 1973 there was a fire at the military personnel records center in St. Louis that destroyed over 16 million files. Over 80% of Army personnel records for those discharged between 1912 and 1960 were destroyed. Over 75% of records of Air Force personnel that were discharged from 1947 to 1964 were destroyed.

No duplicate copies of these records were ever maintained, nor were microfilm copies produced. Neither were any indexes created prior to the fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Department of Veterans Affairs before the fire occurred. Therefore, a complete listing of the records that were lost is not available. However, in the years following the fire, the NPRC collected numerous series of records (referred to as Auxiliary Records) that are used to reconstruct basic service information.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Tue May 17, 2016 9:59 am

I was doing some genealogy research on my ancestor who served with the Prussian army in the 1866 war v. Austria for the domination of the German speaking states.

Ran into a dead end, as those records were destroyed in WW2 when then the Allies bombed Potsdam and completely destroyed all those records.

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Tue May 31, 2016 9:49 am

Watched The World Wars on the History Channel yesterday. Good stuff. Very well done.

http://www.history.com/shows/the-world-wars" target="_blank

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Fri Jun 17, 2016 10:43 am

This is just really sad, although I imagine many of the SS guards ended up dead on the Eastern front. Russians didn't care for the SS, along with many regular German soldiers in the Wehrmacht who felt the SS gave them a bad name.

Of approximately 6,500 SS guards who had worked at Auschwitz, only 29 people were tried in West Germany. (Twenty more were tried in the Communist East.)

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Sun Jul 03, 2016 11:39 am

The Green-Eyed Secret Agent Who Seduced the French to Steal Nazi Codes

Time and again, Betty Pack used the bedroom to get secrets out of Axis officials. To steal codes from the Vichy, an expert in seduction would be the Allies’ greatest weapon.

Going to read this in on my commute Tuesday

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ntent=link" target="_blank

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Sun Sep 11, 2016 9:37 am

Greta Zimmer Friedman, nurse in iconic Times Square sailor-kiss photo, dead at 92

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... D=ref_fark" target="_blank

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Mon Nov 28, 2016 9:46 am

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 9:11 am

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pearl-harbo ... 1481106611" target="_blank

1 hour and 45 minutes until exactly 75 years have past since the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Fewer than 1 million American WWII veterans are still alive today that were alive on this date in 1941.

wyo-cat · Post by **wyo-cat** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 9:36 am

There's some roses that have been placed on the new memorial south of the union.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 11:17 am

My daughter worked at Pearl Harbor until recently and became friends with this survivor: http://www.aprilmwilliams.com/pearl-har ... eatherwax/" target="_blank

Here he is singing to her.

https://www.facebook.com/katieefosho/vi ... 873132788/" target="_blank

Here is the location of the planned USS Arizona memorial at the University of Arizona.

ASUHATER! · Post by **ASUHATER!** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 11:20 am

first wave was attacking as i type this 75 years ago.

Daryl Zero · Post by **Daryl Zero** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 12:00 pm

ASUHATER! wrote:first wave was attacking as i type this 75 years ago.

. . . a day which will live in infamy . . .

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:20 pm

Longhorned · Post by **Longhorned** » Fri Dec 09, 2016 11:04 pm

Turns out Hitler was high on opiates, coke, and meth. The Nazi soldiers were fueled by meth until they eventually crashed. Nazi officials were inspired by Hitler's drugged out delusions. And Hitler's tremors and demise coincided with the Allied bombing of his drug factories.

UAEebs86 · Post by **UAEebs86** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 8:20 pm

George HW Bush narrowly escaped comrades' fate of being killed and eaten by Japanese captors

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02 ... D=ref_fark

The former President George HW Bush narrowly escaped being beheaded and eaten by Japanese soldiers when he was shot down over the Pacific in the Second World War, a shocking new history published in America has revealed.

The book, Flyboys, is the result of historical detective work by James Bradley, whose father was among the marines later photographed raising the flag over the island of Iwo Jima.

Lt George Bush, then a 20-year-old pilot, was among nine airmen who escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on Chichi Jima, a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo, in September 1944 - and was the only one to evade capture by the Japanese.

The horrific fate of the other eight "flyboys" was established in subsequent war crimes trials on the island of Guam, but details were sealed in top secret files in Washington to spare their families distress.

Mr Bradley has established that they were tortured, beaten and then executed, either by beheading with swords or by multiple stab-wounds from bayonets and sharpened bamboo stakes. Four were then butchered by the island garrison's surgeons and their livers and meat from their thighs eaten by senior Japanese officers.

The future president escaped a similar fate because he ditched his plane further from the island than the other crews, and managed to scramble on to a liferaft. American planes launched a hail of fire at Japanese boats which set out to capture him, driving them back, and he was eventually rescued by a US submarine.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:59 am

Amazing his son turned into a chicken hawk coward

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 10:20 am

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/08/europe/de ... index.html" target="_blank

(CNN)A 14-year-old Danish boy doing research for a history class found the wreckage of a German World War II plane with the remains of the pilot in the cockpit.

Daniel Kristiansen and his father, Klaus, discovered what's believed to be a Messerschmitt fighter plane buried in a field on their farm near Birkelse in northern Denmark.

"We went out to the field with a metal detector," Klaus Kristiansen told CNN. "I hoped we might find some old plates or something for Daniel to show in school."

Instead, they found bits of plane debris. So they borrowed an excavator from a neighbor and dug down seven or eight meters.

"At first we were digging up a lot of dirt with metal fragments in it. Then we suddenly came across bones and pieces of clothes," Kristiansen said. "It was like opening a book from yesterday."

Kristiansen remembered being told by his grandfather, who lived on the farm during World War II, that a German plane had crashed there.

"We think it was around November or December 1944," Kristiansen said. He recalled his grandfather once telling him that when the plane crashed, he was making Christmas cookies with Kristiansen's grandmother and his uncle, who was a young boy at the time.

Chicat · Post by **Chicat** » Sun Mar 12, 2017 11:41 am

wyo-cat · Post by **wyo-cat** » Sun Mar 12, 2017 12:30 pm

The author of Blitzed was on NPR last week. They were giving meth to the troops as they were heading west and getting places before the allies could react. No Sleep Til Paris.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Sun Mar 12, 2017 12:53 pm

In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors,

Never heard them call the "Ardennes mountains" ever, just the Ardennes forest.

Definitely more hills than mountains. Author no doubt an expert on stimulants, but not on WW2.

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:09 pm

zonagrad · Post by **zonagrad** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:04 pm

Dunkirk looks like a great movie this summer.

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:00 am

75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid today

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:12 am

scumdevils86 wrote:75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid today

I read 30 Seconds Over Tokyo about 45 years ago and it still has made a lasting impression on me, the courage those airmen had.

Need to see if I can find that old movie too.

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:19 am

Merkin wrote:
scumdevils86 wrote:75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid today

I read 30 Seconds Over Tokyo about 45 years ago and it still has made a lasting impression on me, the courage those airmen had.

Need to see if I can find that old movie too.

One of the first WW2 memoirs/autobiography type stories that I ever read. I was probably 9 years old at the time when I read it. I've read several hundred since.

scumdevils86 · Post by **scumdevils86** » Fri Jul 07, 2017 5:07 pm

Just had the chance to briefly speak with a 92 year old gentleman who served in the 32nd Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in WW2. He was a Browning Automatic Rifleman in a line infantry company in the battle of Okinawa. All that is saying this man saw some deep shit. Unfortunately for me the meeting was in a quick professional capacity so I didn't want to pry too deep into his mind but I always regret when I don't. It isn't too often that you run into a totally lucid, ambulatory, happy-go-lucky 90+ year old WW2 combat vet these days.

He was also a total pro at using his iPhone and computer. More than almost any other elderly person I have met in my life.

RichardCranium · Post by **RichardCranium** » Fri Jul 07, 2017 5:42 pm

I had the priviledge to know an Australian radioman that drew straws to see who would stay behind on some island or other to report on the Japenese advance. He drew a three, and turned to pack up for the jungle when his best mate called out he had a two. Vin got the last seat on the last plane. Later they heard that the entire village was wiped out for hiding the Aussie within 30 minutes of that plane taking off.

RIP Vin.

UAEebs86 · Post by **UAEebs86** » Fri Jul 14, 2017 6:54 pm

ASUHATER! · Post by **ASUHATER!** » Fri Jul 14, 2017 6:57 pm

Whoever knew there was even that many. Those guys have to all be at least 95-100

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:29 am

Carcassdragger · Post by **Carcassdragger** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:58 am

If you want to read an absolutely superb account of the soldier's experiences in Europe during WW II, read "Citizen Soldiers" by Stephen Ambrose. Super good read.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Fri Aug 11, 2017 11:03 am

carcassdragger wrote:If you want to read an absolutely superb account of the soldier's experiences in Europe during WW II, read "Citizen Soldiers" by Stephen Ambrose. Super good read.

$13.99 on Kindle. Yikes! Think I will just get the paperback.

Just finishing up Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account on Kindle.

Jewish doctor who was such a great pathologist Mengele kept him around and alive to perform autopsies on Mengele's victims, such as twins. Usually those helping in the crematoriums were disposed of every 120 days to kill all the witnesses, but he was too important to Mengele. No shortage of volunteers since they received much better food and living conditions, until your 120 days was up.

Just awful the things he witnessed. 20,000 Jews destroyed in 2 days near the end of the war when all the Germans wanted was annihilation of the Jews, no more left/right for slave laborers.

Speaking of which.

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Fri Aug 11, 2017 6:13 pm

I can't believe it took imgur for me to her about this story.

Spaceman Spiff · Post by **Spaceman Spiff** » Tue Aug 15, 2017 6:41 pm

carcassdragger wrote:If you want to read an absolutely superb account of the soldier's experiences in Europe during WW II, read "Citizen Soldiers" by Stephen Ambrose. Super good read.

I'm reading Ambrose's "The Victors" right now. Ambrose is great for readability without sacrificing accuracy.

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Sat Aug 19, 2017 3:39 pm

Chicat · Post by **Chicat** » Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:03 pm

The twitter account @realtimeWWII is "live tweeting" the war from beginning to end. Second time around doing this as if it's in real time. Just started the other day. It starts here:

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:39 pm

That's pretty cool.

azgreg · Post by **azgreg** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:08 pm

Merkin · Post by **Merkin** » Wed Sep 20, 2017 9:54 am

^Bader was a bad ass. I remember reading his biography 40 years ago or so. Lost both his lower legs in plane crash, was medically discharged, then when WW2 started came back and was certified to fly with prosthetics.

Don't know if that story is true or not though since Fokkers are primarily WW1 aircraft and weren't even in Germany during WW2. They had moved to the Netherlands after WW1.

This is a fascinating twitter account, thanks Chi for finding and sharing it.

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