Prior to the US entry into World War II, nearly 9,000 enthusiastic Americans joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.     Nearly 2000 of the 9000 hailed from Texas.

They came for many reasons.   Some because they wanted to join the fight against the Nazis.  Some because the long economic depression of the 1930’s left many poor and unemployed and looking for some excitement.   Some because they were on the run from the law.  All who came found that the easiest and fastest way to enlist was to walk across the long unprotected US/Canadian border and enter one of the many recruiting centers that the RCAF had conveniently located near the border crossings.

These airmen, trained in Canada, joined what was to become the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan which was responsible for training more than 170,000 airmen across Canada at more than 100 locations.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, about 3000 of the 9000 Americans returned to the US and joined the United States Air Force.   The training and experience they received was critical to the fast cycling from peace to war of the US effort to train airmen in America.

5000 of the 9000 Americans who joined the RCAF stayed in the RCAF throughout the war.   Some 800  died while fighting the Nazis.  379 have their names inscribed on Canada’s Bomber Command Memorial Wall which is located on the front lawn of the Bomber Command Museum of Canada, located south of Calgary, Alberta.

When Canada declared war on Nazi Germany on September 10, 1939, the Canadian Air Force was in dire need of pilots.   The Canadian government immediately sought out the help of Canada’s most famous World War I air ace, Billy Bishop.   Bishop was credited with more 72 air victories in WW1, and on several occasions had dueled in the air with the famous German Ace, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.   Bishop shot down 12 German planes in one day over Vimy Ridge during the heat of that battle.   And he ended the war having been awarded the Victoria Cross and more than 10 additional medals for valor under fire.   Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he lived to tell the tale.

Thus when the Government of Canada needed someone to help build up the RCAF, Bishop was the natural “man for the job”.   It was Bishop who came up with the idea of setting up and promoting the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.   Where better to train pilots than over broad flat lands where you could see forever and not run into enemy planes trying to shoot down inexperienced pilots.   The huge expanses of Canada were a natural location for this.   Bishop also knew that Americans who were already pilots or wanted to be pilots would quickly hear about the giant effort underway just on the other side of the border and be attracted to the fight out of a sense of adventure.

Bishop called upon a along time American friend of his named Clayton Knight.   Knight had flown with the British during WW1 and had become a very popular aviation artist after the war.  Bishop knew that he had lots of contacts amongst the pilot community in the US.   Knight agreed to help and formed an organization called the Clayton Knight Committee whose function was to help US recruits travel to Canada and join the RCAF.   There was just had one small problem.   This was a total and obvious violation of the US Neutrality Act and was completely illegal.

Undeterred, the Clayton Knight Committee opened more than 20 offices all around the US including one in the Waldorf Astoria in New York.  They were not able to advertise because they knew it was a violation of US law so instead, they used word-of-mouth and sent letters to flying schools all over the country.   Eventually the US Government got angry over this and in November of 1940, the US State Department released a letter to the media stating that the Canadian Government was directly violating US law by spending Canadian Government money to lure Americans to Canada to serve it the RCAF in violation of the US Neutrality Act.

The Canadian Government had to immediately apologize but Bishop had a new idea.   He ingeniously and quickly set up something called the “Dominion Aeronautical Association” in between the Clayton Knight Committee and the RCAF.    Suddenly the offers for flight school were coming not from the RCAF but from the DAA.   When the new recruits from America arrived at the DAA offices in Canada, they were magically informed that the DAA had no open positions but “please go to the RCAF recruiting offices as I believe they have positions available.  And oh…   By the way, their offices are right next door”.

The situation improved when the Lend-Lease program came into effect in the spring of 1941.  After this, the US government treated the enlistment of Americans in the RCAF as part of the aid program and even exempted the recruits from the US military draft that was just being implemented.

One of the most famous Americans in the RCAF was Joe McCarthy from Long Island who played a leading role in the highly successful and well known “Dambusters Raid” in 1943 when the 617 Squadron of the RAF, using special barrel shaped bouncing bombs, destroyed the Mohn and Edersee Dams causing significant flooding and damage to German factories in the Ruhr Valley.

Another well known American in the RCAF was John Magee who wrote the very famous poem about aviation called “High Flight’.   Some will remember that Ronald Reagan quoted from this poem, using the first and last lines when he spoke immediately after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Magee did not survive the war.

High Flight

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

One of the Texans who served in the RCAF was Bill Ash from Dallas and a University of Texas graduate.   In 1942 while engaged in a large RAF attack over France, Ash was shot down.   He evaded capture for some time in France but eventually was rounded up by the Gestapo who threatened to shoot him as a spy as he had changed out of his uniform and into civilian clothes.   Luckily for Ash, the Luftwaffe found out that the Gestapo was holding an RCAF pilot.  They demanded that Ash be turned over to the Luftwaffe who sent him into Stalag Luft III in Sagan in Lower Silesia.   They would come to regret this as Ash became deeply involved in planning prisoner escapes and Stalag Luft III was the POW camp where the inmates successfully tunneled out of the camp in what became known as “The Great Escape”.   Although Ash was not one of the 77 who made it out of the tunnel that night,  he went on to attempt numerous escapes.   He escaped from various POW camps more than 12 times by going over the wire with ladders, under the wire through tunnels and sometimes through the wire with wire cutters.  His exploits are memorialized in a book that he wrote called “Under the Wire”.

There are few recorded histories of these Americans who fought for Canada.  On this Remembrance Day, (Veteran’s Day in the US), we remember.

 

 

 

On November 3, 1944, the Imperial Japanese Air Force launched an attack against North America that they hoped would help them win the war.

This was not an attack using aircraft carriers or even airplanes.   It was not launched from submarines off the coast.   Instead, from bases north of Tokyo, the Japanese launched more than 9000 hydrogen filled balloons, each carrying a 15 kg anti-personnel fragmentation bomb, two incendiary bombs, and a detonator designed to blow up the hydrogen that remained in the balloons upon landing..

It was an ingenious and fiendish idea from a country that was clearly running short of ingenious and fiendish ideas.     To pull it off, they took advantage of their knowledge of the presence of the jet stream.   Its odd to think about it now, but knowledge about the jet stream was incredibly limited prior to WW2.   The Japanese had learned of these high speed winds that exist mostly above 25,000 ft. from experiments in the 1920’s where they launched balloons from a site near Mt. Fuji.  They learned  that the winds exist in bands that are as much as 200 km wide and 5 km in height.    And the learned that they could launch a balloon into the jet stream from Japan and follow it all the way to North America.

No one in America paid much attention to what the Japanese were learning about the jet stream and it wasn’t until there were hundreds of Allied planes flying around at high altitudes during WW2 that knowledge about the jet stream became more common place.   Pilots began to notice that at certain high altitudes, they were able to achieve far greater ground speeds when flying from west to east compared to when flying from east to west.

In the fall of 1944, the Imperial Japanese Air Force decided to take advantage of these winds to see if they could deliver bombs to North America using high altitude balloons.     On November 3, 1944 they began to launch more than 9000 of these balloons hoping that they would drift over the large forests of Western Canada and the Western US.   As they reached their destination the idea was that the explosives on the balloons would fire and hopefully ignite massive forest fires.   They hoped that the fires would be so big that large numbers of soldiers would have to be drafted into the fight to extinguish the flames and that this would reduce the number of soldiers available to fight in the Pacific against Japan.

They built the balloons from a cloth-like paper called Mulberry Paper and filled them with hydrogen gas.   The balloons were about 33 ft. in diameter and could lift 1000 lbs.    To control the altitude of the balloons they were designed with an altimeter that would open a valve to release some hydrogen if the balloon rose above 38,000 ft.   If the balloons began to drop below 30,000 ft., the altimeter would release ballast bags filled with sand.   Each balloon had around 36 sand-filled ballast bags that were hung from an aluminum wheel that was suspended below the balloon.  The bags were dropped in pairs, from opposite sides  of the wheel, to keep the weight below the balloon centered so that the balloon would not be lopsided.

The idea was that the ballast bags and the hydrogen would be either released or dropped while the balloon floated to North America.   They hoped that the winds would carry the balloons over the huge forests in the western parts of the continent and then descend to the ground.    Hanging some 10 meters beneath each balloon was a fuse which ignited when it came into contact with something; in this case, hopefully the ground.   The fuse would light and as the balloon made the last few feet of its descent, the fragmentation device, the incendiary devices, and the remaining hydrogen would explode and cause a massive forest fire.

It took a few days for the balloons to transit the Pacific Ocean and on November 5, they began arriving in North America.    Of the 9000 balloons that were launched, there were confirmed sightings of about 300 of them.    Balloons were spotted in Canada, as far east as Farmington, Michigan, just 10 miles from Detroit, and as far south as Neuvo Laredo in Mexico.   Many of them functioned as designed and exploded, causing several fires.  But the Japanese did not create the firestorm they had hoped for.   The media was not allowed to mention a single word about the balloons as the government did not want to encourage the Japanese to send more.   Furthermore, they did not want to alarm the general public so as to avoid any panic among the civilians who were suddenly being targeted directly from far off Japan.

The worst incident occurred in Oregon several months later in March of 1945.  A women leading a church group on a fishing trip that included a number of kids came across one of the balloons hanging intact in a tree.   Having no idea what it was, they pulled it down and were dragging it back to their camp when the fragmentation device exploded, killing the woman and five kids.   After this incident, the Government allowed the media to warn the public to stay away from these balloons if they ever came across them.

But this is not quite the end of the story.    Several balloons were found with ballast bags of sand still attached and the US Army set about trying to figure out their origin.   As they examined the sand in the ballast bags under a microscope, it became more and more evident that the sand was quite unique.   Geologists were called in to try to ascertain the exact origin of the sand.  They found that the sand in the bags contained over 100 species of tiny fossils which indicated that the sand had come from a beach.  They found no coral in the mix and they found small fragments of mollusks as well as microscopic skeletons of organisms that feed on the ocean bottom, called “forams”.   Armed with this information, the geologists began to scour university libraries up and down the west coast of the US looking for any papers published in Japan on the geologic makeup of various Japanese beaches.    Much to their surprise, they found a pre-war Japanese geological survey that described in great detail the beaches north of Tokyo on the eastern shore of the island of Honshu.    The Japanese survey was so detailed that the geologists were able to narrow down the source of the sand as coming from the beaches around Sendai, about 350 km north of Tokyo.

Once this was done, the Air Force sent a number of reconnaissance flights over Sendai looking for a facility that might be used for the production of hydrogen.   Sure enough….  They found it.    In April of 1945, once identified, the Air Force sent a large number of bombers to Sendai to ensure that the no more balloon bombs would ever be sent to North America.

Robert Oppenheimer, physics professor from the University of California, Berkley is widely recognized as the “father of the atomic bomb”.

Interviewed after the war and asked about his thoughts upon seeing the results of the first atom bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer would remark that his first thought was of Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, The destroyer of worlds”.

You can see a portion of the interview here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26YLehuMydo

What is clear from watching the interview is that Oppenheimer was deeply troubled by the invention of the atomic bomb.   Dozens of books have been written about how many of the Manhattan Project scientists came to regret their efforts to deliver a working device.  But all of them were petrified at the idea that the Nazis would beat them to it.   This is what motivated them to work day and night to deliver a working device to the US Army.

Had history unfolded in a different way, it could very well have been someone in Germany being interviewed after the war and not Oppenheimer.   Imagine for a moment a recording of a speech by Goebbels with him screaming (for he always seems to be screaming) about Hitler’s use of the bomb on New York City or Chicago or both.   Its not so farfetched.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s most of the experimental physics that led to the theory of how to build a bomb was happening in Germany.  Furthermore, most of the key physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who would build the bomb in the 1940’s were living in Europe, many working in Germany at the Keiser Wilhelm Institute or at various universities around Germany including the Institute of Technology, Humboldt University and the Berlin Academy of Sciences..

It was only due to the increasing anti-Semitism of the Nazi government that forced many key scientists to flee Germany for America.  These scientists were either Jewish themselves or were married to Jewish women.   Either way, the Nazi Nuremberg Laws implemented as the Nazis came to power in 1933,  forced all of them out of their positions at universities in Germany.

Which reminds me of a good joke. …  Why are there so many famous Jewish violinists and not so many famous Jewish pianists?

Have you considered how hard it is to flee while carrying a baby grand piano?

Among the first to leave was Einstein who left Germany almost coincident with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.    But many, many others were to follow.   None more important than the four Hungarians below:

Leo Szilard: Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction and patented the idea in 1933 with Enrico Fermi (keep reading).  He had been in London listening to a speech by Ernest Rutherford where Rutherford had rejected the feasibility of using atomic energy for anything useful.   In reaction to Rutherford, Szilard had an epiphany which eventually led to his and Fermi’s selection of Uranium as the element most capable of sustaining a chain reaction.

No one scientist is more responsible for the American bomb than Szilard.   He was so worried about a Nazi bomb that he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, warning Roosevelt of the danger of a Nazi bomb and encouraging the Allied effort to create a bomb before the Nazi’s got one.   Szilard contacted Albert Einstein and convinced him to sign the letter as he knew that Einstein’s name carrier much more weight than his own.

Szilard would join Enrico Fermi in Chicago where they built the first atomic reactor or “pile” as they called it, “safely” tucked beneath the bleachers at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.

Eugene Wigner:  Wigner was the actual physicist who introduced Szilard to Einstein.   The story goes that even after immigrating to the US, he refused to have his fingerprints taken for fear that the Nazis might beat the Allies to a bomb, win the war, and then track him down and kill him.     Wigner’s job on the Manhattan Project was to design and run the nuclear reactors that would convert uranium to weapons grade plutonium.   These reactors were built at Hanford in Washington State along the Columbia River.   The plutonium from Hanford was used in the devices at the Trinity Site as well as for the “Fat Man” bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki.

Edward Teller:  Teller joined the Manhattan Project to assist in the design of the bomb.   But Teller was a proponent of a nuclear fusion bomb (instead of fission) which today is known as the more powerful  hydrogen bomb.   During the war, Oppenheimer wanted to shelve all work on the H-Bomb in favor of getting a fision bomb working.  But Teller kept pushing for it and became furious with the other Manhattan Project scientists when they would not support him.  He was passed over for a promotion to become the director of the theoretical division (Oppenheimer picked Hans Bethe instead) at which point Teller became totally uncooperative.  He refused to work on the calculations for the implosion mechanism for the plutonium fission bomb.   He eventually went on to co-found the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories where he would design the worlds first Hydrogen bomb.

John von Neumann: von Neumann was one of the world’s finest mathematicians.  His contribution to the Manhattan Project was that he had become the leading expert on the mathematics of shaped charges.   His idea was that the power of the atomic explosion would be greatly enhanced through the design of a “explosive lens” that focused the force of the shaped charge to compress the nuclear material with extraordinary force to create the nuclear explosion.  This design was critical for the plutonium devices at Trinity and the “Fat Man” bomb at Nagasaki.   And the plutonium bombs became even more important when production of enriched uranium (keep reading) was delayed and it became obvious that there would only be enough for one device (used at Hiroshima “Little Boy”.

This shaped charge idea explains why “Fat Man” was big and round and looked a bit like a soccer ball.   The inner par was a lump of plutonium.   When the plates on the outside of the ball exploded, they acted to compress of lump of plutonium at such a high speed and at such a high force that a nuclear chain reaction was initiated and fission occurred.

von Neumann’s calculations also showed that the bomb would be far more devastating if it were to explode above the ground rather than upon impact.   This led to the need for an altitude trigger, since all bombs to this point just had a detonator that fired when it impacted with the ground.

In addition to the Hungarians, a large number of other physicists from other European countries joined the ranks of the Manhattan Project after losing their positions due to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws prohibiting Jews from positions at German universities.

These included:

Enrico Fermi:  Fermi led the team that designed the reactor that they called Chicago Pile-1 which first went critical on December 2, 1942.  This was the first demonstration of a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.   He was involved at both Hanford where uranium was being trans mutated into plutonium.  A slug of U-238 was bombarded with neutrons to form U-239 which has a short half-life and decays quickly to plutonium-239.    The plutonium-239 was then separated from the slug of uranium and was then ready for use in a bomb.   The design of the reactor was such that fresh slugs of U-238 would enter one side of the reactor while an enriched P-239 slug would come out the other side.   Thus the reactor never had to be shut down as it continuously created P-239 enriched slugs.

Fermi also was involved at Oak Ridge Tennessee where bomb grade U-235 was separated out from the naturally occurring U-238.  The problem is that the fissile U-235 represents only .72% of natural uranium and the weight difference between the 2 is only 1.6%.   So its complicated to separate the 2 materials.  Oak Ridge used a gaseous diffusion process that yielded only small amounts of enriched U-235.   The shortage was so severe that the plutonium from Hanford became the material of choice.

However the design for an exploding device made from U-235 was much more simple than one made from plutonium-239.     In the case of U-235, you just needed the barrel of a cannon and 2 masses of U-235 at either end.  Each mass was smaller than the mass needed to sustain a nuclear reaction.   To explode the device, you simply needed to fire the cannon sending one mass of U-235 slamming into the other mass.   This design was used for the device that exploded over Hiroshima (“Little Boy”).   It was long and skinny.    Inside was an actual gun barrel.

Stanislaw Ulam:  Ulam was a Polish born mathematician recruited into the Manhattan Project to work with Hans Bethe in the Theoretical Division.   His job was to help design the shaped charges that would become part of the device known as “Fat Man”.   But when Ulam arrived at Los Alamos in February 1944, the Manhattan Project was deep trouble.   Emilio Segre (keep reading) figured out that the plutonium made in the Hanford reactors would not work in a gun-type plutonium device which was the design of choice up to that time.    This device was called “Thin Man” and it was being developed in parallel with “Little Boy”, the U-235 version of the same thing.  But Segre figured out that the plutonium version would not work.   The crisis now created was to either stop all work at Hanford and redesign the reactors so that the output would be more U-235 which meant duplicating the cost and time associated with building another site like Oak Ridge, Tennessee but in Washington State.

Or, alternatively, the second option was to abandon the “Thin Man” design and go with the “Fat Man” design.  Oppenheimer rolled the dice and focused all development on the shaped charge focused implosion idea (the big round soccer ball).

Ulam and von Neumann worked out the math to make the focused implosion idea work.

Hans Bethe:   Bethe successfully ran the largest department at Los Alamos, the Theoretical Division which oversaw the development of the design concepts for Fat Man and Little Boy.   Bethe famously spoke out at a critical moment when the Los Alamos scientists began to have second thoughts about dropping the bomb on a populated city.   Bethe pointed out that that his only wish was that they had delivered the bomb a year earlier so that it could have been used on Nazi Germany.

Emilio Segre:  Segre joined the Manhattan Project in late 1942 at Los Alamos.   His job was to precisely measure the radioactivity of various fissile materials.  When the group received the first small quantities of plutonium from Hanford, he realized that the radiation levels of the sample was 5X what it should be.   This meant that the “Thin Man” (gun barrel concept)  design would not work because the material was throwing off so many neutrons that pushing together 2 sub-critical masses would only result in a small reaction as the bomb blew itself up “too quickly” before it could create the sustained nuclear reaction that they wanted.

Instead they would have to abandon “Thin Man” in favor of the much more complicated shaped charge design of “Fat Man”.

James Franck:   As with many German Jews, Franck lost his position at the University of Gottingen in 1933 as the Nazis came to power.  He ended up at the University of Chicago and joined the Manhattan Project to work on Chemical and Metallurgical issues.   Franck joined a political committee of scientists who were debating the actual use of the bomb.  He authored the Franck Report in June of 1945 which argued against the dropping of a the bomb on a city.  Instead they argued for dropping the bomb in an uninhabited area and inviting the Japanese to come watch so as to scare them into surrendering.

Rudolf Peirls;   Peirls, born in Germany, was working at Cambridge University when Hitler came to power.   He would never go home again.   In 1939, he and Otto Frisch (keep reading) joined the British effort to construct a bomb.   Oddly enough, while being allowed to work on the atom bomb in England, he was not allowed to help work on radar as he was classified as an enemy alien.  Somebody thought that radar was a bigger secret than the atom bomb.

Frisch and Peirls penned a paper which was given to Churchill that indicated that only a small amount (1 kg) of U-235 could be used to build a bomb.  Previously, the scientific community had generally believed that it would take several tons of U-235.    Their paper made its way to Oppenheimer and Groves who began pressing to have these scientists brought to America to work on the Manhattan Project.   After the Quebec conference in 1943, attended by Churchill and Roosevelt,  both Frisch and Peirls moved to Los Alamos where they took on various roles.

Otto Frisch:  Born in Vienna, he also lost his job when Hitler came to power in 1933.  He moved London and then onto Copenhagen where he worked with Neils Bohr.   In 1938, Frisch went to visit his aunt Lise Meitner (keep reading), another world famous physicist.  While there, he heard that the German Otto Hahn (keep reading) had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced the element barium.   Frisch and Meitner hypothesized that Hahn had inadvertently split the uranium nucleus into two.  Frisch called it “fission”.  Meitner and Frisch wrote a paper explaining the physics behind the phenomenon.

Frisch left Copenhagen before the outbreak of the war and after his time in England, ended up working on the Manhattan Project.  His  job was to calculate exactly how much U-235 was needed to create critical mass. and sustain a chain reaction.

Lisa Meitner: Meitner was born in Vienna and in 1926, became the first woman in Germany to become a full professor of physics, at the University of Berlin.  Einstein once referred to her as the “German Marie Curie”.    Meitner did not immediately flee like many of others but stayed in Germany until 1938.   When she finally decided to flee, she found that the Nazis had been informed that she was going to leave the country and were hot on her trail.  She managed to escape with just a few dollars in her possession and a diamond ring that fellow German physicist Otto Hahn had given her in case she needed to bribe a border guard.    Meitner eventually made her way to Sweden where she remained in touch with Otto Hahn and Neils Bohr.   Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch are credited with coining the term nuclear fission and Meitner is the one who figured out that the power of splitting the atom is derived from Einstein’s formula of E=mc2.  Meitner refused an offer to work on the Manhattan project and never worked on the atomic bomb.  But by fleeing, she also was not available to work on a Nazi bomb either.

Neils Bohr:  Bohr was a Danish physicist.  The situation in Denmark with the Nazis was quite complicated.   The Danish government made a deal with the Nazis to supply food for the German war effort in exchange for letting the Danes set policy in Denmark.   The Danish King had demanded that the Nazis leave the Danish Jews alone early in the war and the Nazis stood by this deal until the end of 1943.   As such, Bohr was able to stay in Copenhagen at his own lab and continue his work on the structure of the atom, initially begun by Ernst Rutherford.  However, as the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bohr began to assist his fellow European scientists to escape from Europe.   A large number of his Jewish friends made their way to Copenhagen where they first went to work in his institute.   From there, Bohr organized fellowships through the Rockefeller Foundation which had the goal of finding work for these scientists and universities in England and America.  Had the Nazis learned of his efforts in this area, for sure they would have killed him.

Bohr also probably did more to prevent the Nazis from building a bomb than any other scientist.   Like most of the physicists in this article, Bohr was aware of the possibility of using U-235 to build an atomic bomb as he had attended lectures in England and Denmark on the subject before the war began.   In September of 1941, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who had remained in Germany and was working on a Nazi atomic bomb, came to visit Bohr in Copenhagen.   The two had a long discussion during which Heisenberg went through his calculations of how large of mass of U-235 would be necessary to sustain a chain reaction.    Bohr realized that Heisenberg had made a mistake in his calculations which reduced the amount needed from Heisenberg’s nearly 1000 kg to under 100 kg.   Bohr never corrected Heisenberg and Heisenberg returned to Germany thinking that they needed more than 10 times what they actually needed.

When the Nazi’s occupied Denmark in late 1943, Bohr, along with nearly all of Denmark’s Jews, managed to escape to Sweden.  When the British realized that Bohr had safely arrived in Sweden, they sent a high speed Mosquito bomber to carry him to England where he went to work on the British version of the Manhattan Project which they called “Tube Alloys”.  Bohr was amazed at the progress that was being made in the advancement of understanding fission.   He then travelled to the US where he toured Hanford, Oak Ridge , Tennessee, and finally  Los Alamos where he ran into his old friend Leo Szilard.   Before the war, Bohr and Szilard had argued over what it would take to build an atomic bomb.  Bohr had taken the position that no country could possibly afford to build an atomic bomb without first dedicating most of its economic output towards this goal.    Upon seeing Szilard at Los Alamos, Bohr immediately pointed out that he had been correct.  When Szilard asked, “about what?”, Bohr responded by pointing out that America was indeed dedicating “most of its economic output towards the goal of building an atomic bomb”.

Nearly every person named above was already a Nobel Laureate in chemistry or physics or mathematics before the war began.    Nearly all of them would earn a Nobel prize in their lifetimes.  Without their knowledge, America’s efforts to build the bomb would certainly have taken many years longer to achieve success.   Perhaps the effort would never have ended in success.

And more to the point, had these scientists stayed in Germany, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to conclude that Germany may well have come up with the atomic bomb on her own.

It wasn’t from lack of trying.   Many world class scientists remained in Germany to continue their work on physics, chemistry and mathematics.   The science of nuclear fission was known to them.  The only question was whether they could solve all the issues that the Manhattan Project faced and deliver a working device.

Shortly after Frisch and Meitner published their paper on nuclear fission, the Nazis began their own work on a functional weapon.   Much of the scientific research into fission had been undertaken by well known scientists including Walther Bothe, Klaus Clusius, Paul Harteck, Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg.   But these scientists were not interested in joining the Nazi party and were thus considered less reliable to Hitler’s inner circle.    Control of the program ended up in the hands of Kurt Deibner, Abraham Essau, Walther Gerlach and Erich Schumann.

From their basic understanding of what was going to be needed to make plutonium-239, the German scientists figured out that they needed an atomic reactor and they also needed heavy water.  The heavy water was to be used to slow down the neutrons emitted from Uranium inside the reactor so that they could trans mutate the U-238 into plutonium-239.   (The American version of this process at Hanford used boron and graphite to slow down the neutrons but Germany had no supply of boron).

Schumann and Deibner chose the small town of Haigerloch, south of Stuttgart to house their reactor.   Many of the scientists working on the program moved there in February of 1943 to work on the reactor and to get away from the almost daily bombing raids in Berlin.   A branch of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was set up in a nearby town for their experiments.  In Haigerloch ,  at the bottom of a steep ravine, the Nazi’s built their atomic reactor.      At the bottom of the ravine they tunneled into the rock making the facility impervious to Allied bombing.   Directly above the facility at the top of the ravine, stands an old Church.   No doubt they were hoping that the presence of the Church would dissuade any efforts to bomb the area.    As it was, the Allies never found out that the Nazis had constructed a nuclear reactor beneath the cliff or they no doubt would have tried to bomb it, church or no church.

To produce a supply of heavy water, the Nazis got lucky.   When they invaded Norway in April of 1940, they took control of a heavy water production facility that Norsk Hydro built in 1934.   Normal water (H20) contains a Hydrogen atom and 2 oxygen atoms.   Each Hydrogen atom contains just a single proton in its nucleus.   In heavy water, the hydrogen atoms are indeed heavier as they contain both a neutron and a proton in the nucleus.   This form of water is known as D20, or heavy water or deuterium.     In a heavy water reactor, as the uranium spits out billions of neutrons, the heavy water regulates the speed of the neutrons, slowing them down so that more of them impact other uranium atoms, and help to increase the chain reaction that leads to increasing fission.

The Nazis were able to get a supply of Uranium-238 and with enough  heavy water from Norsk Hydro and the reactor at Haigerloch, they had what they needed to create the Plutonium-239 for a bomb.

But they also had a lot of problems.  The first and largest problem was that many German scientists had been drafted by the Wehrmacht for general war duty and they had a giant personnel shortage.    Another issue was the scarcity of resources within the Nazi Reich to spend on all the needed research and work to take the program from where it was to a point where they could deliver a working device.    As you read about the American effort, it was no simple task to figure out how to build a bomb, even if the physics was well understood.  And as the war dragged on, there became a sense of urgency and desperation in Nazi Germany to obtain weapons sooner and not later.  Thus programs like Werner von Braun’s V1 and V2 project received a lot of funding and attention while the atom bomb program got much less.    At the same time, as one can see from the US effort, the German atom bomb program was going to need A LOT of funding.

At Norsk Hydro, Paul Hartek became the key scientist.   Heavy water naturally exists in very small quantities (1 part in 4500 parts)mixed in with regular water.   To separate it, you run a current through a tank of regular water.  It turns out that regular H20 will electrolyze (split into Hydrogen and Oxygen) faster than D20.    So if you electrolyze a tank of water and stop when about 1% of the water is left, this leaves behind a fluid that has a higher percentage of D20.   If you start out with 100 gallons of fresh water, the final gallon in the tank will have a higher percentage of D20, say 10 parts in 4500.       If you have 100 tanks where you do this, then collect up the final gallon from each tank and pour this concentrate into a new tank, you can start all over again.   The final gallon from this second run will have an even higher percentage of D20, say 50 parts in 4500.   Do this 50 times and what remains will be a fluid that his quite highly concentrated D20.  This process is called a cascade.

This work at Norsk Hydro drew the attention of the Norwegian resistance, and  British Intelligence.   Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi were brought in to discuss what was going on at Norsk Hydro with General Leslie Groves, the US Army General whose job it was to ensure the success of the Manhattan Project.   The result of the meeting was that this facility in Norway needed to be destroyed lest the Germans beat America in the quest to build the atomic bomb.   They had no way of knowing that the German program was beset with manpower and funding shortages.    What they did know is what the Norwegians were telling them and they were hearing of large rooms filled with electrolytic cascades running non-stop to create D20.   This was more than enough to scare them half to death.

British Intelligence undertook the effort to destroy the Norsk Hydro facility.  Several attempts were made to bomb it.   In 1942, 4 Norwegians dropped by parachute near the plant and tried but failed to blow it up.   Again in 1942 British troops arrived in gliders and tried to attack the facility but this too failed.   Finally, in 1943, a team of Norwegians again parachuted into the area.  They were able to sabotage the cascade and significantly disrupt D20 production.   But even this damage was repaired and after 4 or 5 months, the facility was back in production.   At this point, the American Airforce sent 1000 bombers to try to knock out the facility.   Enough damage was done that the Germans decided to bring the supply of heavy water already produced to Germany.   As the barrels of D20 were being transported across Lake Tinnsjo by ferry,  the same Norwegians who had previously sabotaged the plant, also blew up the ferry on which the barrels of D20 were being transported.    It all ended up on the bottom of the lake.  This one act of sabotage may well have been the most important act of sabotage during the entire war.   For their part in the effort, the Norwegian saboteurs became national heroes after the war when the story came out.

Without a supply of heavy water, the reactor at Haigerloch could not operate.   As a result, no enrichment ever occurred there.     However the allies were never completely satisfied that the German effort had been abandoned and they also had no idea how much D20 may have already shipped from Norsk Hydro.   They didn’t even know about the reactor at Haigerloch.

After wars end, the Americans launched Operation Paperclip, the goal of which was to round up as many German scientists as they could.   Most of the German physicists who worked for the Nazis were included in this group as were hundreds of others including Werner von Braun.   von Braun and many of his fellow Nazi rocket scientists  ended up in Alabama working for NASA.   The German physicists and chemists from the Nazi bomb effort were not sent to America since the work in the US had eclipsed the German effort.   Most of them were kept under arrest in England until later in 1946 when they were released.   The general idea was to keep them under lock and key for long enough so that the Russians couldn’t drag them back to the Soviet Union to work on a Soviet bomb.

When the Americans arrived at Haigerloch, they were totally shocked to find the German reactor which was immediately disassembled and carted off the US.   A replica now sits in the little “Atomkeller” Museum which is open to all and visited by none (expect this author of course).

The German scientists who worked on the Nazi bomb included:

Werner Heisenberg:  Heisenberg won his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 for his creation of quantum mechanics.  In 1939 following the discovery of nuclear fission,  Heisenberg helped form the German Nuclear Energy Project.   After his fateful discussion with Neils Bohr in Copenhagen in September of 1941, Heisenberg returned home and gave a lecture on nuclear fission to Nazi party officials.   As a result, the Army withdrew most of their funding and Heisenberg’s Energy Project was placed under the control of Albert Speer, Hitler’s wartime Minister of Supply and Armaments.   Speer kept the program going but with far less resources as he was under pressure to deliver weapons faster and faster to Hitler.   An atom was just going to take too long.

Otto Hahn:  Hahn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission.   In 1938, along with Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann, he advanced Enrico Fermi’s work and bombarded uranium with neutrons generating a lot of byproducts that he struggled to understand.   Since he was a chemist and not a physicist, he was hesitant to claim that he had somehow discovered a new revolutionary physics principle.  But in fact, he had.   Fission.    It was Meitner and Frisch, the following year, who explained what Hahn had seen and coined the term, “fission”.   In November of 1945, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, it created quite an uproar as many thought that Frisch and Meitner deserved the prize for interpreting Hahn’s results and coining the term “fission”.    The Nobel Committee also had no idea where Hahn was located as they did not know that he had been arrested as part of Operation Paperclip and shipped off to England where he was being held along with a number of other German scientists.   He was not allowed to leave captivity to attend the award ceremonies.  By the time of the 1946 Award Ceremony, he had been released from captivity and did attend that year to collect his prize.

Paul Hartek:  Hartek was the Director of the Chemistry Department at the University of Hamburg before the war.  From 1937, he was an advisor to the Wehrmacht’s Ordinance Department and in 1939, he alerted top Nazi officials of the potential military applications for nuclear chain reactions.   His focus became research into the process to separate uranium isotopes.   This lead him to focus on the use of heavy water as a neutron moderator and in 1941, his group greatly expanded the electrolysis operation at Norsk Hydro.

In 1942 he was almost drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to Russia but Heisenberg managed to keep this from happening so that he could continue his nuclear research.

Walther Bothe:  Bothe was a key player in trying to build the Nazis an atom bomb.  Along with his colleagues Kurt Deibner, Abraham Essau, Walther Gerlach and Erich Schumann, they spent a great amount of effort working on trying to understand how much material and exactly which materials were best suited for building a bomb.   This early work led to the decision to focus on using D20 to moderate neutrons in the reactor that was built in Haigerloch.  They also discovered that the shape of the U-238 in the reactor made a big difference in the speed of the enrichment process.   It turns out that cubes are better than rods which are better than plates.   (see pictures below).

Many of the German scientists that worked on developing an atomic bomb for the Nazis never quite got their careers back on track after the war.   They always had a position of some responsibility but their post war careers were often limited by the suspicion that they were just too cozy with the Nazis.   Bothe fell into this group.

Kurt Diebner:   If any one scientist in Germany could claim or be blamed for being in charge of building the Nazis a bomb, it was Diebner.   He became the Reich Planning Officer for the effort and was responsible for keeping the other scientists focused on the work that would yield a bomb as quickly as possible.     He led the work from his position as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and from here he managed a number of labs around the country where nuclear research was undertaken.   Much work was done on various fission experiments including exploring how to initiate a nuclear reaction with the detonation of explosives.

Werner Heisenberg came to dislike Diebner with a passion and the two of them were at odds for much of the war.   Near the wars end, the slow pace of progress resulted in Diebner losing his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.  He was replaced on an interim basis by Heisenberg who was in charge when the war ended.   However Heisenberg had far less enthusiasm for conducting research that would lead to a bomb than did Diebner.   As such, not much progress was made following Heisenberg’s appointment.

In the final analysis, the project to build a Nazi atomic bomb just proved to be too big an effort for the scientists who remained in Germany and for the dwindling resources of a Reich that was finding itself under attack from every direction.       Their biggest achievement had been the construction of the reactor at Haigerloch and the production of a large quantity of heavy water.    Had the heavy water been delivered, the Nazis may have been able to begin enriching uranium or even creating plutonium.    But as you can read from the experience of the American effort, the actual design and construction of a functional bomb was still a big effort for which the Nazis had barely scratched the surface.

 

 

Above are a number of bios on display of the top German physicists

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author’s Note:

When I began writing this article I had no idea how complicated it was going to be.

In the space of a single human lifetime, humanity went from very little understanding of what makes up an atom to splitting that atom in a weapon of unimaginable power.    In the lifetime’s of Ernst Rutherford,  who first theorized and then proved that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and Albert Einstein, whose general and special theories of relativity form the foundation of modern physics, the world changed in a profound way.   If there was a golden age of theoretical physics, this was it.

Since this author only understands about 0.5% of the physics behind an atomic bomb, it was very difficult to explain it in such a way that even I could understand it let alone convey the subject matter in such a way so that the reader wouldn’t be disgusted with my inability to explain it simply.   I hope I haven’t failed.   I probably failed.   Ha.

I visited Haigerloch in 2007, purely by accident.  I had been in Stuttgart for a conference and was going to spend the weekend in Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee to visit Graf Zeppelin’s incredible Zeppelin Museum.   I was digging around on the Internet for places to stop along the way when I remembered reading an article about the Atomkeller Museum in Haigerloch on the edge of the Black Forest.   It turned out to be very interesting if not totally devoid of other tourists.   The museum was open and the ticket taker, dutifully collected my 1.5 Euro entrance fee.   I asked how many people visited in a year.   He laughed.

 

This past week MIchael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Canadian born Muslim, stormed Parliament Hill in Ottawa with a Winchester lever action rifle.  The attack began with the murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo who was on ceremonial guard duty at Canada’s National War Memorial.  The gunman then hijacked a car and sped towards the Parliament Building where he abandoned the car and ran into the central portion of the building called the Center Block.   It all ended in a hail of gunfire inside the building where the Parliamentary Sargeant-at-Arms,  Kevin Vickers, himself a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer, killed Zehaf-Bibeau and ended the incident.

Canada’s National War Memorial is the equivalent in the US to a combined version of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Many years ago I was a student taking 7 years to complete a 4 year Engineering degree at the University of Saskatchewan.   One of the reasons for my extended life on campus was that I spent a year as the Chairman of a national student organization called the Canadian Federation of Student Services.   I spent quite a bit of time in Ottawa and one day wandered over to see the National War Memorial.

Canada’s National War Memorial

The government sought designs for the memorial in 1925 to commemorate Canada’s role in WW1.  The memorial was officially unveiled just a few months before the start of WW2 by King George VI, in May of 1939.   Nearly 100,000 people attended the unveiling from across the country at a time when the entire population of Ottawa was just 140,000.

 

The two towers on each side represent peace and freedom below which 22 Canadian servicemen are depicted in bronze.  At the front of the memorial are infantrymen including a Lewis Gunner on the far left and a solider wearing a kilt and carrying a Vickers machine gun on the far right.  Others include an infantryman, a pilot in full flying gear, a sailor and a mechanic.   Behind the front group are a artilleryman mounted on a horse which is pulling a gun carriage (seen at the back of the monument).   Behind them are the men and women who supported the front including nurses, stretcher bearers and also a lumberman.   There was good reason to include the lumberman.  Much of WW1 was fought in trenches which required immense amounts of wood to reinforce the walls of the trenches.  More wood was used in efforts to tunnel beneath the enemies trenches and even more wood was used for tunnels behind the lines so that supplies and men could be brought to the front below ground, out of the line of fire of enemy artillery.

Canada’s Unknown Soldier, who died while fighting in France in 1917 and buried in France, was exhumed and reinterred at the base of the memorial just 14 years ago, in 2000.

The Unknown Soldier was selected from a cemetery located near Vimy Ridge.   For Canadians, the victory at Vimy Ridge in April of 1917 carries much national significance.  For the first time during the war, all 4 Canadian Divisions fought together to defeat the Germans.  Suffering some 10,000 casualties, Canadians view the victory as a “coming of age” for the country.   One of Canada’s most famous authors, Pierre Burton said of Vimy, “Canada became a country in 1867, she became a nation at Vimy Ridge”.

So it was at THIS place last week that Zehaf-Bibeau murdered Nathan Cirillo.   It was bad enough that the murderer had killed an unarmed  soldier just a few days after a similar incident where another unarmed soldier was run down by another Islamic Extremist in Quebec.  .   But to do so while  while the soldier was guarding Canada’s National War Memorial just seemed to make it worse.

Cpl. on Guard in uniform

Cpl Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada was was shot twice at close range.   A number of people passing by came to his aid including other members of the military who were part of the honor guard as well as a nurse and a few others including an attorney named Barbara Winters.

Ms. Winters was interviewed the day after the attack by Carol Off of CBC Radio:

Bruce MacKinnon, an Editorial Cartoonist with the Halifax Chronicle memorialized the event which has struck a chord with Canadians across the country.

One of the soldiers on the memorial has descended down to the ground to try to assist Cpl. Cirillo while another on the memorial seems to be reaching down to assist in pulling his newly fallen comrade up onto the memorial itself.

RIP Nathan Cirillo.  May your soul be bound up in the body of life.

Many years ago we took a family vacation to Maui.   While there, one of the fun things to do is to drive along the beautiful coastline to Hana.   There are innumerable places to stop to view the scenery which is nothing short of spectacular.

If you venture past the town of Hana about 8 miles, you will come to mile marker #41.  Look carefully for a nearly hidden left turn which will take you into the Palapala Hoomau Church.   Its easy to miss so keep a close watch.  There, buried in a small graveyard beside the church, lies Charles Lindbergh, arguably America’s most famous aviator.

Lindbergh’s Grave near Hana

It seems such an odd place for Lindbergh to be buried.  Why isn’t he buried, for example, in St. Louis, where he found financial backing for his famous “Spirit of St. Louis”?  Or in San Diego where Ryan Airlines designed and constructed the plane and where the airport is named Lindbergh Field?

The story of Lindbergh’s life from being hailed as one of the greatest aviators on earth to a small churchyard cemetery in Hawaii is interesting.

Most people are aware that Lindbergh was the first person to make a solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 in a plane he called “The Spirit of St. Louis”.  He became a household name at that time and was one of the most famous people on the planet.   A few years later, sadly his son was kidnapped from the family home in 1932 and subsequently murdered.  At the time, as a media circus swarmed around him, the crime became known as “The Crime of the Century”.

To escape the public spotlight, Lindbergh moved the family to Europe where he began to cross paths with the rising tide of Nazism in Germany.

In 1936 the US Army asked Lindbergh to assess the quality and characteristics of the German Air Force.  The Nazis were only too happy to provide him with a tour by the end of which Lindbergh would become friendly with Hermann Goring.  His glowing and exaggerated report to the US Army told of a German air force that was so vastly superior to those of the Soviet Union, France and England that Germany could destroy those countries at will.  The Nazis had wanted to convey this message of strength to America and Lindbergh, who along the way had become a fellow Nazi traveller, was only too happy to oblige.

On the same trip Lindbergh attended the Opening Ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Games and sat in a special spectator’s box with Goring and his wife.

Lindbergh returned to America in 1937 and began to involve himself in politics.  As the war drew nearer, he became a proponent of keeping America out of what many felt at the time was “just another European war”.  Prior to America’s entry into WW2 in December of 1941, America was deeply divided about getting involved.   President Roosevelt and those that wanted to intervene on behalf of  those fighting Nazism were in a minority.

To understand exactly how divided America was, we should look back to 1933, when Hitler first came to power.  Americans were initially indifferent to Hitler.  The depression dominated the headlines and Americans weren’t interested in Europe’s problems while there were so many at home.   It was only after kristallnacht, in November 1938 that public opinion began to turn against the Nazis.    As Americans watched the Anschluss with Austria and then watched the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the general feeling in the US was that Europe was going to embark on a very long and costly war.   They thought back to the history of WW1 and foresaw a similar outcome.   They foresaw casualties on an even larger scale but they thought eventually Germany would be brought to heel.  Just after the start of WW2, in October of 1939, polls in the US indicated that 85% of Americans hoped Britain and France would win but also indicated that a majority still wanted to stay out of the fight.

But the spring of 1940 would bring about a German Blitzkreig that knocked France out of the war in just 4 weeks.  This sudden collapse of France left England on its own.  Most Americans began to believe that Hitler would eventually attack the US and thus became far more interested in helping England win.  Public opinion quickly moved to support providing munitions to England, first in the form of “Cash and Carry” where England could buy what she needed with cash and then “Lend-Lease where America would “lend” munitions to England in exchange for leases on bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland.   Roosevelt would famously describe “Lend-Lease” by suggesting to the American public that lending  ships and planes and munitions to England was no different than lending your garden hose to a neighbor whose house had caught fire.

The America First Committee, created in September 1940, was not only against entry into the war but also opposed aid.  Initially their simple message was that a properly armed America, protected by the vast Atlantic Ocean, was impregnable.   If Germany could not attack America, then what was the purpose of aiding England?  In fact, they felt, aiding England would only weaken America and potentially draw the US into the conflict.   The America First Committee expressed the concern that it was already bad enough that their northern neighbor, Canada, was already committed to the defense of England and this too could bring the Nazi menace to America’s doorstep.

The AFC argued that they were simply motivated by a desire to save American lives.   For some members, this was likely true.  But for many others, this argument was a cover for something more sinister.   Many joined the AFC as a way to express their hatred for Roosevelt and the New Deal.   As 1940 turned into 1941, many AFC members began to also express xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments.

When Hitler overran Poland, his speeches became filled with bile aimed at both Slavs and Jews.   Hitler began to systematically murder the Polish educated classes while at the same time stripping  Jews of their property and forcing them into ghettos created in all the larger cities and towns.   The AFC just ignored these actions.  When Hitler overran six more democracies in the spring of 1940, Roosevelt pointed out that Hitler was out to end democracy in Europe.  His victory, Roosevelt warned,  “would send Europe back into the dark ages with no democracy and no human decency”.   The AFC ignored these inconvenient truths as well.  But the American public was coming around to Roosevelt’s position as time passed and as the war news continued to worsen.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union  in June of 1941, the AFC was invigorated and loudly proclaimed that it was in America’s complete interest to let Hitler and Stalin slaughter each other’s people.   The AFC argued that, “this was now not a war to preserve democracy, it was a war between two equally awful dictatorships.  America should stay out of it”.

Enter Charles Lindbergh.   He was among the most extreme and popular AFC spokesmen.   And he had a new theme for everyone to consider.   His idea was that America should support Germany.  To this point, the typical AFC speaker was content to oppose war and to criticize British imperialism on a equal footing with their dislike of the Nazis.    Lindbergh’s full throated support for throwing in with Germany was a new dynamic as most Americans were still rooting for England, they just didn’t want get involved.  He was, however, very popular with large groups with in the AFC and demand for him as a speaker at AFC events was higher than ever.

Lindbergh spoke about how much there was to admire in Hitler’s Germany.  He spoke about how he built the Autobahn and provided jobs to all who needed one.  He wrote about how Germans were harnessing science to create new inventions.   He said that he was not against the idea of war, just against the idea of war with Germany.   Lindbergh became the AFC’s most popular speaker.  Tens of thousands attended his rallies and hundreds of thousands listened to him on the radio.

And thus began the undoing of the AFC.   Lindbergh gave a voice to his Nazi fellow travelers whose anti-Semitic beliefs reinforced the most extreme elements of the organization.   Eventually some of the leadership of the AFC would try to repudiate Lindbergh but it was too little and too late.   The organization would be destroyed by Lindbergh.

In the beginning, Lindbergh was driven by his hatred of Communism.      While other members of AFC were worried about the survival of American democracy, Lindbergh began to speak about the survival of the white race which he couched in terms of “western civilizations”.    He famously once said, ” Our bond with Europe is a bond of race, not of political ideology”.   Suddenly it seemed the AFC was saying that America should not care about the demise of all the European democracies.  Instead America should just support victory for the white race against the Slavs (Russians).

During the summer of 1941, the AFC was no longer content to hammer away at Roosevelt and at British Imperialism.   Adding to this list, they decided to attack Jews.

The essential slur was that of disloyalty.  They said that Jews had good reason to hate Hitler for his anti-Semitic actions.   But despite these good reasons, they argued, if the Jews forced America into the war to save Europe’s Jews,  it would be the fault of the American Jews when American boys were killed in the fight.

Overt anti-Semites began joining the AFC in large numbers while more and more newspaper editorials began speaking out against this racial slur which was now beginning to pit one group of Americans against another.

In August of 1941, Burton Wheeler who chaired the Senate Interstate Commerce Commission publicly stated that it was time to investigate “interventionists” in the motion picture industry.   To his “surprise”, he soon afterwards said he was surprised to learn that most of the studio heads in the movie business were Jews.   Lindbergh and other AFC leaders quickly jumped into the fray demanding to know why Hollywood was attempting to “rouse war fever” and why America was allowing so many “foreign born” immigrants to shape American opinion.    Hollywood struck back when Wendell Willkie, the Republican party’s 1940 Presidential candidate publicly ridiculed the AFC’s position.   A senior partner at J.P.Morgan, Thomas Lamont, demanded that Lindbergh back up his accusations by naming specific people who he claimed were “working for war”.

Then, on September 11, 1941, following a German U-Boat attack on the US destroyer Greer,  Roosevelt announced that all US Navy ships were free to open fire on any German vessel that was attacking a US flagged ship or convoy.    On the same day, Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior goaded Lindbergh by publicly suggesting that Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer.

Lindbergh took the bait and in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa later that evening he would state:

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.  Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire …These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence.” 

Of the Jews  he said “it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany… But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.  Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.  Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.  History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation…  Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government. “

Lindbergh had essentially paraphrased the exact warning that Hitler had delivered to the Reichstag in 1939 when he too warned that the Jews were leading Europe to war and that the Jews would suffer more than anyone else from the war that they themselves caused.

Hitler had said, “If international finance Jewry in and outside of Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations once again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”  

Lindbergh’s version was all too similar to Hitler’s version and the media reaction was immediate.    Newspapers around the country declared him to be contemptible.   The Republican national leadership also went after him.  Wendell Willkie  called his speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”.  Thomas Dewey called it “an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech.”

Lindbergh’s speech severely damaged the AFC.   The public turned against both him and the AFC.  Other newspapers characterized the organization as being full of people that included, ” a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, and crackpots.”   The organization would never command large audiences ever again and Lindbergh’s reputation would never recover.

A few short months later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the United States and the AFC was out of business.  Lindbergh tried to volunteer for service but Roosevelt saw to it that he would not be allowed to enlist.   Instead, Lindbergh spent the war working for various aircraft companies helping them to fix production problems as they ramped up the war effort.

As a consultant to several aircraft manufacturers, he eventually made his way to the Pacific where his aviation expertise was put to use.  He was able to figure out a way to get more power out of the engine on the Corsair when taking off so that Marine pilots could double their bomb load.   He also was able to introduce improved techniques to pilots of the P-38 that allowed them to fly at altitude with far less fuel consumption.  He even managed to fly some combat missions.  But his role in helping America’s war effort would never come close its full potential.

With his reputation destroyed, Lindbergh would never command much of an audience ever again.  After the war he served on a few government commissions and he developed an interest in conservation.    Eventually he moved to Hawaii to avoid the spotlight where he would die at age 72.

 

 

Every year on Yom Kippur, Jews around the world say a special prayer for the Jews killed at Babi Yar.     Babi Yar is the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev and on the eve of Yom Kippur, on September 29 and 30, 1941, some 35,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis and their local accomplices.  In the months after this, as many as 100,00 more were murdered there as well.

The atrocities at Babi Yar did not happen in isolation.   They were the direct result of Hitler’s massive invasion of Russia called Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet surrender of the City of Kiev just a few days before, on September 26, 1941

On June 22, 1941, some 3 million Germans attacked eastwards along what would become a 1000 mile front with more than 500,000 vehicles and more than 600,000 horses.   They attacked with three different army groups each heading in a different direction.

Army Group North headed northeast through the Baltic States with the goal of taking Leningrad.

Army Group Center headed almost straight east with the goal of taking Moscow.

Army Group South headed southeast towards the Crimea and the oil fields of Lake Baikal.

Operation Barbarossa

To stop the Nazi invasion, Stalin had roughly 2 million men at his disposal, but little in the way of leadership.   The Soviet General Staff was in a complete state of disrepair as Stalin had spent the 20’s and 30’s purging the army of anyone who might have been a political rival to him.   A number of top Generals had been purged from the Army and either killed or imprisoned.     The remaining Generals were mostly inexperienced and for the six months after Barbarossa began, the Soviet Union lost nearly every military engagement, only holding back the advancing Nazis with suicidal charges and mass casualties.

As the Nazi juggernaut pushed into Russia with little or no resistance,  the Soviets were forced to flee from nearly every battle.  The only effective resistance that the Soviet Army could muster was to take refuge in the cities and towns and force the Germans to either bypass the city or fight door to door.    This left the Germans with the decision to either bypass the cities and starve out the Soviet troops or spend a lot of time and suffer a lot of casualties fighting door to door.  Hitler was dead set against bypassing cities and wanted the Wehrmacht to capture and destroy each one leaving no Soviet resistance behind the advancing front line.    But all the Wehrmacht commanders, von Leeb, von Bock and von Rundstedt, as well as their superiors on the General Staff (Fritz Halder and Walther von Brauchitsch) wanted to bypass the cities and reach their objectives before the Russian winter arrived.   They had all learned the lessons of Napolean’s march on Moscow from the previous century and knew that having to spend the winter in the Russian countryside was a deadly mistake.    The arguing reached new heights when von Rundstedt bypassed Kiev in August leaving more than 500,000 Russian troops trapped in and around the city.   Hitler demanded that Kiev be taken, the result of which was that von Rundstedt, in charge of Army Group South, had to stop his advance and turn his armored divisions  around.    Hitler also demanded that a large Panzer Group under Heinz Guderian (part of Army Group Center) which was well on its way to Moscow, be turned around to support the attack on Kiev.

Thus the city of Kiev was encircled and attacked during a period from about August 15 through about September 26, after which organized  Sovet resistance in and around the city ended and the surviving soldiers were told to try to break out on their own.  In the end, more than 300,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner and sent back to Germany for slave labor.   Only a few would survive the war.

After the fall of Kiev, the Wehrmacht units involved reoriented themselves back towards Moscow and towards the Crimea.   But the mistake had been made.   The Nazi’s would never get to Moscow.  The Russian winter arrived with the Wehrmacht forward units within site of the city and perhaps within site of victory.  But that was as far as they would go.  Instead the Germans would spend the winter out in the countryside with no proper winter clothing and little to eat.  By the spring of 1942, the Soviet Army had rebuilt itself and the Germans would never take Moscow.   Thus Hitler’s decision to stop the advance towards Moscow and to take Kiev turned out to be one of his biggest and most costly blunders.  But it spelled doom for the Jews of Kiev.

Shortly after Kiev fell, the Nazis who followed the Wehrmacht into Russia began arriving.   Hitler appointed Kurt Eberhard as the Military Governor of the Kiev area.     And it was Eberhard, along with head of Army Group South’s Military Police Freidrich Jeckeln and the Commander of the Einsatzgruppe that followed Army Group South, Otto Rasch and his deputy, Paul Blobel, who decided to quickly murder Kiev’s Jews with the help of local Ukrainian sympathizers including the Kiev Police Force.

To ease the effort to round up Kiev’s Jews, they posted notices around the city telling Jews to report with all their documents and valuables to a certain intersection for resettlement at a certain time.   The ruse worked and over 2-3 days, some 30,000 Jews showed up thinking that they were going to be resettled.   They were quickly stripped of their possessions and taken to the ravine at Babi Yar.   Upon arrival, they were forced to march into deep pits and  told to stand at attention whereupon they were immediately shot in the head.   Another group was then marched into the pits to stand above those just previously shot and they too were murdered.   This went on for two days straight during which time nearly 35,000 Jews were murdered.   Ukrainian Police soon began bringing more Jews from Kiev and the surrounding towns to Babi Yar.  Over the next six months, perhaps as many as 150,000 Jews in total would be murdered there.

Babi Yar occurred during the early period of the Holocaust when the Nazis were committing a “Holocaust by bullets”.   As time went by Himmler began to notice that even the most murderous of the SS were growing weary of shooting so many people.   Morale began to suffer.  Alchoholism rates began to sour.  At the same time, as the Nazis captured more and more Russian territory, more and more Jews fell under their control.   It was against this backdrop that the top Nazi’s met at Wannsee outside Berlin in January of 1942.   Their final solution was to industrialize the murder of Europe’s Jews by using poison gas in huge gas chambers, killing hundreds and thousands at a time.   As they pointed out, this would spare their soldiers of having to shoot them one by one.  This lead to the construction of the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and finally Auschwitz and the greatest mass murder in history.   By the time it was over, 6 million Jews and countless others would perish.

Perhaps its interesting to know what happened to the perpetrators of these crimes at Babi Yar.

Kurt Eberhard, the military governor of Kiev, was captured by the US Army at the end of the war and incarcerated in Stuttgart.  He committed suicide on September 8, 1947.

Freidrich Jeckeln, the SS Commander who accompanied Army Group South and, among his other duties,  was in charge of the Einsatzgruppen that followed along behind Army Group South.  He was captured by the Soviets right before the end of the war on April 28, 1945.   He was tried, convicted, and hanged in Riga in February 1946.

Otto Rasch, in command of the Einsatzgruppe that actually did the killing was discharged from the Waffen SS later that year.   He was indicted in September of 1947 but his case was discontinued in February of 1948 due to his ill health.  He would escape the hangman’s noose as he died later that year in November of 1948.

Rasch’s direct report,  Col. Paul Blobel, became an alcoholic and was removed from his position in January of 1942.   But apparently he had not satisfied his blood lust because by June of 1942 he was assigned to Aktion 1005, a group whose purpose was to go around and try to hide the evidence of Nazi atrocities in Easter Europe.   To accomplish this, the Nazis began digging up all the bodies that they had shot or gassed and tried to burn them on huge funeral pyres.  Blobel was tried in Nuremberg as part of the Einsatzgruppen Trial.   He was convicted and eventually hanged in June of 1951.     A Nazi to the end, his last words were some sort of pathetic justification for his actions, not worth repeating.

 

On a cool day in November of 1950,  a ship from Italy arrived in the Port of Haifa.   Meeting the ship at the dock was an Israeli Military Honor Guard that carried the Israeli Flag draped coffin of George “Buzz” Beurling off the ship and slowly through the streets of Haifa.  Large crowds gathered along the streets to pay homage to Canada’s greatest air ace from World War II and a member of Israel’s new Air Force.  Slowly the procession approached a small Military Cemetery just south and east of Haifa at the foot of Mt. Carmel.   With full military honors this son of Canada, a committed Christian teetotaler from Montreal, was laid to rest.

Beurling dreamt of flying from the time he was a young boy.  He quit school early to pursue flying and took his first solo flight in 1938, when he was only 17.

When Canada entered the war in 1939, Beurling immediately tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force but was rejected since he did not meet their academic requirements.    Not to be deterred, Beurling then tried to join the Finnish Air Force which, in the winter of 1939, was fighting the Russians in what became known as the Winter War.   But Beurling’s mother refused to sign the necessary papers waiving the age requirement and again he was rejected.    Still wanting to get into the war, Beurling then travelled to England where, finally, in September of 1940, he was accepted him into the RAF.

Beurling developed exceptional flying skills and became an expect marksman with the Spitfires’s 8 Browning machine guns.   Flying at high speed, Beurling learned the art of the deflection shot which meant that he learned to aim his guns not directly at his target, but an imaginary point in space in front of his target where the speeding bullets would intersect with the flight path of his enemy.    During training his gunnery and flying skills brought him to the attention of his superiors and he graduated flying school with top marks.

Fighting in North Africa between Rommel’s Afrika Corps and the British made the British controlled Island of Malta a key battleground in 1941 and 1942.   To send supplies to the Afrika Corps, the Germans needed to send cargo vessels laden with everything from tanks to fuel from Italy to Africa.   With Malta in British hands, these German convoys were under constant attack.   To counter the British threat coming from Malta, Goering , head of the Luftwaffe promised Hitler that that he could bomb Malta in submission.    What developed was a major air war to control the skies around Malta.   And into this melee Beurling injected himself by volunteering to be assigned to the famous Squadron 249, on Malta.

Beurling arrived in Malta on June 9, 1942 and just 3 days later he began racking up air victories.  By July 30, just 7 weeks later, he had already shot down 17 enemy planes, 4 on one day alone.   On September 25, 1942 he had another big day with 3 more confirmed kills.   By the time he was finished flying in Malta, he had shot down 27 enemy planes, by far the highest of any RAF pilot during the fighting on Malta.

At this point in his career he as sent back Canada to participate in the public effort to sell War Bonds.    He was not especially happy to be out of the cockpit and and soon angered the people running the Bond Drive by talking about how much he liked killing the enemy.   This soon put an end to his participation in selling Bonds and he was sent back to England to train new pilots in gunnery and flying skills.

On September 1, 1943, he transferred from the RAF to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and returned to active flight duty.     By the time the war was over, he had 31 1/2 confirmed kills.  He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and Distinguished Flying Medal.

Although he was most familiar with flying Spitfires, when the P-51 came into service, he tried to join a squadron of P-51’s so that he could take long flights into Germany accomanying Bombers on their deep penetrating raids into German industrialized areas.   To quench his thrust for action, he even tried at one point to join the US Air Force because he thought he had a better chance of joining a P-51 squadron if he was part of the USAF.   But it was not to be.

Beurling did not get his way in the air all the time.  Over his career he  was forced to bail out 4 times including once when he was shot down by a student pilot during his time when he was assigned to a training school.   He also crashed 5 additional times either from mechanical problems or from damage to his plane inflicted by the enemy.   He was wounded several times but never severely.

Beurling’s flighing skills were second to none and many of his fellow pilots adopted one of his favorite tricks to shake an enemy from his tail.  Beurling perfected a manoever that put his Spitfire into a vicious and violent stall by pulling way back on the flight controls and then jamming them hard over.   This flipped the plane over and made it drop like a rock.   It also made it nearly impossible for the enemy pilot to continue his pursuit.   Many flight instructors thought this was a crazy idea but it worked and many Spitfire pilots would adopt this trick to get away from an enemy plane.

When the war came to an end, Beurling had a lot of trouble transitioning back to civilian life.   This finally led him to join the fledging Israeli Air Force where he knew he could continue to fly in combat.     The Israelis were at first skeptical and could not understand why a Christian wanted so desperately to join Israel’s air force.  But with the help of a few of his Jewish friends from Montreal he was finally able to convince them that he was serious.   Israel was buying some surplus P-51’s and he had every intention to fly one of them.    So in 1948 he joined the IAF and began ferrying aircraft from Europe to Israel.    During one of these flights, Beurling’s plane crashed in Italy and he was killed.   It was his 10th crash landing and his last.

70 years ago on September 19, 1944, Canada was forced to face a harsh reality.   With the Allies finally pushing back against the Nazi tide, there just weren’t enough volunteer replacement troops reaching Europe to keep up the pressure.

Throwing himself front and center into the personnell crisis was the unlikely figure of Conn Smythe.  Some might recognize him as being the original owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs.   Some might know him as being the guy responsible for helping to start the New York Rangers.

During WW1, Smythe joined the Canadian Army  and became a lieutenant in an Artillery division.   He was sent overseas in 1916 and immediately saw action first near Ypres in Belgium and then at the Somme in 1917 where he was awarded a Military Cross.    In July of 1917, Smythe joined the Royal Flying Corps.   Later that year in October, Smythe was shot down and spent the final year of the war as a POW.

After he returned from Europe, Smythe involved himself in hockey.  In the summer of 1926, Smythe was hired by Tex Rickard the owner of Madison Square Garden to recruit hockey players for a new team that Rickard was going to form in New York.   New York was already home to the New York Americans but Rickard hated the owner of the Americans and decided that he should form a competing team.   The New York media began calling the new team “Tex’s Rangers” and the name “Rangers” soon stuck.  Smythe, who had been hired to be the manager,  scoured the country looking for players.  But before the team took to the ice, Smythe had a falling out with one of Rickard’s managers and left New York.

Smythe purchased the Toronto St. Pats in 1927 and immediately renamed it the Maple Leafs.  He would own the team for the next 34 years.  But when WW II began, Smythe volunteered at the age of 45 to reenter active service.   Smythe was in France in July of 1944 when he was injured in action.   While he was recuperating in the hospital Smythe began talking to other wounded soldiers and it was during this period of time when he became incensed over Canada’s policy of only sending volunteers to fight overseas.   He came to understand that after 4+ years of fighting, Canada was being forced to send new volunteers to fight in Europe who were completely inexperienced.  And while these inexperienced soldiers resulted in excessive casualties, very large numbers of trained French Canadian soldiers were sitting around in Canada doing nothing.

To understand what was going on in Canada at the time, its necessary to explain a bit about the politics surrounding conscription and the politics that separated English and French speaking Canadians.

McKenzie King, Canada’s wartime Prime Minister took the country into WW2 on September 10, 1939.      In Quebec, French speaking Canadians were still unhappy as a result of a  conscription crisis that had occurred during WW1 when Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden was forced to conscript French Canadians into the army against their will and send them to fight.

So with the start of WW2, Canada found itself again in a European war and again with a French Canadian population that was dead set against fighting for Canada.   In 1940, in order to secure a national electIon victory for his Liberal Party, King had promised French Canadians that there would be no conscription.  In fact, King himself had opposed conscription during WW1 when his party was not in power.   In 1941 Canada had enough volunteers to operate 5 divisions overseas.   By 1942, with the war looking like it was going to last a long time, politicians in King’s Liberal Party as well as the opposition Conservative Party outside Quebec began demanding that King do something to ensure that French Canadians would also fight in this second world war.   In anticipation of a huge political fight looming in Quebec over this subject, King persuaded Louis St. Laurent, a key Liberal figure in Quebec politics to join his cabinet as Minister of Justice in early 1942.   After this King settled on the idea of holding a national plebiscite on whether to implement conscription.   Not surprisingly, overall, Canadians voted 63% in favor.   In English Canada, the voting was more than 80% in favor.  But in Quebec, French Canadians overwhelmingly voted more than 70% against conscription.     A large number of Quebec Liberal Members of Parliament left the party after the plebiscite but Louis St. Laurent remained loyal to King.   After the war, King would return the favor and supported St. Laurent in his bid to replace King who retired in 1948.   St. Laurent would become Canada’s next Prime Minister.  But the  plebiscite really solved nothing except to put numbers to a situation that was widely known by everyone.

French Canadians were still being drafted into the army but none of them were deployed overseas.  They continued to sit around in Canada while English Canadians were fighting and dying in Europe. In 1943, the Canadian government tried to deploy one of these French Canadian divisions to the Aleutian Islands, to support the US effort to remove the Japanese who had landed there in the opening days of the Battle of Midway.   King thought that the French speaking Canadians would go along with this since the Aleutians were at least technically in North America.   But it turned into a disaster when large numbers of the Quebec conscripts deserted rather than deploy.

And so it was in 1944 after the D-Day invasion that Canada found itself running out of troops and Conn Smythe entered the picture.

On September 19, In a front page editorial of Toronto’s Globe and Mail Newspaper, Smythe castigated King in public for the Government’s inaction.  He wrote,

“The need for trained reinforcements in the Canadian Army is urgent. During my time in France and in the hospitals of France and England, I was able to discuss the reinforcement situation with officers of units representing every section of Canada. I talked to officers from far Eastern Canada, French Canada, Ontario and all the Western Provinces. They agreed that the reinforcements received now are green, inexperienced and poorly trained. Besides this general statement, specific charges are that many have never thrown a grenade. Practically all have little or no knowledge of the Bren gun and finally, most of them have never seen a Piat anti-tank gun, let alone fired one. These officers are unaniminous in stating that large numbers of unnecessary casualties result from this greenness, both to the rookies and to the other soldiers, who have the added task of trying to look after the newcomers as well as themselves. I give these true facts of the reinforcement situation in the hope that:

1.       Col Ralston, (Canada’s Defense Minister) if he has other information, will know that his facts are out of date or that he has been misinformed;

2.       The taxpayer will insist that no more money be spent on well-trained soldiers in this country except to send them to the battle fronts;

3.        The people who voted these men should be used overseas when needeed should insist on the Government carrying out the will of the people; and

4.         The relatives of the lads in the fighting zones should ensure no further casualties are caused to their own flesh and blood by the failure to send overseas reinforcements now available in large numbers in Canada.”

Keep in mind,  at the time, the First Canadian Army was fighting hard in France after clearing Dieppe, Le Havre and Boulogne on the French coast.  They were about to attack the Germans guarding the Scheldt Estuary which was necessary so that deep water ships could  offload their cargo at the Port of Antwerp.    With all this heavy fighting, Canadian papers were filled with notices of English Canadian soldiers being killed in action.  And along came a well known and respected Canadian war hero who was excoriating the Prime Minister over his inability to get French Canadians to fight for Canada.

King finally succumbed to the political pressure and in November of 1944 he ordered more than 17000 French Canadian soldiers to France.  The resulting riots in Quebec nearly brought down King’s government but St. Laurent spoke out forcefully to his fellow Quebecers and tried to calm them down.    In the end, not many of these conscripts saw action.    The Canadian Army would not play any role in fighting during the Battle of the Bulge nor did it participate in any of the major actions in 1945.

It would be unfair to write that not a single French Canadian fought for Canada during WW2.   There was one volunteer Regiment, the Royal 22nd Regiment that was filled with French Canadian volunteers.   This unit, known as the Van Doos saw action in Italy and in Northwest Europe.     However, there were enough French Canadians sitting around in Canada for 6 more Regiments the size of the Van Doos who never left Canada and never fought.

Canadians take great pride in the contribution Canada made in both World Wars.   But the sad fact is that the French Canadians in Quebec did very little to help the effort.

70 years ago today, Allied forces launched an audacious plan to boldly charge north through Holland to force a crossing of the Rhine River at Arnhem.   Once across the Rhine, the Allies would have complete access to Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley.  By crossing at Arnhem, the idea was to get around the north end of the fortified Siegfried Line and try to end the war before Christmas, 1944.

But like many plans, this one would not survive contact with the enemy and quickly devolved into a bloody mess.   The basic idea was to use airborne troops landing behind German lines to secure the bridges over the various canals and rivers while the British XXXth Armored Corps raced along a road crossing each captured bridge until they crossed the final one at Arnhem.

Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery,  in charge of all British Forces in Europe initially proposed the idea in late August.  At the time,  the First Canadian Army under General Crerar was advancing along the French coast with the goal of capturing Dieppe, Le Havre and Boulogne.  The British 21st Army Group under Montgomery was moving north through the Belgian countryside towards Antwerp and Southern Holland.  The US 12th Army Group under Omar Bradley was closing on the German border through Luxembourg approaching Aachen.   The US 3rd Army Group under Patton was further to the south approaching the Saar.   And the US 6th Army Group under Devers was moving towards Germany after having fought all the way from Southern France, through the Rhone Valley towards Strasbourg.   These 5 armies in the field were all being supplied from the Normandy beachhead with supplies being trucked to each army by the famous Red Ball Express.

By early September, logistic problems were slowing everyone’s advance.   The allies had to shorten their supply lines which extended from Normandy to each of the 5 armies, all of which were advancing further and further from where their supplies were being offloaded from ships.   The need for a functional deep water port further north was becoming critical.  Finally on September 4, Antwerp was captured by the British.  Unfortunately, to reach Antwerp by sea, ships had to enter the Scheldt estuary on the North Sea and travel up the Scheldt to reach the City and Port of Antwerp.   But the Scheldt estuary was still in German hands and travel up the Scheldt River was impossible due to a large entrenched German garrison left behind by the retreating German Army.   The Canadian Army would only clear the Scheldt in late November with tremendous casualties.

The supply shortage became acute and General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in Europe, was forced to pick which armies would be forced to stop and which ones would be given the lion’s share of the supplies and allowed to continue.   This created a political crisis amongst the Allies and Eisenhower ended up forcing the American Armies to stop while Montgomery’s plan for Market-Garden was given the priority.

Just as Montgomery’s plan was given the green light, serious problems started to appear.   Decrypted German enigma signals from Bletchley Park indicated that 2 new SS Panzer Divisions were just arriving in Arnhem and Nijmegen.   This was confirmed by Dutch resistance and aerial reconnaissance.   But neither Eisenhower or Montgomery were dissuaded from the plan.

And so in the early dawn light of of September 17, 1944, some 34,000  airborne troops, the largest airborne drop yet attempted,  began dropping behind enemy lines. The US 101st Airborne under Maxwell Taylor dropped on Eindhoven, at Son and another small town called Veghel.   The 82nd Airborne under James Gavin would drop on Grave and Nijmegen and the British 1st Airborne under Roy Urquhart coupled with the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade under Stanislaw Sosaborski would have the job of capturing the bridge at Arnhem and another bridge at Oosterbeek.   Roughly 1/2 the troops came in by parachute and the other half arrived by glider.   Carrying all the men and supplies were 1500 C-47’s and about 3000 gliders.   The plan was so ambitious that not everything could be brought in on the first drop.  It would take 2 drops over 2 successive days to bring in all the men and supplies.

The Germans defending against this onslaught were still trying to recuperate from their massive defeat in Normandy where more than 250,000 Germans were either killed, captured, or wounded.  To try to organize the remaining forces, Hitler reinstated Field Marshall  Von Rundstedt on September 4 as the Commander in Chief of the West, a position from which Hitler had previously firied him on July 2 during the Normandy battle.    When Von Rundstedt returned, he replaced Field Marshall Walter Model who returned to a battlefield command .  Model was a rabid Nazi who unfortunately for the Allies was also an excellent, well qualified and nasty tactician with experience fighting from the front lines in in the East.  Model fought in nearly every battle during the long advance from Poland towards Moscow.   He learned how best to fight a defensive battle as the Russians pushed the Germans all the way back to Poland at which point he was transferred to France.   With Model, what the German’s lacked in men and supplies, they made up for in military brains and Model would make the Allies pay for every deficiency in the Allied planning.

Right from the start, the Allies were in trouble as a US officer who was killed in an glider landing gone bad was found by the Germans to be carrying a complete set of Battle Plans.   These ended up in Model’s hands within hours thus giving him a chance to concentrate his scarce resources where they could be put to most use.   Model initially thought the plans might be a ruse but he quickly gained confidence in the value of his intelligence coup as the Allied Armies began to show up exactly as his captured plans indicated.

There were many flaws in the plan but probably the biggest was the idea that Montgomery, a General with a long history of delaying action until he had overwhelming superiority in forces, was the right leader to charge down a single road into the teeth of whatever enemy might be lurking around the next corner, trying to block his progress.

The airborne troops met with varying degrees of success in the first few days.   The 101st Airborne, the furthest south captured the first  4 of its 5 assigned bridges.  But when they arrived at the bridge crossing the Son, it had been blown up.  This badly slowed the armored advance while a temporary bridge was erected.

North of the 101st, the 82nd Airborne, by D-Day +3, took the bridge near Grave as well as a bridge of the Maas-Waal Canal.   As part of this group, 508th Parachute Infantry Division landed near the the Nijmegen bridge.   But their drop zone was so far from the bridge that by the time they arrived at the bridge, the Germans had already reinforced it.    After a major fight, the bridge remained in German hands.  Eventually, on D-Day + 4 the 82nd Airborne would capture the Nijmegen bridge by attacking the bridge from both ends.  To accomplish this, troops were sent across the river in small wooden assault boats.  As the boats were unloaded of the trucks, they realized that although the boats had arrived, there were few paddles.   Using their rifle butts as paddles, they finally made it across the river and took control of the north side of the bridge.

Further north, the British 1st Airborne began dropping in the early afternoon on D-Day.    But their drop zone was also a long way from the bridge at Arnhem.     Pathetically, this division’s radios were not working which meant they were cut off from the rest of the world and from each other.   A small group in jeeps was sent racing towards the Arnhem bridge but they were stopped by a large blocking force of Germans who knew exactly where the British had landed and their objective.

Over the course of the next 8 days, the Allies would try to keep pushing  XXXth Corps up the road first passing through the 101st area, then to the area held by the 82nd Airborne and then ultimately to Arnhem and the waiting British 1st Airborne division which had been reinforced by the Poles on D-Day +5

But in the end, XXXth Corps would only make it as far as Nijmegen before it became apparent that they could advance no further.  On D-Day + 9, the surviving British and Polish Airborne troops in Arnhem made an escape back towards Nijmegen.  Arnhem and its bridge  would forever become known as “The Bridge Too Far”.

The aftermath of Operation Market-Garden was not pretty.   When the operation was launched, the Dutch railroad went on strike in defiance of the Germans in control of Holland at the time.   As a reprisal, the Germans stopped all food deliveries throughout the winder of 1944-45.  This winter became known as the Hungerwinter in Holland during which time more than 20,000 Dutch starved to death.

As a footnote, a Canadian Officer named Farley Mowat, in the spring of 1945, along with a small group of other intelligence officers, crossed enemy lines to meet with the German General Baskowitz to discuss food drops to the Dutch.   Baskowitz, who realized that Germany at this point was unlikely to win the war, finally agreed and shortly thereafter, bombers filled with food bundles began dropping food all over Holland to the starving Dutch.    Mowat would return to Canada after the war to become one of Canada’s most famous authors.

The Port of Antwerp was finally opened to allied shipping in November of 1944 and became a prime target for Hitler.   Antwerp is the only city on the continent of Europe to be bombed with V2  rockets as the Germans were desperate to close this deep water port to the allies.   Antwerp was also the target destination for Model once again when he launched what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Eventually the Allies would cross the Rhine.   At Remagen on March 7 (Bradley), at Oppenheim on March 23 (Patton) and near Rees on March 23 (Montgomery).

Patton, always ready to put on a good show for the press, walked across the Rhine on a pontoon bridge with cameramen in tow.   As he set foot for the first time in Germany proper on the east bank of the river, he reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt in each hand.   Then, raising his hands and paraphrasing William the Conquerer after the Battle of Hastings, he said, “By the spender of God!  I have seized Germany with my two hands”.