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”.

Peleliu is part of the Caroline Island Archipelago, the largest of which is the Island of Palau.

In September of 1944, American military planners settled on Peleliu as the next invasion target as they island hopped towards Japan.   The island had  a functioning runway which gave it some strategic importance, but this invasion has gone down in history as one of the ones that historians often cite as being an avoidable waste of lives.    Measuring just 6 square miles, Peleliu has gone down in history as one of costliest battles of the Pacific with more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese soldiers killed in the Battle that lasted 73 days.

The Japanese, changing tactics after studying their previous defeats where they tried to engage the invading Americans on the beaches, decided to allow uncontested beach landings.  Their new plan was to attack from dug-in positions once the Americans had come ashore.     The entire island was turned into a maze of underground bunkers and camouflaged firing positions.   Unfortunately the attacking Americans knew nothing about this and walked into a murderous cross-fire.

In a lesson that might well be remembered by our current government as they discuss the effectiveness of bombing ISIS, the US military launched a massive air attack on Peleliu in the week before September 15.  Firing on this tiny 6 sq. mile island were the battleships Pennsylvania, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee and Idaho, heavy cruisers Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Minneapolis, and Portland, and light cruisers Cleveland, Denver and Honolulu.   The bombardment from these ships only stopped so that planes from 19 aircraft carriers of various sizes could drop bombs on the island.    In excess of 10,000 tons  of shells and bombs slammed into the island.  The Admiral in charge thought for sure that no Japanese could survive to fight effectively.   The reality was that hardly a single Japanese soldier had been killed because of the depth of the caves in which they had taken refuge.  The Japanese planes at the airfield were destroyed but none of the underground fortifications were knocked out, leaving the Japanese completely ready to ambush the US forces as they landed on the island.

On D-Day, the Marines who piled into their landing craft were in for a nasty surprise.   As the landing craft approached the beaches, the Japanese opened fire from fortified positions from above and at both ends of the beach, catching  the Marines into a murderous crossfire.  In less than 1 hour, more than 60 landing craft  were destroyed.   After the first day, the Marines held 2 miles of beach and little else, at a cost of 1,100 men.   Somehow, the Marine commanders still thought that the Japanese were all but defeated and that they would crumble at any second.

72 days later, the island was declared as having been cleared of Japanese.

One interesting thing happened on Peleliu that was to have great impact on future island invasions and eventually on how battles would be fought in Europe.    The fighting was so difficult on Peleliu and the Marines on the ground became so frustrated with their commanders that they decided to finally take matters into their own hands.   Its hard to believe given today’s technology but in 1944, the men on the ground had no way to communicate directly with the hundreds of aircraft buzzing above their heads.   The pilots in their fighters were sent out to look for Japanese targets on the ground but were often afraid to fire near the front lines for fear of hitting their own troops.   At the time, the only communication from ground to air was accomplished by placing large orange panels, often shaped like an arrow, which would point towards the Japanese position.   No one thought to provide a radio with a direct link from the fighting ground troops directly to the pilots in their planes.   Radio communications went back to the offshore ships, then from Marine radio operators to Naval Aviation radiomen and then back to the planes.    This took about 5 minutes and if the pilot had a question, another 10 minutes to ask his question and then get his answer.

On Peleliu the Marines and Navy Pilots came up with the solution.   Pilots with radios were sent onto the island to act as forward air controllers.   Pilots volunteered for this duty because they first thought that only a pilot could give precise enough instructions to other pilots about where to bomb to avoid friendly fire casualties.   Eventually the job of a forward air controller was devised and training provided so that Army and Marine radiomen could provide the quick instructions.  In retrospect, it seems hard to believe that this was not already standard practice.   This fast communication with the ability to quickly hit targets proved very successful and became common practice as the island hopping campaign continued on to Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

8 Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to the men on Peleliu.   Only 1 lived to receive the medal in person.

The Commanding General of the Marines on Peleliu (General Roy Geiger) was one of America’s great fighting Generals of the War.  He was in command on Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942 and again in charge of the invasion of Guam during July of 1944.   And then again in Peleliu in September of 1944.  Geiger then led the Marines on Okinawa in June of 1945 and assumed command of the Tenth Army when Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner was killed in action.    To this day, Geiger is the only Marine officer to command a US Army in the field.

After D-Day, military planners knew that the Allied armies in France were going to need huge quantities of fuel to power the tremendous number of planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps and every other type of vehicle imaginable as the Allied armies fought their way across France and into Germany.

“Running out of gas” was a bad idea.

Using tankers to carry fuel to the French coast was thought to be too dangerous due to the ever-present U-Boat threat.   Additionally, the US tanker fleet was desperately needed in the Pacific to supply the huge armada of Allied forces spread across great distances in the fight against Japan.

The solution turned out to be “Pluto” or Pipe Lines Under The Ocean.   Today, no one thinks twice about laying a pipeline under the ocean.  But in the 1940’s, no such technology existed and it had never been done before.

So beginning in 1942, the British started a project to see if it was possible.  Involving engineers from both the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Iraq Petroleum Company, several methods were tried.  The final design was to take 1000 meter lengths of a soft steel, welded together and then spool them onto a giant floating 30 ft diameter drum.   The drum would be towed across the English channel slowly unspooling the 3 in diameter steel pipe as it went.

After successfully testing the concept across the River Clyde in Scotland and then again across the Bristol Channel, they were ready to go.   On August 12, 1944, the first pipeline was laid in just 10 hours to Cherbourg in Normandy.   On either end, pump houses were built and camouflaged inside buildings made to look like anything but a pumping station.  Some of the pump houses were made to look like ice cream factories or even small houses so as not to attract the attention of German bombers.

By the end of the war, the Allies had laid down 18 pipelines across the English Channel and managed to pump nearly 200 million gallons of fuel to the advancing armies.   By VE Day, the pipelines had been extended to run all the way across France to the Rhine.

Watch the short youtube video about the project at the link below:

http://bit.ly/1tOtoKh