23 February 2015 is the 70th anniversary of the raising of the US Flag on Mt. Suribachi on the tiny island of Iwo Jima.

Fighting our way to Iwo Jima had already taken a herculean effort.  After Pearl Harbor, the Empire of Japan seemed unstoppable and the news only came in one kind….  bad.   Wake Island fell to the Japanese on 23 December 1941.   On 9 April 1942, the American troops surrendered on Bataan.  Nearly 90,000 Phiippino and US troops surrendered in what was the largest surrender of US troops since the Civil War.  A month later, Corregidor fell to the Japanese.  On 15 May 1942, Burma fell.  The expansion continued with Hong Kong, Borneo, and Singapore.   By 31 August 1942, the Caroline Islands, the Gilberts,  the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Solomon Islands would all be occupied and controlled by the Japanese.  The Japanese even bombed Darwin in Australia on 19 February 1942.   The Japanese had already occupied much of China.  Was Australia next?

Although the Japanese would suffer a serious set back at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, it was only after a terrible fight on Guadalcanal that began in August of 1942 and ended in February of 1943 that the US and its allies could finally stop Japanese expansion.  The fight on Guadalcanal took a tremendous toll on the US Navy and Marines.   Two aircraft carriers were lost, the Wasp (15 September 1942) and the Hornet (27 October 1942).   This left only the USS Enterprise functioning in the entire Pacific.   And it too was damaged before the end of the year.   The situation was so bad that news of the loss of the Hornet was only made public in January of 1943 after several new aircraft carriers started to come into service.

Thus beginning in early 1943, after successfully beating the Japanese on Guadalcanal, the long island hopping campaign towards Japan could begin.   But it was a long and bloody affair.  More than 30 island invasions were undertaken with more than 70,000 killed and 300,000 wounded.   As the allies closed in on Japan, the Japanese became more and more desperate and more and more fanatical.  In many instances, rather than surrender and after they were out of ammunition, they would often charge the US lines in Banzai charges.   First at night but then also during the day, with swords drawn, they often charged into the US lines.   There was no surrender.   It was “kill or be killed”.

At Saipan, things would take an even darker turn.    Beginning on 15 June 1944 and for the next three weeks,  71,000 Marines fought it out against a force of 31,000 Japanese.   When it was over24,000 Japanese soldiers were dead and another 5,000 had committed suicide.   But 3500 Marines also lay dead with another 10,000 injured including the actor, Lee Marvin.

In one final banzai charge, some 3,000 Japanese ran towards the US lines.  Behind them came all the wounded, some only barely able to walk.  Some on crutches.  The US front line was over run and 2 army divisions were almost totally wiped out with some 650 killed and wounded.  The attack lasted more than 15 hours after which more than 4,000 Japanese lay dead.   Three men were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, all posthumously.

To the Marines, Navy and Army personnel who participated in this, what must they have been thinking?   How much worse could it get?

Sadly it could get a lot worse.  Six months after Saipan, it was now time to invade Iwo Jima,    Over the course of 5 weeks beginning on 19 February 1945, 70,000 Marines took on 22,000 Japanese.   The Japanese had dug more than 11 miles of tunnels dug into the hills, the coral, and the sand of an island that only measures 8 square miles.

At the southern tip of the island stood the islands largest feature, Mt. Suribachi at 500 ft. above sea level.

Following a massive bombardment that lasted for hours from both naval artillery and bombers, the first of 30,000 Marines landed on the south east side of the island.   The landing was uneventful and the Marines thought that perhaps all the Japanese died in the bombardment.   Successive waves of Marines landed behind the first wave as the Japanese were waiting for just the right moment to open fire.   The Marines were caught in a withering cross fire of Japanese artillery, mortar and machine gun fire.   It was impossible to dig a fox hole due to the soft sand.  All they could do was move forward which took them into more direct lines of fire from the hidden Japanese.  Making things worse, US tanks also driving off the beach began to run over Marines who could not get out the way.   By the end of the first day, the US had already suffered more than 2400 casualties.  Progress was made yard by yard as the Marines moved across the island as well as south towards Mt. Suribachi.   Only the prodigious use of flame throwers could suppress the gun fire coming from the well Japanese positions.   The battlefield looked like a World War I battlefield with the massive use of artillery turning the entire area into a killing zone where bodies could only be identified by fragments of their uniforms.

One Navy Chaplain, Gage Hotaling, recalled burying “fifty at a time” in bulldozed plots where the bodies were so mangled that he had no idea if the men were Jewish or Catholic or something else.   He attended to 1800 burials himself.

John Bradley,  a Navy Medic, found himself in the middle of all of this trying to save the wounded.   On the second day of the fight Bradley ran out into the open field to save a badly wounded Marine.   He managed to apply field dressings and was able to pull him back to safety.   For his efforts, he was awarded the Navy Cross.      But the emotional scar left behind from the fight kept Bradley from ever talking about Iwo Jima with his family.

On the second day, the Navy finally landed a large number of tanks which provided the Marines with some cover from the machine guns as they began to advance towards Mt. Suribachi.

The Marines also benefited from a new technical development.  Finally, after numerous island invasions, someone had figured out that if the men on the ground were in direct radio contact with fighters circling above, then those fighters could actually be called upon directly to swoop down and attack enemy positions with immediate effect.   Readers today will shake their head and wonder how such a seemingly obvious arrangement had not previously been implemented.  But shockingly, it was totally uncommon for pilots to talk directly to ground troops or for the pilots to send a forward air observer to speak directly to them and call in targets of opportunity.  In fact, the only reason that it happened at all was because the pilots and Marines were all living together on the Navy ships.  Finally, in frustration, some pilots and Marines began to talk about improving tactics.  The end result was to give the pilots and Marines radios set to the same frequency so that they could talk to each other directly.    Prior to this. the Marines had to radio for help back to the ship.  On board the ship, the Marine radio operator had to write down the request for assistance and hand it to the Navy person who was in radio communication with the pilot.  Only then was a request sent to a pilot to fire on a certain location.   This often 10 minutes or more by which time the situation could be completely different.

On D-Day+4, 41 men were working their way towards the summit of Mt. Suribachi.   They had been given a  flag and told by their Colonel  that should they reach the summit, they should raise the flag.    Each of the 41 men thought that their next step forward was going to be their last step.  But finally they made it to the top and began looking for a way to raise the flag.   Unknown to them, every person on the island and every person onboard the several hundred ships with a view began to watch the drama unfold.  The men attached the flag to a pipe and Lt. Schrier, Sgt. Thomas, Sgt. Hansen, Cpl. Lindberg, and Pt. Charlo raised the flag.    Suddenly they could hear the cheers from the Marines below them and ships off shore began to blow their horns.    The Japanese noticed this too and immediately opened fire on the men at the summit.  As they dove for cover, the photographer, a Sgt. Lowry, broke his camera but not before he took this picture below:

Onboard one of the ships, Navy Secretary James Forrestal was watching with Marine General Holland Smith.   Somehow Forrestal got it into his head that he wanted the flag as a souvenir.   But the Colonel who had sent the men up the hill in the first place, also wanted the flag so he ordered that another group of men should take another flag up to the top of the summit before Forrestal could lay claim to it.   And Colonel Chandler Johnson ordered his men to take “a much bigger flag” to replace the one he wanted.

They say that the 2nd flag had flown from a ship that was sunk at Pearl Harbor.   No one is really sure if that is true but it was carried to the summit by Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, Harlon Block, Mike Strank and Rene Gagnon.    An AP photographer, Joe Rosenthal happened to hear that another flag was on its way up and he decided to tag along.   On the way up, the group with the 2nd flag and Rosenthal passed St. Lowry who had just taken his picture and who was heading down to replace his smashed camera.

Almost immediately upon reaching the summit, Rosenthal realized that the 2nd flag was about to raised and he quickly jumped into position.   The 2nd group of flag raisers had also attached their flag to piece of pipe but because of the size of the flag and the strong breeze, it took all of them to manhandle the pipe into the vertical position.   Just as they were pushing the pole upwards, Rosenthal snapped his iconic image.

The photo would become the most reproduced photo of World War II.  Rosenthal would earn a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

It has been reproduced in many forms the most important of which is the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington Cemetery outside Washington, DC.  The original mold is located on the grounds of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas.

Sadly, within just a few days, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank were all killed in action.   Gagnon, Hayes and Bradley became celebrities and toured the country with a model of the flag raising that was used in the largest and most successful war bond drive of the entire war, raising more than $26 Billion, twice the goal.

Ira Hayes, following the war, suffered from what we now call PTSD.  He developed a heavy drinking problem and died in 1955.  Tony Curtis played Ira in a movie called The Outsiders in 1961 and Johnny Cash recorded a song about him called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes”.   Rene Gagnon returned to Iwo Jima on the 20th anniversary of the battle in 1965.   He passed away in 1979.

John Bradley never talked about his war time experiences with his family.  EVER.  He only gave one interview, in 1985, about the subject.  When he passed away in 1994 his son James knew almost nothing about his fathers experiences during the war.   It was a taboo subject when he was growing up.  Eventually he found a trunk at home with some of his father’s things from the war and only then began to think about learning more about it.  He went on to publish a book “Flags of our Fathers” in 2000.   Clint Eastwood used the book to inspire a movie with the same name in 2006.

Iwo Jima was the only battle in the entire Pacific Campaign  where US casualties exceeded Japanese dead.  26,000 Americans were killed or wounded on Iwo Jima with another 10,000 Navy personnel killed or wounded in the surrounding ships from Japanese attacks from the air including Kamikaze attacks.  Of the 22,000 Japanese, only around 200 were taken prisoner, almost all of these were captured after being knocked unconscious during the fighting.

Iwo Jima was still not the end of the Japanese Empire.   Okinawa was invaded on 1 June 1945.   Over the next six weeks, more than 50,000 Americans were killed or wounded on the island and another 15,000 were killed or wounded in the waters surrounding the island on the Navy ships.   More than 110,00 Japanese soldiers were killed and another 100,000 Japanese civilians also perished, often by suicide.

Compared to Okinawa, Iwo Jima suddenly started to look like a picnic.   And every single American in the Pacific began to look at an upcoming invasion of the Japanese Home Islands thinking that none of them (neither American or Japanese)  would ever survive it.

Luckily for them all,  at a number of undisclosed locations around the US, very clever people were at work on a device which they hoped would be so horrific that it would force the end of the war.   It took using two of them, but it finally brought Japan to their senses and no invasion of Japan would occur.

Over the course of WW II, nearly 400,000 US servicemen would be killed.   This number is roughly split 50/50 between the Pacific and Europe.   Iwo Jima was the only battle where US casualties exceeded Japanese casualties and nearly 1/4 of all Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to Marines in the Pacific were awarded to men on Iwo Jima.   27 awards were made, 14 of them posthumously.

John Basilone was killed on Iwo Jima on the first day.  He received both the Congressional Medal of Honor (Guadalcanal) and the Navy Cross. (Iwo Jima).   He was the only Marine enlisted man to receive both awards.

 

These words as spoken by Sir Arthur Harris, often referred to as “Bomber” Harris or sometimes in a less friendly fashion as “Butcher” Harris, sealed the fate of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, Dresden.

Exactly 70 years ago, over the period from 13 to 15 February, 1945, more than 700 RAF and 500 US bombers, in four raids, dropped nearly 4,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on a city that has often been referred to as “Florence on the Elbe”.  By the time it was over, the bombing and the firestorm it created had decimated an area measuring more nearly 2 miles x 2 miles in the city center and killed nearly 25,000 people.

By February of 1945, area bombing, sometimes referred to as carpet bombing, was not new to the Allied effort.  What was new and what has created its own “ethical firestorm” is that Dresden was known for its incredible baroque architecture and its pretty location along the banks of the Elbe.  This fact, multiplied by the resulting firestorm that killed nearly 25,000 people, multiplied by its proximity to the end of the war in Europe, multiplied by well intentioned people from the UK and the US who have since made apologetic comments about the harshness of the deed, and finally multiplied by the German need to grasp upon any deed that might seem excessive by the Allies so as to allow Germans to feel that they were a “victim”, has turned the bombing of Dresden into a symbol for the suffering of German civilians during the war.   A symbol for those who lived beneath a barrage of anonymous bombs dropped at night by the British RAF and by day by the US Air Force.    A symbol for the deaths of perhaps 500,000 German civilians at the hands of Bomber Command, and its leader, “Bomber” Harris.

Harris took over as the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command in February 1942.   He was promoted into the position after the British realized that their efforts to properly bomb targets up to this point had been woefully inadequate.   Through the first 2 years of the war, only 1/3 of all bombers had gotten within 5 miles of their intended targets before dropping their bombs.  Harris was brought in to fix it.

At the same time, Churchill’s War Cabinet had been debating how best to employ its growing force of Lancaster and Wellington bombers.  Churchill’s personal scientific advisor, Professor Lindemann, had penned a policy paper that advocated carpet bombing or area bombing of German cities as a way to break the moral of the German people and hasten the end of the war.  The War Cabinet adopted the plan and Harris was tasked to carry it out.

He stated at the beginning of his tenure at Bomber Command,

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Harris’ initial results were also disappointing.   But gradually the number and quality of the British bombers improved as did their technical abilities.   At the same time, the Luftwaffe’s technical and numerical advantages were slowly overcome.

Harris was an advocate for launching huge raids on specific targets.  His idea was to overwhelm the German defenses at  a given location by launching 1000 plane raids against a specific target.  His first 1000 plane raid was launched against Cologne on 30 May 1942 with devastating results.

With better navigational aids and new technology employed to fool the German night fighters, results continued to improve.   Harris was promoted to Air Marshall.  He, and many other influential high-ranking Allied commanders began to believe that their carpet bombing strategy just might force the Germans to an early surrender.

Harris boldly proclaimed pending victory against the Germans in August of 1943 after the devastating bombing of Hamburg.    In the last few days of July of 1943, the British and US Air force carpet bombed Hamburg, exactly as they would carpet bomb Dresden.   Perhaps 40,000 civilians died in Hamburg in a firestorm that engulfed nearly the entire city center.   A vortex of super-heated air created a tornado of fire that reached up to 1500 feet into the sky.  The men in the bombers had never seen this before as it was totally unexpected.   The clear weather, improving skill of the Pathfinders and the use of a new radar system by the Pathfinders known as H2S all worked to make the bombing more effective.   The Hamburg raid also employed, for the first time, a new innovation called “Window”.   We know it today as “chaff”;  small strips of aluminum dropped by the bombers and designed to interfere with German radar.   The raid resulted in considerable damage to the German arms industry and was considered a huge success.

As often happens, there were unintended consequences of the raid on Hamburg.   Only 15 km south of Hamburg’s city center was a concentration camp called Neuengamme.  The SS opened the camp in 1938 to house political prisoners but its purpose was soon expanded to house the usual cast of Nazi targets that invariably perished in droves in camps such as this all over Germany.  Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, political prisoners and POW’s were all worked to death in wretched conditions at Neuengamme itself but also at dozens of sub-camps all over the area.  After the Hamburg bombing, hundreds of prisoners were sent to clear the rubble and bury the dead.  None of them ever returned to the camp.

Neuengamme records show 106,000 people arriving.   By wars end, 55,000 had been worked to death or simply murdered.  The number that were murdered while clearing rubble in Hamburg is unknown.

Churchill was not a big fan of area bombing and his public statements during this time maintained that Bomber Command was attacking industrial targets.   He said that any civilian casualties were unintentional but were unavoidable.    After the success of the Hamburg raid, Harris and others urged the War Cabinet to be more honest with the public with regards to the real strategy of the bombing campaign.   Notes from the War Cabinet meetings at the time indicate that Harris argued that:

the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive…should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany.

… the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.[

In November of 1943, Harris began attacking Berlin with 1000 plane raids in the hopes of duplicating the success of Hamburg.  But Berlin was far better defended and much further away from England forcing the bombers to carry fewer bombs and more fuel for the round trip.   German fighter coverage was much better over Berlin and the city itself was defended by a series of large “flak towers”.  These towers proved to be virtually indestructible to bombs and held dozens of anti-aircraft guns.   The RAF and USAF were unable to ignite a firestorm in Berlin but instead suffered terrible losses in aircraft.   Over several months, the Allied loses exceeded 1000 bombers shot down and more than 1500 heavily damaged.   Often more than 10% of the attacking force was being shot down on each raid.   The losses were unsustainable with most of the damage resulting from anti-aircraft fire from the flak towers.

Visitors to Berlin today can still see these structures as they proved too difficult and too strong to dismantle after the war.   Its possible to tour the interior as well too see for yourself the Nazi love affair with concrete and high strength carbon steel rebar.

Despite Bomber Command not being able to bring the war to a close through carpet bombing, there is no doubt that the effort had a huge impact on the Nazi war effort.   After the war, Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Supply wrote that were it not for the bombing campaign, up to ten thousand additional deadly 88 mm guns would have been available as anti-tank weapons on both the eastern and western fronts where they already had a reputation for cutting through allied tanks like a hot knife through butter.  In recognition of this, Stalin awarded Harris the Order of Suvorov in February of 1944.  The US awarded Harris the Legion of Merit in January o f 1945.

Prior to D-Day, Harris and Bomber Command were pulled off their carpet bombing mission.  For a time they were given the mission of bombing French rail yards to make it more difficult for the Germans to send reinforcements to counter the coming allied invasion.   But after D-Day, Bomber Command returned to the mission of area bombing over Germany to progressively cause as much destruction and dislocation of German industrial and economic centers as possible.

Ultra intercepts from Bletchley Park where the Allies, under Alan Turing’s direction,  were breaking the German’s Enigma codes indicated that the Germans were beginning to suffer from serious fuel shortages.   So after D-Day, Harris was told to target these facilities with some success.  But the Germans were producing fuel from coal in small facilities all over Germany, even on railway cars, making it difficult to significantly impact fuel production.   Eventually targeting was switched to include more and more rail yards.  This proved increasingly effective at destroying the German fuel supply by making it more and more difficult to transport coal from the Ruhr to wherever the Germans had hidden the synthetic fuel manufacturing facilities.

Thus we come to February of 1945, a time during which the Russians were beginning to close on the final barrier that separated the Russian armies from Berlin, the Oder River that today separates Germany from Poland.

After the Russians crossed the Vistula and captured Warsaw on January 17, their pace of advance increased as the German armies retreated.   Krakow was captures on 19 January 1945.   8 days later, on 27 January 1945, Auschwitz was liberated.   The Russians soon pushed into Lower Silesia, then part of Germany, forcing thousands upon thousands of German civilians to flee to the west.

German refugees flooded across the Oder River ahead of the Russian army.    Dresden, located some 200 km south of Berlin had been relatively unscathed by the war.  Its rail yards were relatively intact and tens of thousands of Germans were streaming west as fast as they could to get away from the approaching Russian army.

On the night of the Dresden attack, the RAF issued the following memo to the airmen who participated:

Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas. At one time well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance…. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.

The original plan was to send the USAF to Dresden during the day on 13 February 1945 but bad weather over Europe scratched the daytime raid.  Thus it was left to the British to carry out the first raid that night.   The plan was for a double attack.  The first wave would be followed by a second wave three hours later specifically to target the fire crews who by then would be well engaged in fighting the fires from the first wave.

The first wave of 254 Lancasters hit the city at 22:14.  By 22:22 the attack was complete with close of 900 tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs.   The second wave of nearly 500+ Lancasters and Wellingtons hit the city at 01:21 on 14 February 1945 and dropped more than 1800 tons of bombs.  (In an earlier article I describe one of my uncles as being a Pathfinder in this second wave).

Later that same day, 300+ B-17’s in two groups dropped 700 tons of bombs on Dresden beginning at 12:17 and continuing for more than hour.

Of the total of nearly 800 RAF bombers hitting Dresden, only six were lost, three of which were hit by bombers dropping bombs from higher altitudes and hitting other RAF planes below them.   Only a single B-17 was lost during the daytime raids by the USAF.

On the ground, the results were devastating.   The old city was engulfed in a huge firestorm.  By the time the fires were extinguished, the RAF was able to conclude that one quarter of the industrial buildings and half of the rest were destroyed.  Some 78000 houses and apartments were destroyed.   Total deaths were around 25000 people, most of whom suffocated as the firestorm consumed all the oxygen.

Kurt Vonnegut, a US soldier during WW2, was thrown into combat during the Battle of the Bulge.   Like many others, he was captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp in Dresden where he would experience the fire bombing first hand.  He survived after taking refuge in an underground slaughterhouse which the Germans had converted into prison cells.   The guards called the building Schlachthof Funf (Slaughterhouse Five).  After the bombing, Vonnegut was put to work by the Germans gathering up corpses from underground cellars which had not protected their occupants.   Many of Vonnegut’s books are centered around his experiences in Dresden.

The firebombing of Dresden became a rallying point for people who thought the Allies and Harris had gone too far with their bombing campaign even before the war ended.   Somehow the allied attack on Dresden, known by all to be a cultural gem, seemed excessive, especially to those in the intellectual circles in the UK and US.   The Associated Press published an article describing the event as a terror bombing.

However you view it, this was the last city that the allies in Europe were to fire bomb.  But in Japan, by wars end, 67 cities received the same treatment, only made worse by the much larger bombing capacity of the B-29 compared to the B-17 and the prevalent use of wood in Japanese construction methods.  Curtis LeMay, the US General in charge of the Air Force in the Pacific, had learned from Bomber Harris.

Immediately after the war, the controversy would only increase.  Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee as Prime Minister in a new Labor government that immediately began questioning the belligerent policies of Harris and Churchill.   Churchill was already speaking out against the new threat of a communist takeover of Europe.   Attlee’s government tried to marginalize Churchill by using Dresden as an example of Churchill’s war mongering, a charge that the Labor party had leveled against Churchill in the 1930’s as Churchill spoke out against Hitler.

Bomber Harris retired in September of 1946 and soon published his story about Bomber Command’s achievements in the book “Bomber Offensive”.

In the book he wrote about Dresden:

I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.

In a dispute with the Attlee government over awarding the members of Bomber Command with a separate medal after the war, Harris became furious and refused a peerage in 1946.   He was thus the sole commander-in-chief not to become a peer.    In post-war Europe, this made it seem, even more so, that the government thought Harris had “gone too far” with the bombing campaign.

When Winston Churchill was returned to office as the Prime Minister in 1953, he insisted that Harris accept a peerage and “Bomber Harris” became “Sir Arthur Harris”.

But this did not quiet the controversy.    Indeed over the years it has only grown and seems to have become a source of fuel for Germans who believe that the Dresden bombing was “excessive” and therefore they too were “victims” during the war.   Somehow Dresden’s fate is separated from the fate of the dozens of cities and towns and millions of civilians murdered by the Nazis.

The city has now been almost completely rebuilt to its former glory.   The nearly destroyed old town has been nearly completely rebuilt with the odd exception of the Jewish synagogue, built in 1838, that stood on the edge of the old town but was burned down and destroyed not by the allied bombing but on Kristalnacht on the night of 9 November 1938.   The bill for the removal of the rubble of the old synagogue was given to the Jewish community of Dresden.   Its not clear if they paid it before they were subsequently murdered.

The most famous of the buildings to be rebuilt in the old town is the  Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady).  A German born American biologist whose family escaped from Lower Silesia through Dresden in those last closing days of the war became interested in seeing the church and other buildings rebuilt.  Gunter Blobel took an active role in the 1990’s to raise money for this purpose.  Blobel won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of signal peptides in 1999.   He donated the entire award towards the building of the church and of a new synagogue in Dresden.

Today the Frauenkirche has been returned to its former glory and stands as a symbol of the rebuilding of Dresden.   Many of the original large stones that were knocked down in 1945 were reused in the construction of the church.   These old stones are black in color compared to the lighter tan new stones.

Many of the rebuilt structures are well worth a trip to Dresden to view.  In addition to the Frauenkirche, the Dresden Opera House is a must-see.

Too many to bury

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today (February 03, 2015), in Washington DC, Congress awarded a Gold Medal to members of the World War II era 1st Special Service Force, otherwise known as the Devil’s Brigade.  The Congressional Gold Medal is awarded to persons “who have performed an achievement that has an impact on American history and culture that is likely to be recognized as a major achievement in the recipient’s field long after the achievement”.   The Medal can be awarded to both citizens and non-citizens of the US.

This combat unit of Americans and Canadians, pulled together under a unified joint command fought in the Aleutian Islands, Italy and southern France.   Their history is quite unique and interesting.

All the special forces that exist today in the Canadian and US military can trace their lineage back to the time when the 1st SSF was formed.   At the start of World War II, the British foresaw a need for fast hard-hitting highly trained commandos.   A whole series of units were formed from elite forces and usually lead by officers who themselves had a vision on how to attack the enemy as hard as possible in a time when resources were scarce.  The first groups  to be formed were a series of Commando Units in the British Forces whose job it was to undertake raids into French coastal towns that had fallen under German control.   From the success of the Commando units, came the Special Air Service  (SAS) which initially was tasked with operating behind the lines in occupied North Africa.  In 1940, the British also formed the Special Boat Service (SBS) which initially saw action in the Mediterranean.

When France fell to the Germans in the spring of 1940, Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying that British Forces, both military and clandestine, would “set the Continent on fire”.   He envisioned that all of these special forces groups would lead the way.   Perhaps their most famous raid came in March of 1942 when commandos filled the old HMS Campbeltown (provided by the US under Lend-Lease and originally named USS Buchanan) with delayed action explosives and rammed it into the huge dry dock gates at St. Nazaire on the French coast.   St. Nazaire was not only a large U-Boat base but also had the largest dry-dock on the continent, something the Germans would find useful for repairing their large battleships like the Turpitz or Prinz Eugen.    Of the raiding force of over 600 men, only 228 returned safely to England.   Around 170 were killed and 200 more were taken prisoner.   But a few hours after their ammunition ran out and the attackers were forced to surrender, the Campbeltown blew up killing more than 300 Germans and knocking out the dry dock for the duration of the war.   Nearly 100 military decorations were awarded to the men who took part in the raid including five Victoria Crosses.

With the US entry into the war at the end of 1941, the US military began to develop its own special forces.   General Lucian Truscott, with assistance from the British General Staff, proposed the formation of an American Unit along the lines of the British Commandos.   In May of 1942, Captain William Darby was given command of what became known as Darby’s Rangers.   These Rangers trained in Scotland alongside the British Commando units and became the first US ground forces in combat in Europe.    Forty-four enlisted men and 5 officers were dispersed among the 5000 Canadians and 1000 British soldiers that attacked Dieppe on 19 August 1942.   Despite the terrible cost of the raid, the raiders returned to England with parts from a German radar station and other intelligence.   There is some speculation that Ian Fleming may also have been involved in the planning of the raid as part of an effort to grab a new German 4-rotor Enigma machine which was then coming into service.   The extra rotor in the Enigma complicated the efforts of the British code breakers at Bletchley Park.  Suddenly the cryptologists were to be unable to crack the codes.   Therefore getting their hands on a 4-rotor Enigma was a high priority.   History now shows that Bletchley was unable to crack the 4-rotor design until December of 1944 thus making it unlikely that they were able to grab one in Dieppe in August.

The cost of the Dieppe raid was staggering to the allies.   Of the 5000 Canadians who attacked that day, 3367 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.  Of the 1000 British Commandos, nearly 250 were lost.   The Royal Navy lost a destroyer and 33 landing craft with over 500 dead and wounded.  The RAF lost 106 planes while the Luftwaffe only lost 48.   The German Army suffered under 600 casualties.   Three Victoria Crosses were award for the operation including one to Reverend John Foote, a padre in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.    Another went to Colonel Charles Merritt of the South Saskatchewan Regiment.   Merritt was taken prisoner at Dieppe  and subsequently sent to a POW camp in Bavaria.  He, along with 64 others escaped the camp through a 120 ft tunnel in June of 1943.   He was recaptured soon afterwards but his other escape attempts eventually landed him Colditz Castle, a POW camp to which the Germans sent a great number of allied soldiers who were classified as “escape artists”.

Encouraged by the results of the British Commandos, General George Marshall agreed to form a US version.   Their initial project was to land a force in the Norwegian mountains and create a base of operations there from which to harass the Germans who were occupying Norway.   The plans were moved along even to the point of asking the US car company Studebaker to design and build a cargo carrier for use in the deep Norwegian snow.   Studebaker completed the design of the M29 Weasel which was to be deployed as part of the project.

Eisenhower and Marshall badly wanted to put US forces into action against the Germans and pressed for the Norwegian operation to move forward.   But a lot of logistical problems existed.  The primary problem was that the troops would need to be dropped by parachute into Norway and the planes to do this simply did not exist.  Furthermore, all resupply would need to come from the air and again, the planes were simply unavailable at this point in the war.   Col. Robert Frederick, the officer working on the plans eventually realized that all the goals of the operation could be achieved by simply bombing the Norwegian targets, thereby avoiding the need for the Norwegian base in the first place.   But the planning for the mission got Marshall and Eisenhower thinking of a need for trained troops who could fight in the snow.

In July of 1942, Canada’s Minister of Defense, James Ralston,  signed off on a plan which envisioned a joint command of both American and Canadian officers.  The goal was to train the troops to become experts in fighting in winter conditions.  Ralston agreed to send nearly 700 men including officers to train alongside an equal number of Americans and as many Norwegians as they could locate and entice to join.   In the end, the scarcity of Norwegians resulted in the force being half American and half Canadian.    The combined unit would train at Fort William Henry Harrison in Helena, Montana.   The force was made up of 3 regiments, each with a Lt. Colonel in command and 32 offices with 385 men.  Each regiment had 2 battalions.  Each battalion had 3 companies and each company had 3 platoons.

The men were highly trained at the insistence of Frederick in night fighting techniques and close hand to hand combat.  He insisted that they be trained in the use of explosives for demolition, for amphibious warfare, rock climbing, mountain warfare and as ski troops.   Part of their conditioning included 60 mile marches which one battalion managed to complete in just under 20 hours.

Hand to hand combat training was stressed to the point that each man was issued a specially designed combat knife.  A Canadian, Patrick O’Neill,  who already had become an expert in dispatching the enemy with a knife was assigned to teach these skills to the entire unit.

Frederick himself designed the blade of this knife with the idea that his men could use it to silently eliminate the enemy during a night operation.

The unit patch was a red arrowhead with USA written horizontally and Canada written vertically.

After training for an entire year, the 1st SSF was deployed to the Aleutians in August of 1943 as part of the task force that was to retake the island of Kiska which had been occupied by the Japanese during the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  Upon arrival, the invasion force found that the Japanese had voluntarily evacuated Kiska and the island was retaken without a shot fired.

With the cancellation of the planned insertion of the 1st SSF into Norway, the unit found itself without a mission until General Mark Clark came into the picture.  Clark was in command of the US troops fighting in Italy and he was desperately short of combat troops.   By the summer of 1943, most US troops were either earmarked for use in the upcoming cross-channel landings scheduled for 1944 or were being sent to the Pacific.  The Italian campaign was being run on a shoestring and Clark found himself fighting a tough, well entrenched German foe that was using the mountains in Italy with great skill to impede his advance.   The 1st SSF with their mountain training were a perfect fit for Italy.

In November of 1943, the 1st SSF arrived in Naples and was immediately sent to the front lines.   Clark’s opposition in Italy was General Albert Kesselring.   Kesselring’s defense plan for Italy consisted of a series of fortified lines through the mountains, each designed to thwart the Allied forces efforts to move north towards Rome.   His troops were dug into the tops of the mountains and each position was able to provide defensive fire for the adjacent position.   Clark was hopelessly outmatched by Kesselring and the fight north for the allies was a series of one disastrous engagement after another.

By the time the 1st SSF arrived in the scene, the allies had finally broken through to the Bernhardt line.

As part of this defense line, 10 miles SE of Cassino stood Monte la Difensa.  The Germans on the top of the mountain left the backside of the mountain undefended as they thought that the sheer clif face was too steep to climb.  But on the night of 3 December 1943, the men of the 1st SSF scaled the cliff with all their equipment and attacked the Germans at dawn, pushing them off the mountain top before noon.   Over the next 3 days, the 1st SSF would encounter massive counter attacks from Kesselring’s artillery and infantry located on nearby mountain tops.   By the time it was over, the 1st SSF had suffered nearly 75% casualties but they not only secured Monte la Difensa but also the neighboring La Remetanea.    Taking these positions forced the Germans back to the next line of defense, the Gustav Line.   This line included the heavily defended and soon to be infamous, Monte Cassino.   The Gustav Line would hold for nearly 6 months during which time the 1st SSF would become involved in the allied landings at Anzio.

To get around the defenses of the Gustav line, Clark proposed a sea invasion some 20 miles behind the Gustav line at Anzio.  On 22 January 1944 the allies landed with little German opposition.   But the American commander Gen. Lucas hesitated and dug in around the beachhead instead of charging forward into Kesselring’s rear area.   A furious Winston Churchill remarked, “I thought we were going to get Blitzkreig…. Instead, we got Sitzkreig”.    Failing to advance gave Kesselring the opportunity to reorient his forces and it wasn’t long before the beachhead was surrounded by crack German troops including massive amounts of artillery and tanks.  It was into this mess that, on February 1, 1944, the 1st SSF landed at Anzio to replace the 1st and 3rd Ranger battalions on the front line.   They were positioned along the right flank of the Anzio beachhead along the Mussolini Canal.

Frequently going on patrol at night across the canal on the German side, the men  of the 1st SSF had a nasty habit of completely covering their exposed skin with black boot polish.   Using their V-42 combat knives, the men of the 1st SSF caused so many casualties on the German side that Kesselring had to pull back his units from the German side of the canal to keep his troops from “disappearing” at night.   It was at Anzio that the Germans began calling 1st SSF “the Black Devils”.    The diary of a dead German soldier included the following:

“The black devils (Die Schwarzen Teufel) are all around us every time we come into the line”

To further terrorize the Germans during their night patrols, the 1st SSF took stickers bearing their arrowhead emblom patch and left them on dead German corpses and on walls all over the German rear areas.

When the allies finally broke out of the Anzio beachhead on 25 May, 1944, the 1st SSF headed immediately towards Rome where they were the among the first to enter the city on June 4.

As a footnote, heading to Rome from Anzio was an incredibly stupid strategic mistake by Clark.   He should have headed straight east across Italy so as to cut off the retreating Germans who were south of Anzio still manning the Gustav Line.   Had he done so, he might well have captured nearly 200,000 crack German troops.   Instead he headed to Rome which allowed the Germans to retreat north in an orderly fashion.   They then reformed along a new line north of Rome and forced the Allied Armies to again and again bash their heads against the dug in German mountain defenses.  Clark was never able to push Kesselring out of Italy for the duration of the war.

In August of 1944, the 1st FFS moved to southern France to join the armies heading north from Marseille.  By September, they moved into positions along the French – Italian border but by then, the unit had seen its last major combat.

The unit was disbanded in December of 1944 and the men sent back to their respective armies.  While in existence, the 1800 man unit accounted for nearly 12,000 German casualties, 7,000 prisoners while they themselves suffered more than 600% casualties.   This meant that nearly 11,000 men fought in the 1st SSF in under 18 months of fighting.

In 1968, a move was made about the Devil’s Brigade starring William Holden as Col. Frederick and Cliff Robertson as Maj. Alan Crown, the Executive Officer of the unit and the commander of the Canadians.  The focal point of the movie was the battle at Monte La Difensa.

In 2000, the History Channel made a series called “Dangerous Missions”.   One of the episodes in the series was named “Black Devils”.   The documentary recreates the battle at Monte La Difensa in great detail.