On 10 June, 1944, men of the 2nd Waffen-SS “Das Reich” Panzer Division came to Oradour-sur-Glane.  Located some 460 km south and east of Normandy, this small community had existed for 1000 years.   The soldiers stayed for only a few hours.  When they left, the town and all its inhabitants were dead.    On that fateful day, members of the Waffen-SS Battallian “Das Reich” gathered the entire community together in the town square.  The men were taken to garages and barns while the women and children were herded into a church.    From inside the church, they could hear the sound of the machine guns and the screams as the men of the town were all shot.   Then, the SS turned their attention to the church.   They set it aflame; and the women and children inside the church were murdered as well.

A few weeks later, the SS “Das Reich” Battalion would find itself nearly cut-off and surrounded in the “Failaise Pocket”.   In a pincer movement, the British, Canadians and Poles tried to close the pocket from the north while the US Army tried to close the pocket from the south.    The heaviest fighting occurred around the town of Falaise as the Germans realized that it was the only way out.  In the Battle, the “Das Reich” Battalion took tremendous casualties.  They barely escaped from the pocket with one quarter of their men.   Many of the perpetrators of the massacre at Oradour would die in the Falaise Pocket.   But the survivors would live to fight again during the Battle of the Bulge.

But on that day in June, just four days after D-Day, the SS would murder some 642 men, women and children.   It was a war crime, like so many others during the war, that would never be fully examined or explained.   And in a final insult to the dead, most of the perpetrators who survived the war would never be properly punished.

They never rebuilt Oradour.  Its ruins stand as a memorial.   A memorial not just to those murdered there, but also a memorial to the hundreds of towns and communities that suffered a similar fate across Europe,  in Poland, in Czechoslovakia and in Russia.   A fate also shared with towns and communities on the other side of the world in China and in Burma.

Oradour was in the part of France that was occupied by the Nazis.  By June of 1944, the French resistance, often referred to as the “Maquis”,  with assistance from the British SOE and the American OSS, were doing their best to disrupt German communication and supply lines throughout France.   The German military commanders, especially those who had seen duty on the Eastern Front, had seen it all before.   In a tit for tat series of escalations, the war behind the lines became just as brutal as the war on the front lines.  Thousands of Germans soldiers, police battalions and even prison battalions were engaged in a deadly fight with thousands upon thousands of partisans.  Neither side was interested in taking prisoners.  Neither side gave any quarter.

It was this attitude that the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” brought with it to Normandy as it was redepoyed from the Eastern Front to the French town of Montauban in January of 1944.  Under the command of SS-Major General Heinz Lammerding, “Das Reich” had been involved in a number of anti-partisan raids in Eastern Europe.  Many thousands of civilians had been murdered for perceived partisan activities or even “sympathies”.  Dozens of towns had been put to the torch.   When faced with an increasing insurgency in France, Lammerding knew exactly what to do.

The with D-Day landings, the Maquis put their efforts into high gear.  The Germans brutally responded.   On 09 June, 1944, Lammerding and his men decided to show the Maquis who was in charge.  They entered the town of Tulle, near Limoges and hung 99 men.   Every man they could find, died that day.

The next day, on 10 June, 1944, members of a subordinate unit of the 2nd SS Panzer Division came to Oradour-Sur-Glane.  Under the command of SS Major Adolf Diekman, the 3rd Company of the 4th SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment, surrounded the town.   Within a few hours, 197 men were shot and/or burned alive  in garages and barns while 445 women and children were then burned in a church.

The town was then looted and burned to the ground.  By 8 pm, the Germans withdrew leaving nothing but a smoking ruin.   Only 7 villagers survived the massacre, six men and one woman.   Another 15 escaped during the process of rounding up the inhabitants.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Vichy government protested to the German Army.    The excuse they received back from German Army HQ was that the SS attacked because they themselves had come under attack from inside the town.   The Germans tried to tell the French that all the deaths in the church were due to a Maquis ammunition dump that had exploded.    But the Vichy weren’t buying the explanation.

After the war, the massacre in Oradour received much attention.  In 1946, the De Gaulle government made the town a national memorial and mandated that it should be maintained in its current condition.  It fit De Gaulle’s narrative that the town was destroyed in retaliation for partisan activities.    He promoted this idea as much as possible to deflect from the collaborating actions of the Vichy government.

The French raised Oradour at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.  Why Oradour was chosen by the officers of the “Das Reich” Division has never been resolved or explained.   Few Germans would ever be prosecuted for the murders.   Diekmann would die in the fighting at the Falaise Pocket.    The Germans refused to extradite Lammerding back to France so that he could stand trial even though he had been sentenced to death in absentia by the French court in 1953.    In 1961, the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office opened a file against Lammerding but refused to proceed on the grounds of insufficient evidence.  Lammerding died in Germany in 1971.

In 1953, a French military court prosecuted 21 former members of the 2nd SS “Das Reich” Division for the crimes they committed in Oradour and Tulle.   Two were given the death sentence and 18 more received prison terms of between 5 and 20 years.  The French were able to get ahold of these men because they were ethnic Germans from the Alsace, a region that was turned over to France at the end of the war.  But within 5 years of the convictions, all were set free.

In 1981 the East Germans arrested an SS Sergeant named Heinz Barth, a platoon commander whose soldiers were among those that shot the men in Oradour.   An East German court sentenced Barth to life in prison.   He was released in 1997.  Barth would live another 10 years and only die in 2007 at the age of 86.

You can still visit Oradour-sur-Glane and walk down its deserted streets.   Like Lidice in the Czech Republic, the destroyed remnants of the town and its  642 murdered inhabitants serve as one of many reminders of German brutality.

 

 

 

In Berlin, running perpendicular to the Tiergarten is Stauffenbergstasse, renamed in honor of Col Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944.   For on that street stands the Bendlerblock, the wartime headquarters of the German Navy or Kreigsmarine.  And it was at the Bendlerbock that Stauffenberg and several of his co-conspirators were lined up and shot following their arrest on 20 July 1944 for their failed attempt to kill Hitler.

Today, in the Bendlerblock you can find a new fascinating museum.  The German Resistance Memorial Center opened just a few years ago and showcases the stories of the Germans who did what they could to resist the Nazis.   This museum could never have been built in the immediate years after the war.  Those that resisted Hitler were shunned by regular Germans who lived through the war.   Many thought the Resistance were traitors who helped bring untold destruction to the Fatherland.  Many more couldn’t bear the thought of celebrating them because it raised questions about why they themselves or why their parents weren’t among those who actively resisted Nazism and Hitler.

Only now has a new generation taken interest in learning about the Resistance.   It took a couple of generations to pass before Germans were ready to contemplate the idea that there actually was an organized Resistance to Hitler and the Nazis and to accept that their grandparents or great-grandparents weren’t a part of it.    Unfortunately, with the passage of so many years, information is hard to come by.   Surviving family members often changed their names and disappeared into the fog of time.  If their fellow countrymen thought they were traitors, most thought it best to just bury the past move on.    Very few of the survivors wrote books and most of the personal papers of those captured and killed were burned by the Nazis.   Hitler’s narrative was that he was universally beloved by the German people and any evidence to the contrary was to be utterly destroyed.

Indeed, none of the key members of the Resistance were given a real trial.  If they were caught, most of them were imprisoned without trial and all of them that remained alive were murdered in April of 1945, just before the war ended.   Hitler wasn’t going to allow any of them to survive if he was not going to survive.

As you enter the Bendlerblock and as you climb the staircase to the second floor museum entrance, photos with names line the walls.  In many cases, this is all that is left behind as evidence that these people ever existed; people who resisted Hitler and who mostly perished for their efforts.   Inside, their stories have been pieced together by the researchers who built the museum.    For some, the stories are quite detailed.   Many lack all but a few details.  And some are barely mentioned at all…….

Its hard for anyone to fathom how the head of Germany’s Abwehr or Military Intelligence, could have played such an important role in the resistance to Hitler and Nazism.  Most Germans can hardly believe it either.  Until his arrest, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris was viewed in Germany as being perhaps the most cunning and ruthless member of Hitler’s inner circle.  Hardly a single German would ever have thought that the head of the feared Abwehr was secretly running a double game.   While helping to plan many of Hitler’s expansionist schemes, he was also plotting against him, doing whatever he could to thwart Hitler’s plans and in many cases, trying to warn the Allies of Hitler’s intentions in advance.    Its a fascinating story.  He remains perhaps the biggest mystery man of the Nazi era.  A man full of contradictions.  He never made a public speech.  He rarely spoke at all to anyone but his closest confidants.    He had absolute control of the Abwehr and used its power to shelter many members of the Resistance, giving them jobs and the authority and papers necessary to travel around the Nazi Empire.  The Abwehr became the epicenter for most of the efforts to thwart the plans of Hitler’s Nazi regime.   They schemed for ways to initially depose and arrest him before finally coming to terms with the idea that he had to be killed and they would have to be the ones to organize it.   Along the way they used the Abwehr to smuggle Jews out of Berlin to safety and tried to tip off the Allies in many instances to Hitler’s plans and intentions.

Canaris rose to fame  during WW1 while serving on the German cruiser, the SMS Dresden as its intelligence officer.   In December of 1914, during the Battle of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, the Dresden managed to evade the vastly superior British Navy on numerous occasions.  He shrewdly had his contacts on the Argentine mainland sending fake messages from shore to the Dresden talking about where the Dresden should meet coal supply ships to take on fuel.   But it was always a ruse and the British fell for it several times.  Finally, after several months of cat and mouse games with the British Navy, the Dresden was cornered.  The crew scuttled the ship and he, along with the crew, were interned in Chile.   But the undaunted Canaris quickly escaped and after a 4 month chase, he managed to return to Germany as hero in October of 1915.

He spoke fluent Spanish and was sent to Spain to work as an intelligence officer.  He ended WW1 as a successful U-Boat Captain with nearly 20 credited sinkings.

During the interwar period, when most German officers were forced out of the military, Canaris managed to stay in the German Navy.  He developed a nasty reputation and was reputed to have been involved in at least one political assassination of a left wing rival.  Although he didn’t join the Nazi Party, most of his friends were members.   Perhaps his best friend was Reinhard Heydrich with whom he rode horses in Berlin’s Teirgarten.   Canaris and his family often joined Heydrich and his family at backyard dinners.

As Hitler came to power in 1933, Canaris was appointed as the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.  A few years later, he became a Rear Admiral, a rank and position he held until the end.   He immediately set out to develop a spy network in Spain and became a close personal confidant of General Franco.

Up until 1937, it seems that Canaris actively supported Hitler’s actions.  Canaris was an avid anti-communist and much of the politics in the interwar period in Europe was dominated by the fight between communism and various forms of capitalism including national socialism.

For some reason that is lost to history, he began to become disillusioned with Hitler around 1937.  Perhaps Canaris lost faith with Hitler over the Nazi treatment of the Jews.  But its not known with any degree of certainty.   What is known is that Canaris and his family had a number of Jewish friends in Berlin where he lived and perhaps he could see what was coming.  We only know that something set him on a path to oppose Hitler and that he would become Hitler’s most dangerous enemy.   This also put him on a direct collision path with his old friend Reinhard Heydrich who had become the #2 man in the SS under Himmler.   Heydrich was a rabid Nazi who became the architect of the Final Solution to rid Europe of its Jewish population.

But by the time of the Czechoslovakia crisis in 1938, Canaris had clearly made up his mind that Germany needed to get rid of Hitler or face ruin.   History records that Canaris was warning Hitler not to invade Czechoslovakia as it was going to be “too dangerous”.     And Canaris knew exactly what was going on in Czechoslovakia  because he was running a spy ring in the Sudetenland using Sudetan Germans to spy on the Czechs.   It was here that Canaris would cross paths with the most famous of Sudetan Germans, Oskar Schindler.   Schindler became one of the Abwehr’s most important spies in Czechoslovakia until he was captured and imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Czechs.  He was only saved from the executioner by Hitler’s successful takeover of Czechoslovakia after which he was freed from prison.  There is reason to believe that Schindler’s relationship with the Abwehr continued after he was freed from prison and that it was his connections with Canaris and the Abwehr that provided Schindler with the power he needed to save his list of Jews from certain death in the concentration camps of Plaszow, Auschwitz and later from Gross-Rosen.

After Czechoslovakia, Canaris seems to have ramped up his anti-Nazi efforts.   He began hiring into the Abwehr, a large number of fellow thinking Germans who also opposed Hitler.

Chief among these was Gen. Hans Oster.  Oster was vehemently opposed to Hitler.  Long before the war began, Oster was going from one top Wehrmacht General to another trying to whip up anti-Hitler sentiment.    They eventually banned him from the General Staff Headquarters so that they wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore.  Oster  became an early advocate of killing Hitler rather than just deposing him.   And he became Canaris’ deputy at the Abwehr.

Joining them were a number of other key players in the Resistance including General Erwin Lahousen, the head of Austria’s military intelligence and a prewar friend of Canaris.   It was Lahousen who would train the agents sent by the Abwehr to the  US during the middle of the war.     Perhaps this explains why they all got rounded up within hours or days of their arrival.

Also joining the Abwehr was a Lutheran Minister named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.   Bonhoeffer left the Lutheran Church in disgust over its support of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.   In fact, the entire Bonhoeffer family became involved in the Resistance including his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnányi, who also joined the Abwehr.   Dohnanyi was a attorney who unfortunately thought it would be a good idea to keep a giant file of all the Nazi’s transgressions.   This file would fall into the hands of Himmler’s Gestapo and would lead to the demise of them all.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that Canaris made to the Allied war effort came right at the start of the war.   Canaris, who had become a close personal friend to Spain’s Gen. Franco during the Spanish Civil War, travelled there to convince Franco to resist Hitler’s demands that Spain allow German troops to transit through Spain to capture Gibraltar.  Canaris knew that if Gibraltar fell, then all the British troops that had to be supplied through the Gibraltar Straits by ship could never survive.   Hitler would have dominated the Mediterranean.  Malta would have been indefensible.  There would have been no way for the British in Egypt to resist Rommel’s Afrika Corps and nothing would have stood in Rommel’s path from Tunisia all the way to Saudi Arabia where the British derived nearly all of their oil supply.

Canaris traveled to Poland after the invasion in September of 1939 and saw first hand what Himmler and Heydrich and the SS were doing.  He was so incensed with what he saw that he went to Gen. William Keitel, the head of the General Staff and demanded that it stop.   He warned Keitel that the world would one day hold the Wehrmacht responsible for the murderous acts in Poland.  Keitel’s response was to tell Canaris to return to the Abwehr and say no more about it.

It wasn’t long before detailed information concerning Nazi atrocities began leaking out.   Canaris arranged to use one of his agents, another anti-Nazi named Dr. Josef Muller, a devout Catholic, to get the information into the hands of the Vatican in Rome.   These reports made their way to British intelligence.   Similarly, Canaris organized another path of communications through Dietrich Bonhoeffer who met secretly in Sweden with his prewar friend, George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester and the Dean of Canterbury.   Bonhoeffer also told Bell about the growing anti-Nazi efforts inside Germany and of Hitler’s intentions.  Bell became another conduit to British Intelligence.

Now entering this story is Sir Stuart Menzies, the head of MI-6.  With all these reports seemingly originating from the Abwehr, it was up to Menzies, the head of British Intelligence to decide what to do with the information.   Was it good information?  Or was it disinformation?   Could these stories of a bunch of anti-Nazi’s running the Abwehr really be true?  Or was it a ruse designed to fool the British into doing something stupid?   Menzies knew that Canaris was a cagey and clever adversary.  How could he trust Canaris when his reputation for outfoxing the British during WW1 was so well known?  As with many things that have to do with Canaris, its not clear how much Menzies trusted the information he was receiving through Mueller and Bonhoeffer.   And after the war, it would have been embarrassing to admit to the public that British Intelligence may have missed a chance to help the anti-Nazi’s either depose or kill Hitler and end the war in 1940 or 1941.  So even the Allies chose after the war to say very little about the Resistance to Hitler.   Menzies MI-6 files have yet to be opened to historical review.  It may take many more years before this side of the story is better understood.

Shortly before Heydrich was assigned to Prague in 1942, the SS and SD under Himmler began to grow suspicious of the Abwehr and Canaris.  Himmler tried to have the Abwehr placed underneath his control but Canaris managed to keep this from happening.  However, it was becoming clear to Canaris that his old friend Heydrich was now his enemy.   The story of the assassination of Heydrich by the Czech resistance does not, as of today, include any connection to Canaris.   But it is clear that with the demise of Heydrich, much of the pressure on the Abwehr from Himmler and the SS began to die away, at least for awhile.  As such, knowing that Canaris was in contact with British Intelligence, it would not be stretch to believe that he had something to do with the plan to kill Heydrich.  History records that the plot was hatched in London by the Czech government in exile and British Intelligence.   If Canaris was involved, it will take the opening of MI-6’s archives to reveal it. .

What is known is that Sir Stuart Menzies met with Canaris on several occasions in Lisbon and in Spain during the war.   What was discussed remains shrouded in secrecy.   We do know that several of the attempts on Hitler’s life during the course of war were carried out with British explosives and British detonators including the July 1944 plot.  Perhaps these attempts to kill Hitler were the subject of the meetings.   We also know that many in the Resistance thought that if they could depose or kill Hitler, the Western Allies might agree to negotiate a separate peace deal that would allow Germany to keep fighting the Russians in the east.    But this was a dream that many in the Wehrmacht secretly and sometimes openly also dreamed about.   Either of these subjects could have been the topic of discussion between Canaris and Menzies.

Canaris was also secretly trying to tip off the allies about Hitler’s intentions.  He warned the Allies that Hitler was going to invade Poland using Muller and Bonhoeffer.    Again he warmed them that Hitler was going to invade Western Europe through the low countries and into France.   But each warning was viewed as being a cunning trick and each time the warning was ignored.

In April of 1943, Canaris made contact with George Earle, the former governor of Pennsylvania who Roosevelt had sent to Istanbul to be his personal spy to gather information about the Balkans.   Canaris showed up on his doorstep to pitch the idea of a separate peace deal directly to the Americans.  But just as the contacts through Menzies failed to achieve anything, neither did an appeal directly to Roosevelt via Earle.  And of course, to the Allies, it could indeed have been nothing more than a trick.  Either way, the only answer ever given by Churchill or Roosevelt was that the Allies would only accept unconditional surrender.

As the war dragged on, the actions of the Resistance to Hitler grew more and more desperate.   In late 1943, during an attempt to smuggle some of their Jewish friends out of Berlin to safety in Switzerland,  Oster and the Jews were arrested by the SS trying to board a train out of Berlin.   Canaris cooked up a tall tail that the SS was interfering with an Abwehr intelligence mission as the Jews were actually trained Abwehr agents being sent to Switzerland and then to America.   But they had a little trouble explaining to the SS why it was necessary for entire family, including children and grandparents, to go along.   Himmler was getting more and more suspicious.   Eventually, after the July plot to kill Hitler,  Himmler and the SS managed to find Donyanyi’s extensive notes about  Nazi atrocities.  This brought  even more focus onto the Abwehr and Canaris as the purpose of Danyanyi’s notes were hard to explain.

They managed to all keep their jobs until the end of 1944 when Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer,and Donyanyi would all end up in the cells under the Gestapo building on  Prinz Albrechtstrasse.

In February of 1945 Canaris and a number of others were sent to the concentration camp at Flossenburg, near the Czech border.   Here they were tortured and starved until 9 April, 1945 when they were marched out of their cells and hung just a few weeks before the end of the war.    The camp was liberated only 2 weeks later by the US Army on 23 April 1945.

 

 

One of Canaris’ fellow prisoners at Flossenburg was the former Director of Danish Military Intelligence, Col. Lunding.  He occupied the cell next to Canaris.  On the morning of his murder, Canaris told him by tapping out morse code on the wall,

“This is the end.  Badly handled.  My nose broken.  I have done nothing against Germany.  If you survive, please tell my wife.”

Lunding recalled after the war watching the naked Admiral being led to his execution.

Another member of the Abwehr who managed to escape to Switzerland and survive the war, Hans Gisevius, wrote of his friend Adm. Canaris, in a book in 1947 “To The Bitter End”,

“Canaris hated not only Hitler and Himmler, but the entire Nazi system as a political phenomenon .. He was everywhere and nowhere at once.  Everywhere he traveled, at home and abroad and to the front, he always left a whirl of confusion behind him.”

….
And as you walk around in the Bendlerblock Museum, you may find something quite odd that that museum.   Almost completely absent from all the photographs and names and stories is none other than…  Admiral  Wilhelm Canaris.  Maybe the Admiral would smile thinking that he once again was keeping them guessing?

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.

 

 

For a number of years now, on Christmas Eve, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations has rebroadcast a recording of Alan Maitland reading Fredrick Forsyth’s, “The Shepherd”.    Maitland was the host of a very popular CBC program called “As it Happens” in the 1980’s and his voice seems perfect for reading Forsyth’s story of a RAF pilot flying from Germany back to England on Christmas Eve, 1957, when his jet suffers a complete electrical failure.    Lost in the clouds and fog, and low on fuel, he is met or led or “shepherded” to a disused WW2 era RAF base by a WW2 De Havilland Mosquito which he believes has been sent up to bring him in before he crashes.

As the story unfolds, he learns that the pilot was named Johnny Kavanaugh and he learns that Kavanaugh had a lot of practice shepherding damaged bombers back to the RAF base during the war.  We also learn that Kavanaugh’s Mosquito Squadron was a Pathfinder squadron during the war.

As I was listening to the story this year, I was reminded that one of my uncle’s who passed away in the 1980’s had flown in a Pathfinder squadron during the war.  The job of the Pathfinders was to lead the bombing raid and mark the targets for the bombers that were following behind.   The Pathfinders dropped green and red colored flares to mark the periphery of where they thought the target was.   If they did a good job, the results of the bombing mission would be a success.   If they did a bad job, the raid might be a complete waste of time as the bombs could fall easily wide of their intended target.

My Uncle, Allan Gonor, received a Distinguished Flying Cross for completing 38 missions as a navigator between September 16, 1944 and March 31, 1945.  Unlike the Pathfinder in the Forsyth story, Allan’s squadron did not fly the amazingly fast Mosquito but instead his Pathfinder squadron flew the famous 4 engine Lancaster Bomber.

Lancasters used as pathfinders, flew with a crew of 8 but just one pilot. Below summarizes the crew assignments:

Position	Location
Pilot	Seated on the left hand side of the cockpit. There was no Co-Pilot
Flight Engineer	Seated next to the pilot on a folding seat
Navigator	Seated at a table facing to the port (left) of the aircraft and directly behind the pilot and flight engineer
Navigator/Radar Operator	Seated next to the navigator and also facing to the port (left) of the aircraft the Special Equipment Operator operated the H2S radar set
Bomb Aimer	Seated when operating the front gun turret, but positioned in a laying position when directing the pilot on to the aiming point prior to releasing the bomb load
Wireless Operator	Seated facing forward and directly beside the navigator
Mid-Upper Gunner	Seated in the mid upper turret, which was also in the unheated section of the fuselage
Rear Gunner	“Tail End Charlie” seated in the rear turret this to was in the unheated section of the fuselage and was also the most isolated position. Most rear gunner’s once in their turret’s did not see another member of the crew until the aircraft returned to base, sometimes 10 hours after departing

 

My cousin Saul had a copy of Allan’s DFC citation which listed all the various raids that comprised his 38 qualifying missions.  As I began going through the list, I quickly came to realize that some of the raids in which Allan flew as a Pathfinder were some of the most historically interesting raids of the war.

Allan, arrived in England from Canada in 1943 after graduating from Navigator School at the ripe old age of 18.   Although he was Canadian, he never flew in the RCAF but instead spent the war flying in various RAF Squadrons.

Initially he seems to have been involved in some sort of replacement pool of airmen as his first missions seem to indicate that he was moving from one squadron to another.

His first mission is listed as occurring on 16 Sep 44 when he flew with the 101 Squadron to Leeuwarden in Nazi occupied Holland.   History records that the British heavily attacked this Dutch airfield on the 16 and 17th of Sep of 1944 as it was being used by the Nazis to house Messerschmidt Bf-109’s.   This date is significant as the raid was timed to coincide with the beginning of Operation Market-Garden which began on September 17.  Keep in mind that the British typically bombed at night.  This meant Allan’s flight began on September 16 after sundown and he returned to base after midnight on September 17.  Thus, Allan’s first raid was really timed for the same day as the beginning of Operation Market-Garden.

On September 27 and 28, Allan flew missions in the 158 Squadron  to Calais in support of the Canadian Army which was fighting its way northwards from Normandy towards Antwerp.

On 2 Oct 44, he flew with the 12 Squadron to Westkapelle in Holland.   Westkapelle is west of Antwerp and history records that on the night of Oct 2/3, the British bombed the dikes south of the town to flood the area so that the Germans could not move around as the Canadian Army began to attack the place from the ground.

In October of 1944, Allan spent most of his time with the 101st Squadron.   This squadron of Lancasters was special in that the planes were modified to carry a large radio transmitter and a 2nd radio operator who spoke fluent German.  Their mission was to confuse the German fighters by issuing instructions in German trying to vector the attacking  German fighters AWAY from the British bombers.  They also carried powerful radio jammers to try to jam the German’s radio communications.   Since they were broadcasting all the time, their positions could be ascertained by the the Germans using radio direction finding equipment and by triangulating their positions.  This made flying in these planes very dangerous and many of them were shot down as they were prime targets for the German night fighters.

It was during this month that Allan participated in his first 1000+ plane raid to Dusiburg on 14 Oct 44.   Unbelievably, the RAF  attacked Duisburg twice on the same day; during the day and then again that same evening.    Allan was on both raids.  More than 1/2 the city was destroyed as the RAF tried to take out a synthetic fuel plant, among other targets.  The Germans had very few oil resources.   Most of the fuel that they burned in their tanks, their trucks and their planes was manufactured by liquifying coal.   They built many of these plants and each of them was a prime target for Bomber Command.    On each raid that day to Duisburg,  the RAF lost more than 100 planes to flak and to enemy fighters.

In November, Allan was assigned to the Pathfinder Squadron #156 where he remained for the duration of the war.  He flew 24 more raids with the 156 Squadron and had nearly the same crew each time.   They seemed to change planes frequently and the flying log notes that they often returned to base with a lot of holes in the plane so its no wonder they had to change aircraft.   Allan was part of a permanent team that included another Canadian, who like Allan, was flying in the RAF rather than the RCAF.   The pilot of the crew was Arthur Boggiano.   Boggiano received his DFC for having the nerve to continue to lead a mission to Mannheim on 1 Mar 45 where they lost an engine before they even arrived at the target.   Despite just having 3 functioning engines and instead of turning around and returning to base,  Boggiano and his crew continued to Mannheim, marked the target, and dropped their own bomb load from just 6800 ft (while everyone else was bombing from 18000 ft) before beginning the long flight home.  This was not a night raid but a day raid.  Their log shows that they departed their base at 12:25.  They were over the target at 15:14 (3:14 pm) and they arrived back at their base at 18:50, more than 1 hour late due to their reduced speed from the loss of the engine.   Interestingly, the log also notes that they were “shepherded” back to base by fighters that found them as they were flying west and flying alone over the North Sea.   For his effort that day, Boggiano was awarded the DFC.

One of Allan’s missions in particular jumped right off the page for me.  On the nights of 13 and 14 Feb 45, the British and the US bombed Dresden with devastating results.   Sure enough, this mission is on Allan’s list.   He flew that first night, on 13 Feb 45 as one of the lead Pathfinders.   Their log notes that as they approached the target, the fires in Dresden were already visible from 60 miles away.

The log bears reading below: “Extensive fires were burning from a previous wave.  Several explosions were reported, and the town was burning from end to end”.

Allan’s final mission occurred on 30 Apr 45 when he participated in something called Operation Manna.    During Operation Market-Garden in September of 1944, the Dutch railway workers went on strike in support of the allied effort.   To retaliate, the Germans banned all food imports into Holland.   With the onset of what was to  become the harshest European winter in 30 years, the Dutch began to starve in what became known as the “Hunger Winter”.    By the spring, hundreds were dying of starvation each day.    Despite significant parts of Holland being liberated by the Canadians, the northern and western parts of Holland remained occupied by the German Army right up until the final surrender in May of 1945.   In the final few days of the war, the Germans and the Allies were trying to negotiate an arrangement whereby the Allies could drop food to the starving Dutch.   As the negotiations dragged on, the RAF took a chance that the Germans would not shoot down low flying bombers dropping food from 300 ft to the Dutch.   On April 30, they sent 300+ planes including Allan’s Pathfinder Squadron to Rotterdam where they opened the bomb bay doors and dropped food instead of the usual bombs.

Cristian de Groot from Holland found this 8 mm footage of what the drop looked like from the ground. http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2011/04/rare_footage_of_rotterdam_food.php/

The planes you see in the footage are Lancaster Bombers.   Perhaps one of them is Allan’s?

 

I also had another uncle who flew in bombers during WW2.   My mother’s brother, Dave Elkin, was also a navigator.   He flew in the RCAF in a Halifax Bomber.   Both the Halifax and the Lancaster were 4 engine bombers but the Lancaster had a slightly larger bomb load and could fly higher and further than the Halifax.  Both had a standard crew compliment of 7 men. Dave flew 26 missions in the RCAF 408 Squadron beginning on 04 Oct 44 to Dortmund.  His final mission was to Hannover on 05 Jan 45 where his Halifax was shot down.   Dave bailed out and spent the last 6 months of the war in a POW camp near Lukenwalde, south and west of Berlin. Dave and Allan never knew each other during the war as they were not yet married into the Brook clan.    Surprisingly if you compare a list of their missions, 6 of them are on both lists.

14 Oct 44 to Duisburg
14 Oct 44 to Duisburg
28 Oct 44 to Cologne
30 Oct 44 to Cologne
30 Nov 44 to Duisburg
04 Dec 44 to Karlsruhe

The 14 Oct 44 raids to Duisburg seemed to involve nearly the entire RAF bomber force but the other raids were not so large.   It is therefore just a odd coincidence that they both flew to the same place on the same night. Dave kept excellent notes on his time in the RCAF and he wrote a little Novella some years ago where he put it all down on paper.

Dave wrote about the raid to Cologne on 30 Oct 44,

Two days later on October 30 we went back to Cologne on a night OP.   we were airborne at 5:22 pm and arrived at the target right on time at 8:16 pm.    the pathfinders did a good job of target marking and Fred (the bomb aimer on Dave’s Halifax) did a good job of bombing.  Our target pictures showed that we had knocked out a large German power plant.   The pictures clearly showed the outlines of the wrecked building and four large smoke stacks lying on the ground.   Right after we turned to start for home we had the scare of our lives when we were coned by searchlights.   The inside of the plane was so bright that the light seemed almost solid and tangible.  You felt like you could pick it up in your hands.   Andy and John Daly (the pilot and flight engineer) had worked out a strategy to prepare for this event.  They cut the power on all four engines and put the plane in almost a straight down dive.  This got us out of the cone momentarily at which point Andy made a steep turn to port for a few seconds and then a steep turn to starboard.   This did the trick and the lights failed to find us again.

Isn’t it interesting that Dave is complementing the job of the pathfinders on this raid and as it turns out, his complement is directed towards his future relative.

Towards the end of 1944, both Dave an Allan began to see ME-262’s, Germany’s revolutionary jet fighter in action against their planes.   It was truly frightening to be attacked by a plane that was far faster than the escort fighters that accompanied the bombers.   On their joint 4 Dec 44 to Karlsruhe, they both reported seeing jet fighters for the first time.

On 5 Jan 45, Dave’s crew was on the return flight after having bombed Hannover when the plane was hit by 20 mm cannon fire from a German night fighter.  Only Dave and two other crew members were able to get out before the plane exploded.  Dave ended up at Stalag Luft 3A near Lukenwalde.   The camp included a British and American Officer’s section as well as a section for Russian POW’s and another for other Europeans and civilians.  As the Russians pressed towards Berlin from the east and the western allies pressed towards Berlin from the west, the Germans began moving POW’s from camps that would have been overrun.   Dave’s camp thus began to fill with prisoners from many other POW camps.

He wrote:

At the end of January 1945, a large group of RAF officers arrived from the famous Stalag Luft 3B in Sagen, Silesia.   There were over 1000 men and completely filled up our compound.   This camp had been the site of the “great escape” followed by the murder of a large number of prisoners by the Nazis (54 to be exact).   these officers were evacuated before the advancing Soviet armies and were forced to march the several hundred miles to our camp in winter weather.  They experienced great hardship in doing so.   Some were in pitiful condition on their arrival.

There  were also a number Polish officers in the camp that were captured right at the start of the war.   Dave befriended three of them and they used to meet on the sports field to converse.   They spoke German and Dave could speak some German mixed with Yiddish.   They soon all figured out that they were all Jewish.  One of them, Julian Wilf gave Dave a photo of himself which Dave kept his entire life.   Dave never knew what happened to his friend after the war.

Life in the camp was pretty boring.   To keep themselves busy they thought a lot about food and spent a lot of time trading the items in their red cross parcels amongst themselves and with the German guards.    They all seemed to take a perverse delight in making life difficult for the guards by always showing up late for roll call or moving around to screw up the POW count.

One amazing story that Dave included in his writing was about having a Jewish religious service on a Saturday.  Since I could not make this up even if I tried, I’ll just let Dave tell it in his own words:

A regular feature every Sunday morning at our camp was  a Christian church service which took place on the sports field rain or shine.    A Catholic chaplain who had been taken prisoner conducted these services for both Protestants and Catholics.   A Jewish American B-17 pilot, who was quite religious approached me one day and asked if I would be interested in participating in a Jewish service if it were held on Saturdays.   I told him that I was not particularly religious but that I would be glad to help form a Minyan (10 men needed to have a service).   Since I was the only British Jew in the compound, he asked me if I would discuss the matter with the RAF Group Captain, since he was the senior allied officer.   I agree and we both spoke to him.   The Group Captain wondered if this was a wise thing to do, knowing the German attitude towards Jews.   We told him that we were prepared to risk it as we did not think that there would be a big reaction this close to the end of the war.  He then stated that he would back us up but that we had to understand that he had very little power or authority to help if things turned bad.   We accepted this and thanked him for his kind interest in the matter.  The American pilot had already rounded up enough American Jews to form a Minyan with myself.   the Polish Jews were not approached since their position was too precarious.  The American pilot had a prayer book…..   We decided to hold our Jewish service the very next Saturday.   The day proved to be bright and sunny, which we took as a good omen.   After breakfast and the Appell we gathered on the sports field and formed a small group facing east.   Our religious leader began the service.  The rest of us followed suit as best we could.    A crowd of curious prisoners soon gathered around to watch.   A patrolling German guard came by and after a while and demanded, “was ist los?” (what’s goign on?)   When told that we were conducting a Jewish Church Parade , he explaimed, “nich erlaubt” (not allowed).  We ignored him and continued with our service.  He then ran off to the Headquarters building.  Soon afterwards a file of about ten German soldiers, came running towards us carrying rifles with fixed bayonets.   On seeing this, the crowd of prisoners around us, which had grown to several hundred, immediately stepped forward and joined us in our prayers, genuflecting and humming as best they could.   This stopped the Germans in their tracks.   A sergeant with them went off to confer with an officer and the order came down for them all to withdraw which they soon did.   This was the last that we heard from the Germans about this matter and we continued to hold our services until we were liberated by the Russian army several weeks later.   This was probably the only organized Jewish religious service being held in Germany at this time.

I visited the camp in 2011.  Not much is left except a small memorial park and some undeveloped fields where you can see some remnants of the camp’s huts.

 

After the war, both Allan and Dave returned to Canada.   Both entered medical school.  Dave became a Plastic Surgeon in Montreal and Allan was a GP in a small town in Saskatchewan, North Battleford. They both had families, lived their lives and are remembered by those that knew them.   Allan passed away in the 1980’s but Dave lived into his 90’s and just passed a few months ago.

We remember their service.

In December of 1944, a German attack into Belgium threatened the allied armies that had landed after the Normandy Invasion.   In what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, 250,000 Germans attacked westward heading towards Antwerp, the only deep water port that was just put into service the previous month.

To stem the flood of Germans heading west, the allies sent everyone available into the fight including the 101st Airborne which quickly became surrounded in the key town of Bastogne.   The 101st was rushed to the front in trucks carrying only minimal amounts of ammunition and almost no warm winter clothing.  Food and medical supplies were an afterthought.   The winter weather worsened into what became the coldest European winter in 30 years.  Frostbite, constant enemy artillery and death was all around.

With 7 roads in and out of Bastogne, holding the town was one of the keys to slowing the German advance.   Lose the town and the Germans might just have made it to Antwerp, splitting the allied armies and perhaps changing the outcome of the war.

The General in charge of the 101st at the time was Anthony McAuliffe.   McAuliffe graduated from West Point in 1918, just as World War I came to an end.  He joined the artillery in 1920 and spent the next 20 years in various commands around the US.  He graduated from the United States Army War College as a Lt. Colonel and entered the Supply Division of the War Department where he worked on the development of the jeep and the bazooka.

With the start of the war, he joined the 101st Airborne Division as the commander of their artillery division.  He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and landed in a glider in Holland during Operation Market-Garden.   McAuliffe became the Assistant Division Commander of the 101st when Lt. General Don Pratt was killed on June 6,  when Pratt’s glider crashed during the D-Day landings.

When the 101st Airborne was sent to Bastogne, McAuliffe was the acting Division Commander as his boss, General Maxwell Taylor, was in the US for meetings.

On December 24, Christmas Eve, McAuliffe distributed the document below to his troops. (scroll down for a more legible copy).

Reprinted below for easier reading:

Headquarters 101st Airborne Division 
Office of the Division Commander

24 December 1944

What’s Merry about all this, you ask? We’re fighting – it’s cold – we aren’t home. All true but what has the proud Eagle Division accomplished with its worthy comrades of the 10th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and all the rest? just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division. These units, spearheading the last desperate German lunge, were headed straight west for key points when the Eagle Division was hurriedly ordered to stem the advance. How effectively this was done will be written in history; not alone in our Division’s glorious history but in World history. The Germans actually did surround us. their radios blared our doom. Their Commander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance.

December 22nd 1944 
To the U. S. A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne.

The fortune of war is changing. This time the U. S. A. forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units. More German armored units have crossed the river Ourthe near Ortheuville, have taken Marche and reached St. Hubert by passing through Hombres Sibret-Tillet. Libramont is in German hands.

There is only one possibility to save the encircled U. S. A. Troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think it over a term of two hours will be granted beginning with the presentation of this note.

If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U. S. A. Troops in and near Bastogne. The order for firing will be given immediately after this two hours term.

All the serious civilian losses caused by this Artillery fire would not correspond with the well known American humanity.

The German Commander

The German Commander received the following reply:

22 December 1944 
To the German Commander:

NUTS!

The American Commander

Allied Troops are counterattacking in force. We continue to hold Bastogne. By holding Bastogne we assure the success of the Allied Armies. We know that our Division Commander, General Taylor, will say: Well Done!

We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas.

A. C. McAuliffe

 

 

McAuliffe’s response to the Germans became the stuff of legend.  When the Germans received his response they had to ask the US soldier delivering the message what it meant.  The soldier responded explaining that McAuliffe was declining their offer and essentially telling the Germans, “You do your worst.  We’ll do our best”.

On this Christmas Eve, no matter what problems you may have, no matter that your entire 2014 year may well have been a terrible year; take a moment to reflect on something positive in your life.

When dealt a lousy deal, think about McAuliffe’s response to the Germans and just say, “N-U-T-S”.

Take Winston Churchill’s thought to heart….

“When going through hell, keep going”.

Happy Holidays!

 

 

 

 

On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a massive attack against the Allies in the Ardennes that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.  Some 250,000 German troops in 14 infantry divisions along with 5 panzer divisions surged forward against just 80,000 American troops defending a 60 mile front.

Of the roughly 180,000 US deaths in World War II in Europe, nearly 40,000 of them are tied to this battle.  The US would suffer the 2^nd largest surrender of troops of the war as some 7500 troops of the 106^th Infantry Division surrendered at one time at Schnee Eifel (12,000 Americans surrendered at Bataan in the Philippines in April of 1942).  The fighting was so intense that desertion became an issue.  So much so that General Eisenhower felt forced to make an example of Private Eddie Slovak, the first and only American executed for desertion since the Civil War.  More than 21,000 Americans received a military sentence of one kind or another for desertion including 29 death sentences.  All were commuted except Slovak’s who had the misfortune to be undergoing a clemency review just as the Battle of the Bulge was raging and at a time when Army moral was at a low point due to fighting losses.  The personnel situation was so bad that cooks and truck drivers were handed weapons and sent to the front lines.

During the course of the battle, the Nazis would commit a number of atrocities including the murder of 72 captured US troops at a place called Malmedy.  And at another place called Wereth, a tiny hamlet in Belgium, 11 black troops of the 333^rd Field Artillery Battalion were murdered by the SS.

It all began with a desperate plan by Hitler to try to split the allied armies and recapture the only functioning deep water port of Antwerp that was available to the allies in 1944.  The hope was to isolate and cutoff the British and Canadian Armies north of the surging German Army and to force their surrender.  If Hitler could not force the British and Canadian Armies to surrender, he hoped to at least try to split the Allied resolve for unconditional surrender.  If Hitler could somehow accomplish this, maybe he could survive the war and remain in charge in Berlin.  At a minimum, by reaching Antwerp, the Germans hoped to cut off the easy flow of supplies to all the Allied Armies in Europe and force them to go back to landing supplies in Normandy which meant huge logistic issues.  Their hope was to slow down the assaults from the west so that Germany could put more of its shrinking resources into fighting the Russians who were moving west through Poland towards Berlin.

The allies were not totally in the dark about a coming German offensive.  Despite the Germans trying to keep radio traffic to a minimum, decoded “Ultra” intercepts from Bletchley Park indicated that the Germans were massing for an attack although the date was uncertain.  The real culprit here was the total belief by Eisenhower’s staff that the Germans were all but beaten.  General Omar Bradley, in charge of the US 1^st Army in the Ardennes was completely caught off guard and was lucky that he was not relieved of duty and sent home.   As was often typical of the fighting in World War II, the German Generals, in this case Walter Model head of Army Group B and Gerd von Rundstedt completely outmaneuvered their American counterparts in the initial stages of the battle .  And as was also typical of the Allied Generals of World War II, only one US General, George Patton, was able to act decisively and effectively to counter the surging German Army with a decisive attack of his own.

Leading the charge west for the Germans were 2 Panzer Armies.  At the front of the attack was Joachim Peiper of the 6^th Panzer Army who was one of Germany’s most decorated tank commanders.  It was Peiper’s SS division that would perpetrate the Malmedy massacre on December 17 on the north side of the bulge.  He and the overall commander of the 6^th Panzer Army, Sepp Dietrich would be put on trial for their involvement in the massacre after the war.

South of Dietrich’s 6^th Panzer Army, von Mantueffel’s Fifth Panzer Army attacked towards Bastogne and St. Vith, both road junctions of great importance with many roads leading out of them in all directions.  Capturing these towns would give the Germans many options of where to attack next, making it more and more difficult for the Allies to defend and stop the assault.

As the battle raged, the Germans were able to surround Bastogne but could not capture it due to the tenacious defense by the US 101^st Airborne.  Additionally, the Germans failed to capture the high ground of the Eisenborn Ridge.  Elements of the 99^th Division of the US 1^st Army Group under Hodges were able to hang on to the dominating heights of the ridge with effective help from the British XXXth Corps artillery.  If Peiper had pushed the Americans off the Eisenborn Ridge, he could advance on the River Meuse.  And if he could cross the river, the path to Antwerp was wide open.

Despite launching a surprise attack with overwhelming force, the Germans had plenty of their own problems.  Their first was that Hitler promised the Wehrmacht nearly 50% more tanks than what was actually delivered.  Despite having a fresh supply of Germany’s largest King Tiger Tanks, a 70 ton beast firing an 88 mm cannon that could cut through the armor of a US Sherman Tank like a hot knife through butter, they only had about 100 of them.  These were mixed in with tanks of other designs.  Additionally, the Germans suffered from a severe lack of fuel and the advancing Panzer Armies were forced to forage for fuel as they tried to attack west.

An even bigger German problem was that the Luftwaffe was mostly out the picture by December of 1944.  As a result, the Germans had little ability to attack from the air or even to get aerial reconnaissance of the Allied positions.  Coupled with the bad weather that kept everyone’s planes from flying, this severe limitation kept the Germans from knowing exactly where along the Allied lines they should attack to achieve the best results.

Further confounding the German effort was the ability by the Allies to eventually muster a huge force to counter their attack.  The British under Montgomery began to arrive with large amounts of artillery and began pounding the advancing units of the 5^th Panzer Army along the northern edge of the bulge on December 22.  On the southern edge of the bulge, Patton’s 3^rd US Army began arriving on December 23 and started cutting into the German’s southern flank.  Patton was heading towards Bastogne where he intended to relieve the besieged 101^st Airborne.

By December 24, with the weather starting to clear and more Allied divisions entering the fight, the German position was becoming more and more untenable.  Allied resupply by air began on December 23 and large numbers of American P-47 Thunderbolt fighters began cutting into the advancing Panzer units.

On December 26, the lead elements of Patton’s army broke through to Bastogne which effectively left the advancing German armies with no easy means of retreat.

The Wehrmacht knew their position was becoming precarious on December 24 when they failed to capture the bridges over the Meuse.  That evening General Hasso von Manteuffel recommended that Germany halt all forward efforts and withdraw.  Hitler rejected the idea and the Germans fought on.

Heavy fighting continued for some time despite the ever worsening position of the Germans and the strengthening of the Allied position.  On January 1, Eisenhower pressed General Montgomery for all out British attack from the north and for Patton to continue his drive north into the southern flank of the Germans.

As with what happened in Normandy at Falaise, for a number of reasons, the Allies were not able to close the gap and trap all the Germans inside the pocket.   Large numbers of Germans would eventually escape back into Germany from the bulge after January 7, when Hitler finally agreed to allow their retreat.  Even with this, it took until nearly the end of January for the front line to return to where it was before the attack began.

Although the battle is often thought of as mostly an American victory, the truth is a bit more complicated and a lot more interesting.  General Omar Bradley’s handling of the US 1^st Army was so poor during the battle that several of his largest divisions were moved under British General Montgomery’s command.  Montgomery was able to reorganize the chaos and bring his artillery units into action against the Germans.  But Montgomery and the US Army held each other in tremendously poor regard.  Montgomery, often prone to self aggrandizement,  held a press conference on the same day that Hitler ordered a withdrawal (January 7) where he described his own contribution as being the most significant part of the allied victory despite US troops outnumbering British troops by 10:1.    As you could expect, the reaction of the US commanders was not good.  Both Patton and Bradley threatened to resign.  Eisenhower, encouraged by his British deputy, Arthur Tedder, who also disliked Montgomery, decided to fire Montgomery for even holding the press conference in the first place.  It was only due to the intervention of Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, that Eisenhower reconsidered and allowed Montgomery to just apologize for his poorly timed comments.  All this controversy created by Montgomery probably saved Omar Bradley from being fired for his lack of defensive preparation in the first place.  Either way, it all once again proved that if something big needed doing, Patton was the General who could get it done.

More than 600,000 US soldiers fought in the Battle of the Bulge and it was the deadliest of the US battles of WW2 with more than 80,000 casualties.

For black soldiers in the US Army, the battle proved to be a turning point in the history of the US Army.  The shortage of fighting men forced the army to integrate many of the units fighting in the battle by bringing in black soldiers to fill in for battle loses.  By breaking down this barrier to integration during a time of crisis, the US Army was no longer able to justify the segregation policy under which it had previously operated.  This opened the door to full integration of the armed forces by President Truman a few years later.

Up until this point of the war, black soldiers were often relegated to all-black support units such as cooks and truck drivers.  During the fighting in Italy, several all-black infantry units under US General Marc Clark had abandoned their positions during heavy fighting.  Clark had written scathing reports to the General Marshall about the behavior of these all-black units.  This reinforced all the stereotypes that the US Army had used to justify the non-integration policy.  There is no equivalent story to the Tuskegee Airmen in the US Army’s history.  But the positive result of integrated units with black soldiers fighting during the Battle of the Bulge completely changed the situation.

At the end of the battle, Germany had suffered over 85,000 casualties and had used up most of Wehrmacht’s personnel reserves.  The Luftwaffe was further decimated and the Allies were poised to enter Germany proper as they raced toward the Rhein.  Hitler’s hope of some sort of separate negotiated peace with the western allies was dashed thus ending any chance he might have thought he had to survive the war.

 

 

 

Today I find myself in Puerto Galera, some 15 miles south of Batangas in the Philippines.    Here to dive for a couple of weeks, today we are on-shore as Typhoon Rubi slowly moves across the Philippines creating plenty of chaos and leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

As I gaze out into the bay, I am reminded of another time in December of 1944, when, not far from here out at sea, Admiral Chester Halsey’s Task Force 38 sailed directly into the path of another Typhoon known as Typhoon Cobra.

Task Force 38 consisted of 7 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers, 8 battleships, 15 cruisers and nearly 50 destroyers.   These 86 ships were operating about 300 km east of Luzon fighting to knock out as many land-based Japanese fighters as possible.  This was in support of the land invasions then were underway to clear the Japanese from the many Philippine Islands.

Without the benefit of modern weather radar, what Halsey and his meteorologists didn’t realize was that a major typhoon was building in the area.   On December 17, the fleet sailed directly into its path.  By the time it was over, just under 800 sailors had drowned, 3 ships were lost and 28 more were heavily damaged including the relatively new Battleship Iowa.

Of the 50 destroyers assigned to TF 38, 3 were lost during the storm, the Hull, the Spence, and the Monaghan.    The design of the ships was partially to blame as during the course of the war, a never ending amount of new and heavy equipment was always being added near the top of the ship.  This added weight acted to raise the center of gravity of each ship, making it easier for them to capsize.   As the war went on, more and more anti-aircraft guns were added to counter the threat of Japanese Kamikaze attacks.  The addition of radar masts further added weight as did more torpedo launchers, and more depth charges.  Already top heavy with this new added equipment, the problem was further compounded as the destroyer fleet had been running hard and was low on fuel.   To compensate for the use of the fuel which is stored low in the ship below the center of gravity, the ships would pump in sea water to create ballast to keep them from becoming too top heavy.      But the need to refuel in the worsening sea conditions caused considerable chaos as orders were received, rescinded, and then reversed on whether or not to pump out the sea water ballast and take on more fuel.

With their fuel tanks dangerously low and without seawater as ballast  the ships became top heavy which made them prone to roll in good weather.  In bad weather, it proved deadly.

Of the 3 destroyers, the Monaghan was of special interest..  She had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and was on picket duty just as the attack started.   A Japanese 2-man sub loosed a torpedo at her which missed by just 50 feet.  The Monaghan counter attacked, ramming the midget sub and then dropping depth charges on it as it submerged.   An oil slick soon appeared signifying that the sub had been destroyed.   Thus the Monaghan became the first US ship to score a kill in the Pacific War.

On December 17, 1944, the Monaghan, the Hull, and the Spence, with some 900 men aboard would all capsize.  Some of the men were able to get off the ship and into the water.  Many more drowned as they were trapped below deck and unable to get out.  For the survivors, being thrown into the ocean in a typhoon with hundred foot waves was not much better.  Some of the men were able to grab onto life rings and other types of floating debris.  Anything to hang on to was useful as they rolled down and then up and then down again on 100 foot swells.

At one point, the crew of a small Destoyer Escort, the Taberrer, designed for use in the North Atlantic for convoy duty spotted a few survivors of the Spence in the water.  This was the first indication that a serious accident had occurred.  Unfortunately, the Taberrer could not radio for help as her radio mast had been destroyed by the storm.  The Taberrer herself was not in great shape.  She was rolling nearly 90 degrees in one direction and then rolling nearly 90 degrees in the other direction.  Her ability to withstand this sort of abuse was no accident.  Her Canadian and British designers (she was actually designed as a North Atlantic Corvette) had designed her so that her center of gravity was only 18 inches above the keel.  This made for a ship that would roll in high seas but would be very, very difficult indeed to capsize.  Perfect for the stormy North Atlantic.  The US had borrowed the design, renamed it a Destroyer Escort and built nearly a hundred of them.

Luckily for the survivors of the Hull, the Spence and the Monaghan, the quick eyes of someone on watch on the Taberrer spotted men in the water.  The Captain of the Taberrer, Lt. Commander Henry Lee Plage, despite his own ship’s bad condition, began a recovery effort.  The rough seas made rescuing men from the water extremely dangerous but Plage figured out that he could put the rolling ability of his ship to good use in helping to fish men out of the water.  He began to time his approach to a man in the water with the roll of the Taberrer and to bring the ship alongside just as the Taberrer reached its highest roll.   In this way, the crew of the Taberrer could pull a man onboard just by dragging them horizontally across the surface of the water until they landed on the deck of the Taberrer which was nearly perpendicular with the surface of the water.   As the ship began to roll the other way, the man would find himself on board the Taberrer where just moments before they were floundering in the water.  For more than 72 hours the Taberrer steamed back and forth in a box pattern searching for survivors.  First finding survivors of the Spence, then men from the Hull, Plage had no idea how many ships had gone down and no idea how many men were still in the water.  Eventually they happened across another US Warship and signaled her with their latern that at least 2 ships had gone down.  With this, a fleet wide alert was issued and a much larger rescue attempt was underway.   But when it was over, the Taberrer had rescued 14 men from Hull and 41 from Spence, just 56 saved from a crew of over 500.  Another Destroyer Escort, USS Brown managed to find 6 men from the Monaghan as well as some others.  93 men were rescued in total, 56 by the crew of the Taberrer.  More than 700 perished.  For his actions during that 72 hour period, Plage would be awarded the Legion of Merit.  Each and every crew member of the Taberrer was awarded the Navy Unit Commendation.

A further interesting event occurred onboard the USS Monterrey, one of the 6 light carriers assigned to TF 38.   Onboard the Monterrey was a certain Lt. Gerald R. Ford.  The Monterrey carried a full load of planes on its hanger deck and during the storm, one of the planes broke free from its chains.  This set of a cascade of events that caused a giant fire aboard ship.  The fire was so bad that the Captain was about to issue an abandon ship order when he sent a fire control team that included Ford to try one last time to put out the fires raging below deck.  After about 2 hours the fire was finally brought under control at which point Ford was told to head to the conning tower to inform the Captain that the ship was saved.  Communications had been cut due to the fire damage and someone needed to actually traverse the pitching flight deck to get to the conning tower.  As Ford made his way across the deck, the ship rolled to more than 30 degrees causing Ford to begin sliding across the deck and right off the side of the ship.   Surrounding the flight deck was a small raised metal edge that is there to prevent tools and bolts from sliding off the flight deck.  As Ford slipped towards the edge of the deck he knew his only chance was to somehow grab onto this edge.  If he missed it, he would go right off the side of the ship to be lost at sea.   As he neared the edge, Ford jammed his foot hard onto the raised edge and desperately reached out to grab it with a hand.  He contacted just enough of it so that he could contort his body 270 degrees and drop down onto a catwalk that was below the flight deck, thus saving his life.

When TF 38 returned to Ulithi Atoll, the large US anchorage in the Western Pacific that served as the US forward Naval Base during this part of the war, a Court of Inquiry was convened by Admiral Nimitz into Halsey’s handling of the events surrounding Typhoon Cobra.  Although they cited errors in his judgment, Halsey was exonerated by the Court.  But in June of 1945, Halsey once again sailed TF 38 into another typhoon.   Although only 6 sailors lost their lives in this second typhoon, there was again considerable damage to ships and equipment.   Halsey again had to face a Court of Inquiry.  This time the Court was going to rule against Halsey but Nimitz stepped in and saved him from being relieved of command.  There was no way that Nimitz was going to see his most successful fighting Admiral forced out of command by a typhoon.

 

Very few politicians on the world stage played as large a roll in the events of the 20th century more than Jan Smuts.

Born in 1870, Smuts would play a large roll in the Boer War, World War I and World War II.   He passed away in 1950 after a long career representing South Africa and played major rolls in many of the events that defined the 20th century.

He commanded a guerilla army of Boer’s against the British during the Boer War.  The war ended in 1902 with the British declaring victory but with the Boer’s extracting a promise for self government which they finally achieved in 1906/07.    As the war was coming to a stalemate with the British,  Smuts met with Lord Kitchener, the commander of the British and Commonwealth forces.   Smuts recognized that although the war was not lost, continuing to fight the British would just lead to the further destruction of the country and further bloodshed with no end in sight.   His point of view prevailed amongst the Boer’s who had gathered at a conference to decide upon the fate of the war and the conference ended with overwhelming support for the 1902 treaty.

After the Boer War and before World War I, Smuts would take on leadership roles in key South African political parties.  At the onset of  World War I, in 1914, Smuts led the South African Army in a successful  attack against German East Africa which today includes the countries of Burundi, Rwanda and part of Tanzania.

In 1917, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George asked Smuts to come to London to join the Imperial War Cabinet.   Shortly after his arrival, Lloyd George tried to convince Smuts to take over command of the British Army in the Middle East.   But Smuts deferred and General Allenby was given the command.   Were this not the case, then the bridge crossing the Jordan River would not be called the Allenby Bridge, but would be known today as the Jan Smuts Bridge.

Smuts did however choose to work closely with Allenby and helped Allenby plan for his successful attack into the southern flank of the Turks.   This plan called for the construction of a railroad to assist in moving troops from Egypt northwards towards Damascus.   With the railroad built, Allenby was able to take Jerusalem, Haifa and Damascus, routing the Turks and pushing them all the way back to Turkey.

Smuts would also play a large role in the formal formation of the Royal Air Force, combining all British air assets under one formal command and providing it with the support that he felt it needed and deserved so that it would not be controlled by the army.   It took until World War II for the US to adopt the same idea.

When America entered WW1 , Smuts argued that the US troops should be distributed amongst the other allied armies rather than be allowed to fight as an intact American Expeditionary Force.   When this idea was declined by the US, Smuts wrote a confidential letter to Lloyd George arguing that the American General John “Blackjack” Pershing was too inexperienced to lead the US troops and that someone more experienced, like himself, should be put in charge of the Americans.   The reader can just imagine the US reaction to that once the letter was leaked to the public.  It turned out Smuts was wrong about Pershing who acquitted himself quite well during WW1.

After the war, Smuts attended the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of South Africa.  He became a strong supporter of the League of Nation and became a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles where South Africa received a mandate to rule German South West Africa (now known as Namibia).

In the run up to World War II, Smuts returned to politics.  As the war was heating up, initially the South African Government  tried to remain neutral but the Prime Minister at the time was deposed at a party caucus and Smuts was elected in his place.   Smuts was invited to join the Imperial War Cabinet.    As Churchill came to power in 1940, Smuts power within the War Cabinet began to rise.  Churchill and Smuts had served together in World War I and Churchill grew to appreciate Smuts advice more and more as the war dragged on.

During the Battle of Britain, it was not uncommon for Winston Churchill to tempt fate and watch the bombing of London from a vantage point atop the Admiralty Buildings in Central London.  As the War Cabinet became aware that this was going on, they thought Churchill’s wife could make him stop and remain in the relative safety of the large bunker beneath the building.  When this failed, they approached the King who they knew Churchill was terribly fond of and asked King George VI if he could talk to Churchill and get him to stop risking his life on the roof.   This backfired terribly as Churchill only talked the King into joining him on the roof to watch the bombing.   They then approached the  Queen to see if she could help.  Her solution was to threaten to join the duo up on the roof to “appreciate the show” for herself.    As a result, the King acquiesced and agreed to remain safely off the roof.   But Churchill remained undeterred.    Thus the War Cabinet, with Churchill out of the room, began to deliberate what they should do in the event that Churchill were to be killed either by enemy action or as the result of a heart attack.    Interestingly enough, their solution was that they all agreed that Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, would become the Prime Minister of England.   This would be accomplished through a unanimous vote of the coalition government that remained in power in England for the duration of the war.   Of course this did not happen but its interesting to ponder how history could have recorded that Jan Smuts led Britain and the Commonwealth through the darkest hours of World War II.

At the end of the war, In May of 1945, Smuts represented South Africa in San Francisco at the drafting of the United Nations Charter.   He became the South African signatory to that document.

Smuts was also a big supporter of the Balfour Declaration, first adopted in November of 1917 and then again reaffirmed in 1922 in the League of Nations British Mandate for Palestine which set forth British  policy towards the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.  He became personal friends with Chaim Weitzman, who would go on to become the President of Israel and Smuts saw to it that his government voted in the United Nations in support of the creation of the State of Israel.   A Kibbutz near Haifa is named for him, Ramat Yohanan.

Smuts saw much change in the world and in his native South Africa over the course of his life.    He is the only person to have signed both the League of Nations Charter and the United Nations Charter.   He is also the only person whose name adorns both the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as well as being the South African signatory to the surrender documents that officially ended  World War II.    Smuts truly had a seat, front and center, for many of the key events of the 20th century.

Most people have probably never heard of him.   Which makes him a good subject for Remembrance Day, 2014.