Replies

Free Republic University, Department of History presents World War II Plus 70 Years: Seminar and Discussion Forum
First session: September 1, 2009. Last date to add: September 2, 2015.
Reading assignment: New York Times articles and the occasional radio broadcast delivered daily to students on the 70th anniversary of original publication date. (Previously posted articles can be found by searching on keyword “realtime” Or view Homer’s posting history .)
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by freepmail. Those on the Realtime +/- 70 Years ping list are automatically enrolled. Course description, prerequisites and tuition information is available at the bottom of Homer’s profile. Also visit our general discussion thread.

Selections from West Point Atlas for the Second World War
The Western Pacific, New Guinea, and the Philippine Islands: The Invasion of Leyte (KING II), 17-20 October 1944 and the Battle for Leyte Gulf, 23-25 October 1944
The Philippine Islands: Leyte Island and the Visayas, 1944 – Sixth Army Operations on Leyte and Samar, 17 October-30 December 1944
Northwestern Europe, 1944: 6th and 12th Army Group Operations, 15 September-7 November 1944
Northwestern Europe, 1944: 21st Army Group Operations, 15 September-15 December 1944
Eastern Europe, 1941: Russian Balkan and Baltic Campaigns – Operations, 19 August-31 December 1944
Northern Italy 1944: Allied Advance to Gothic Line, 5 June-25 August and Gains 29 August-31 December
China, 1941: Operation Ichigo, April-December 1944 and Situation 31 December
China-Burma, 1941: Third Burma Campaign – Slim’s Offensive, June 1944-March 1945

October 20, 1944:

"Nazi administrators at Auschwitz burn documents related to prisoners and their fates.
"Nazis initiate death-march deportations of Jews from Budapest, Hungary, to Germany.
"22,000 Budapest Jews are entrained for deportation to Auschwitz.
"Six hundred Jewish boys from a group of 650 locked in a barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau are to be gassed.
Many race about the camp, naked and panicked, before being clubbed by the SS guards who pursue them.
The 50 survivors are put to work unloading potatoes from railcars.
"Men of the Polish Home Army attack Jewish houses in the freshly liberated village of Ejszyszki.
The village's Jews subsequently retaliate against the Poles.
"Nazis put 25,000 Hungarian Jewish men and 10,000 Jewish women to work digging anti-tank trenches in the path of the advancing Red Army."

Women and the Holocaust

" 'The murderers are loose!
They search the world
All through the night,
oh God, all through the night.'

"Gertrud Kolmar, a brilliant Jewish writer, included those words in a poem she called 'Murder.'
The exact date of her death in Auschwitz--she was deported from Berlin during the winter of 1943--is unknown, but her cry lives on.
Its anguish laments the ruthless murders of millions of women, Jews foremost among them, in the 'Final Solution.'

"German deportation and death lists often included gender identification.
Women and men were segregated in concentration and death camps, and early on Jewish women were treated better than Jewish men.
However, once World War II began in 1939 and the Final Solution was under way in 1942, Jewish women were increasingly at risk.

"German authorities considered elderly Jewish women useless to the war effort.
They were therefore sentenced to death by starvation, disease, shooting, or gas.
Of more troubling concern were Jewish women of child-bearing age.
On one hand, their work for the Third Reich could be productive.
On the other, their menace was especially acute because they could produce Jewish children.
The Final Solution had to prevent that outcome.

"Hundreds of thousands of Jewish women were killed at Treblinka.
Hundreds of thousands more were worked to death or gassed at Auschwitz.
Still others were subjected to forced labor, brutal medical experiments, and death at Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women that opened near Fürstenberg, about 50 miles north of Berlin, in May 1939.
Designed to hold several thousand prisoners, its population soared to more than 40,000 in 1944.

"Women from over 20 countries were among the more than 100,000 who were imprisoned in Ravensbrück at various times.
About 13.5 and 5.5 percent of that number were Jews and Gypsies, respectively.
Death claimed about 92,000 of the camp's total prisoner population.
About 6,000 people were gassed in the camp's final months, when the Germans selected Ravensbrück as a destination for prisoners evacuated from camps in the East, as the Red Army forced Germany's retreat.
No other concentration camp in Germany had such a high percentage of murdered prisoners.

"Holocaust scholar Myrna Goldenberg aptly sums up the situation: The hell may have been the same for women and men during the Holocaust, but the gender-related horrors were different.
The last words of her poem 'The Woman Poet'--'do you hear me feel?'--suggest that Gertrud Kolmar would agree."

headline: "MacArthur Invades Central Phillippines"

Meanwhile, back at Maffin Bay in New Guinea, my Dad's 33rd Infantry Division conducted "scout team" patrols:

"Headquarters desired to capture an enemy prisoner, if possible, and determine exactly how many men the Nips had transferred from Sarmi to the Woske River sector.
This mission fell to the 33d Division Scout Team, a hand-picked unit organized for assignments such as this.
Composed of men from every regiment in the Golden Cross, the Scout Team had been trained under the famous Alamo Scouts, Sixth Army's private infiltration force.
It had been active since the 123d took over the Maffin Bay perimeter, penetrating enemy lines at points beyond the reach of the rifle companies.
Lt. John L. Durant, formerly a platoon leader in the 123d Infantry, commanded the team. Second in command was Lt. Francis E. Peebles of the 136th Infantry.
Given a free hand in planning the mission, Durant felt that an ambush placed across the Woske represented the best chance of taking one of the enemy alive.
To reinforce the Scout Team on this delicate assignment, Colonel Serff attached to it one platoon of riflemen from Company F, led by Lt. Raymond R. Utke. Durant's scheme called for his Scout Team, composed of eight men besides Peebles and himself, to actually lay the ambush.
Utke's platoon was designated as a supporting force, assigned to cover the crossing of the Woske and the setting of the trap. Orientation of troops began on 18 October as soon as Durant's plan had received regimental approval.
Execution of the plan was scheduled for the morning of the 20th.
Moving stealthily, the 31-man patrol managed to ford the Woske at its mouth without alerting enemy sentries.
At 0500, an hour after the river crossing, the ambush was in place.
Durant had selected a spot about three hundred yards west of the Woske and some seventyfive yards in from the shoreline.
He deployed his team in bunkers and high grass which lined both sides of a narrow beach trail.
Utke's men stayed a few yards closer to the Woske, prepared to reinforce the ambush party upon Durant's signal.
For five solid hours ambush party and support maintained a tense watch, waiting for a Nip patrol to walk into the jaws of the trap.
When no Japanese appeared by 1000, Durant, disgusted with the turn of events, decided to advance toward Sawar Drome and set another ambush along a more travelled route.
Utke and five Fox Company men moved out as the point, followed by Lieutenant Durant and the Scout Team and the remainder of the infantry platoon.
Barely two hundred yards were covered before an enemy party, following Durant's move along the beach, quickly organized an ambush of its own and enfiladed the American column with machine-gun fire.
Several knee mortars opened up simultaneously with the automatic weapons.

Durant's men were caught flatfooted.
Zeroed in on the open beach, all they could do was hit the ground and attempt to roll away from the machine guns' beaten zones.
Lieutenant Peebles, bringing up the rear with fifteen F Company men, managed to withdraw his force and turn some answering fire against the enemy.
This diversion enabled forward elements to break contact and race for the Woske.
Five dead were left behind, including Lieutenant Durant who had been killed by a mortar fragment.
Utke and Peebles both suffered wounds as did nine other members of the ill-fated force."