Posted on 01/28/2026 5:39:43 PM PST by NKP_Vet
The Belgian troopship SS Léopoldville had just slipped beneath the English Channel after being hit by a torpedo. Gerald Howard went down with the ship. The 23-year-old rifleman nearly drowned under the frigid water like hundreds of his comrades. He fought his way back to the surface.
"I was on the ship until it went down," Howard recalled decades later. "It pulled me down, and when I came up I saw a life raft. They said 'You can't get on.' I said, 'Like hell I can't.'"
Howard woke up around midnight in a hospital in Cherbourg, France. He was among the lucky ones. On that Christmas Eve in 1944, a German U-boat torpedo killed 763 American soldiers just five miles from the French coastline. Nearly 500 bodies were never recovered from the water.
The U.S. government buried the story for decades. It was the deadliest U-boat attack on American soldiers sent to fight in World War II.………
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
LOL.
I read your nonsense on the new Ghetto Thread.
“””””They deserve far better than Soldiers Medals, a relatively mid level award.”””””
A non-combat medal for valor, it is the medal that JFK was awarded, (the Navy version).
Perfect response😂
Was this part of the “Slapton Sands” training disaster? I know the casualties in that were kept secret, and rolled into the D-Day numbers
Slapton Sands occurred in the run up to the Normandy invasion in June. In December, the 66th Infantry Division was being transported across the Channel when the liner was torpedoed.
I suspect when you are on a torpedoed boat, you are in combat.
Since you’re so fkn ignorant, you should leave OUR country..
OK, thank you for the information.
IIRC:
A German ship sailing along the African coast loaded with a couple thousand American and English prisoners was torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine...
Crain was awarded the Silver Star while Holmes received the Soldiers medal, Holmes’s medal didn’t make sense since they were engaged in combat and I agree that it should reflect that.
Yep. War is hell.
“By the way, best current estimates put Russian military dead at about 325,000 and Ukrainian military dead at about 140,000 since February 2022.”
What the H**L does that have to do with an article post about US soldiers massacred in WWII? Keep your BS Ukraine loving crap off the post unless it is about that BS Ukraine war.
I disagree. Russian dead and missing are about 700,000 because its kia\wia ratio is so even due to awful battlefield medical care and the far higher lethality of drones. The Ukrainian dead to wounded ratio is also affected by drone lethality. The Russians are good at drone warfare too.
IMO the Russians have finally started winning with their strategic air campaign against against Ukraine’s electric power plants. This war will be over in 1—2 years.
No, that’s just Russian propaganda, their excuse for violently attacking a nation that was not and never would be a threat but which the greedy Russian leader and his still very much Stalinist political allies see as a strategic location for their desired recreaction of a Russian empire.
Russia has no business invading another country to get real estate any more than we would have for invading Canada. The nonsense about invading Greenland is just that, it will never happen but it is in Russia’s interest that liberal loons believe it because it would excuse the invasion and mass murder Russia has perpetrated in Ukraine.
Nations do not have any right to other countries as “strategic buffers.” That’s absurd.
They may desire such but other countries are under no obiigation to recognize aggression and thievery as legitimate. it and would be wise to take such moves as warnings that the aggressor, if they aren’t made to pay the highest price for every acre, eventually intended over the coming decades to continue taking “buffer zones” until their army finds itself right next to Germany, and eventually beyond, wading in the Atlantic. Fortunately the Russians, like their Democratic Socialist friends, aren’t nearly as good at fighting as they are they are with propaganda and playing the victim.
An entire infantry battalion - dead - in a couple of minutes.
Christmas Eve, six months after D-Day.
The Battle of the Bulge had just started, one week earlier.
Probably troop replacements.
The USA and Britain completely controlled the surface of the English Channel.
That must have been an incredible shock.
I am skeptical about the 50 year secret.
Dozens of senior grade officers would have known about this.
I find numbers like this very hard to believe.
That would require 480 dead - every day - for four years.
Plus, another 480 hospital necessary wounded - every day.
You would need 700,000 military police just to maintain discipline and fill the monthly draft quota.
So Russia didn’t want to invade? They did it to help Ukraine?
Sure, NATO is the problem. In 2014 Ukraine was neutral with the majority of Ukrainians against joining NATO, and no chance of joining NATO, so Putin seized Crimea.
LOL, "strategic buffer", or more accurately a subservient state. Its amazing, Putin writes a 7,000 word essay denying Ukraine's right to exist as an independent state, posts its on the Kremlin website where it still exists to this day, and everyone ignores it.
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