I wonder if this is the ship my old Sunday school teacher was aboard when on his way to recuperate from wounds rec'd during The Bulge? It got sunk.
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 ...
I am not under any Hollywood illusions that our troops were all eager to join up, etc. I originally had “or drafted” in my post, but edited it out to uncomplicate the point. Bad choice I guess.
If you read the article carefully the soldiers were only told to remain silent during the War.
Then American documents were declassified in 1959.
It was only British documents that were classified until 1996.
In wartime it is standard practice (of all participants of almost all wars) to minimize bad news to keep civilian and military morale as high as possible.
That is one reason why wartime reporting cannot be trusted (again no matter what side) during the war.
There was extraordinary pressure for young men to sign up for the military.
The advertising and media campaigns made the Covid vaxx propaganda seem mild by comparison.
The peer/social pressure was very intense.
Those men who did not sign up were viewed as loathsome—the very bottom of the social pecking order.
One of the soldiers of Easy Company in an interview for “Band of Brothers” mentioned a man from his hometown who committed suicide because the Army wouldn’t take him.
The advertising and media campaigns made the Covid vaxx propaganda seem mild by comparison.
The peer/social pressure was very intense.
Hard to imagine. Nationalism used to be a thing.
White Feather Campaign
The White Feather Campaign was a prominent enlistment campaign and shaming ritual in Britain during the First World War, in which women gave white feathers to non-enlisting men, symbolising cowardice and shaming them into signing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Feather_Campaign
“But don’t kid yourself that every red blooded American rushed down to the recruiting office on their 18th birthday.“
….Or that they were all signing up for the infantry. They gave my father this choice: Cook, Airborne. He was assigned to Ft Dix for the duration. Well within driving range of his LI home.
Interesting article.
The giving “white feathers” to folks who did not deserve them reminds me of the anti-ICE crazies in MN—so driven by virtue signaling zealotry that they can easily be fooled into attacking innocent or wrong targets.
My father was given a choice to serve as a radio operator in the Amazon during the war.
He admitted he was thrilled—would rather take his chances against Brazilian head-hunters (and yeah they were there) rather than German or Japanese troops.
Those radio operators actually did save the lives of airmen whose planes were damaged and needed a place to land.
The obscure airbase was ridiculously boring—but the men stationed there could return home with honor as having done their duty.
I imagine there was intense social pressure to join but also personal pressure, especially for some in their 20s or up, not to. Going into the service meant leaving behind wives, young children, sick or elderly parents, etc., to fend for themselves; farms that go to wrack and ruin without constant attending, jobs with decent pay they needed to support families, jobs in critical defense industries, etc.
My father and uncles all served in WWII, and were never shy about talking about it, but I don’t recall a word about draftees from them or their peers. Upon reflection that is sort of curious.
My grandfather was 34 years old with kids when he went into and served in a non-combat position in the Philippines.
My grandfather had a brother who was a gunner on an airplane & who was shot down and captured by German locals and then turned over to the German army as a POW. Wouldn’t talk about it unless it was another vet and his niece, my mother is only aware of just this little bit I shared. She also shared that the locals were brutal and he was treated better as a POW.
There’s a more recent video of a guy who served in Afghanistan and remembers seeing a red headed Muslim that was Chechen. He said they were told to keep one bullet for themselves as the Chechens would skin you alive.
One of my uncles had lost an eye as a kid. He thought they would never take him. Well, they did. They told him he couldn’t be in a combat unit.
He ended up in the South Pacific in graves registration. One of the places he went was New Guinea. He and his team would go up into the mountains to recover bodies out of plane crashes. They came under fire all the time. He said it didn’t matter if he was in the infantry, he wasn’t really able to see the enemy with one eye so he just shot in the general direction.
Can you imagine them drafting a one eyed skinny kid today? The world is a different place.
Ukraine started out with World War Two levels of 3 wounded per 1 dead in 2022, improved that to 5 wounded to 1 dead in 2023, and then their wounded to dead ratio started dropping in 2024 as the numbers of Russian drones soared. Repeat, drones are far, far more lethal than artillery, mortars and small arms. Most casualties overall since 2023 have been inflicted by drones.
Plus there is effectively no Russian battlefield medical care in winters, and not much even in summer. Russian battlefield medical care throughout this war has been far below its World War Two standards.
Ukraine receives 1,000 bodies in latest soldier swap with Russia [38 Russians]
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4364556/posts
The last swap took place in November last year when Russia returned 1,000 bodies to Ukraine and received 30 in return.
Christmas 1944 was a tough time for US GIs generally.
It's really not a good to bail out or get shot down over the people you just bombed. They can be a bit emotional about the whole thing ... I wouldn't be surprised if, as an aviator, he ended up in a Luftwaffe POW camp. They tended to be less nasty than other groups, particularly to American or British POWs.
Note that I put it as "less nasty", not as "better" or "good" ... it's all degrees of nastiness.
If you're a Russian in 1945, that's no tragedy; it's a good start. War is hell.
I wonder if this is the ship my old Sunday school teacher was aboard when on his way to recuperate from wounds rec'd during The Bulge? It got sunk.
I saw a post that said Russia losses are close to 1.2 million. Worse than WWII.
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