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 ...
You posted it.
“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.”
You should seek help with your obsessive compulsive disorder.
NO one gives a rats ass about how many foreigners died.
This thread is not about them, so stop hijacking threads to talk about russia, jackass.
The sinking of the Leopoldville was mentioned on page 477 of the US Army Official History of World War II in the European theater in “The Last Offensive” by chief historian Charles MacDonald that was published in 1972.
Charles MacDonald is most known for his WW2 autobiography “Company Commander.”
General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower declassified all operational Army, Army Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps records in 1947. Thus this was declassified several decades before the article’s author did his research. I will admit that FINDING the documents in the National Archives is a major research problem.
Stronk reply
If you’re a Russian in 1945, that’s no tragedy; it’s a good start. War is hell.
Yep. Goebbels wanted “Totaler Krieg” and he got it.
stronk up yours
😂😂😂
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