Now I don’t feel so bad about the ending of Das Boot.
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.
It tears me up to think of these, mostly young, guys who never got a chance to do what they had volunteered and trained for, much less to live out their real lives post-war. What a sad way to go.
My great grandma was on the SS Athenia when the Huns blew it up. I got lucky. Lousy hun bastards (ht Patton)I did love living in germany though. Loads of fun.
The Lancastria, evacuating troops from France early in the war had a much greater loss of life. News of it was suppressed.
A chunk of the blame can be laid to the US Army Air Force. The Germans didn’t pick up survivors because of the Lacona incident.
Time to upgrade many of those awards to Silver Stars and MOH. They deserve far better than Soldiers Medals, a relatively mid level award.
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
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...
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.
Christmas 1944 was a tough time for US GIs generally.
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.