A fun read. Bader was quite remarkable.
Posted on 04/19/2015 4:23:46 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Harry Truman was a dishonest machine crook who surrounded himself with other dishonest crooks. He was a terrible President, despite some positives like the Marshall Plan. It is truly amazing that the Dems have been able to rehabilitate him posthumously.
A fun read. Bader was quite remarkable.
I really don't understand all the worry about a follow-on guerrilla war. The only place the Germans are really fighting hard is in the East because they know their fate and the fate of Germany in the hands of the Russians. In contrast, there is no organized civil disobedience in areas occupied by the Western powers.
The Air Force created the Henry E. Erwin Outstanding Enlisted Aircrew Member of the Year Award, presented annually to an airman, noncommissioned officer or senior noncommissioned officer in the flight engineering, loadmaster, air surveillance and related career fields.
It was to be a joint Army/Marines operation to land on the China coast south of Shanghai to establish bases from which to conduct further air raids on Japan and to tighten the naval blockade. The Marine component, as the Graybook indicates, actually got the warning order to begin training. With the Philippines and Okinawa not yet finished and Olympic approaching it will finally be cancelled.
My library doesn’t have this. Brickhill also wrote “The Great Escape.”
That’s very interesting.
I looks like we went with the Army version. Was that found to be a better version than that of the Navy?
http://www.historybyzim.com/2013/04/nammering-atrocity-1945/
On April 19, 1945, a freight train with nearly 4,500 prisoners from Buchenwald pulled onto the railroad siding at Nammering. The train had been destined for Dachau, but at Plattling it was diverted towards Nammering because of damage to the railroad caused by Allied bombing. Once in Nammering, some of the local inhabitants attempted to give the prisoners food and water, but these provisions were stolen by the 150 SS and police officers guarding the train. The commanding officer in charge, Lieutenant Hans Meerbach, ordered during the halt that the bodies of the dead be removed from the train and cremated. This work proceeded too slowly for him, however, and prisoners were forced to carry the bodies of the dead to a nearby mass grave in a ravine roughly 500 yards from the train. There the prisoners carrying the corpses were shot by the guards and they were also buried in the grave. Altogether 524 prisoners were shot and nearly 800 were interred in the mass grave. The bodies were then covered with lime and the grave was flooded to speed up decomposition. Those 3,100 prisoners who had remained on the train were sent on to Dachau, where they were liberated. After the discovery of the site by U.S. troops on April 28, the ranking American officer in the area forced SS men collected from a nearby POW camp to exhume the corpses and lay them out on either side of the ravine above the mass grave. The inhabitants of Nammering were then ordered to walk through the gravesite, and the bodies were buried in the surrounding towns of Eging am See, Aicha vom Wald, Nammering, and Fuerstenstein.
This week in Haaretz 1945 / A disturbing report from Churchill’s delegation to Buchenwald
On April 19, 1945, eight days after the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by Allied forces, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stood before parliament and delivered an urgent request.
“I received this morning an unofficial statement from General Eisenhower indicating that new discoveries, particular in Weimar, are far more serious than what has been revealed up to now,” he said. “Eisenhower urges me to send a group of MPs to his headquarters immediately, so that they can see these atrocities with their own eyes. I have decided that a parliamentary delegation comprised of eight members of the House of Commons and two members of the House of Lords should depart immediately... The goal of this visit is to discover the truth.”
Members of the Buchenwald delegation were selected from a large group of volunteers who offered their services that day. And they had to hurry - direct evidence was disappearing by the hour. Under orders from Allied soldiers, German residents in the area had already started to clean the camp of its filth and festering disease, and to bury the dead one by one; Eisenhower issued commands for the burial procedures. The few huts fit for human use were being converted by Allied workers into field hospitals, to treat the tens of thousands of mortally ill camp prisoners.
The British delegation departed the next day, aboard Dakota military aircraft. On Saturday morning, April 21, they passed through Buchenwald’s gates.
The delegation’s report was prepared within a week. On April 27, 1945 a thin volume was published, selling for two pence to anyone interested. A copy is preserved today in the Haaretz archive. Delegation members clarify in the preface that they arrived at Buchenwald without an intention to conduct a legal inquiry of Nazi war crimes, a process “that would have lasted weeks, even months.” Instead, they came to “discover the truth,” they wrote, quoting Churchill - so long as real human traces remained evident in the camp.
Though conditions at Buchenwald had surely improved immeasurably in the week after the Allies liberated it, evidence was still abundant. “The stench of decay and disease still enveloped the camp,” delegation members reported. American soldiers told the British visitors about what had taken place in one of the camp’s “better” huts: Female prisoners were forced to sleep there with the few prisoners who received special privileges - which included 20-minute visits to this slave-labor brothel. The women were promised better conditions, but in most cases they were executed. When the camp was liberated, 15 women were still alive in the hovel.
The report described the former inmates as wandering around like exhausted skeletons. Those in slightly better health showed their scars and wounds to the British visitors, and described the beatings they had suffered.
“One half-naked skeleton, who wandered on crutches, writhing in pain in the corridor stopped when he saw us, straightened up, smiled and saluted,” they wrote.
The British parliamentarians visited wooden huts that had no floors, where victims were packed in. Some showed the visitors the boards on which they slept: “Even in their extremely emaciated state, they could sleep on the planks only by lying on their sides, without moving.”
The delegation members witnessed similar conditions in the Nazi health clinics. “Excrement from dysentery sufferers dripped through the planks,” they wrote. They visited gas chambers, and rooms whose ceilings had nooses for hanging prisoners. There were piles of corpses, still dressed in blue and white striped uniforms; these victims had starved to death. The visitors were informed of torture experiments carried out in the medical labs, and met one survivor, a Polish Jew, who had been castrated.
“They told us that most of those who had undergone operations were dead; and they made it clear that the policy of exterminating Jews had long replaced that of sterilizing and castrating them,” the report stated.
The parliamentarians heard about Frau Koch, the wife of the camp’s commander, who would collect objects made from human skin. A British scientist who accompanied the MPs examined a lamp shade that had belonged to the Nazi woman and verified these claims.
The visitors also reported seeing small signs of restitution and recovery. A Hitler doll had been placed next to the camp’s gate, as though it had been killed symbolically - with a caption in German that read, “Hitler must die so that Germany can live.”
“Preparing this report, we have committed ourselves to writing with restraint and objectivity, and to refrain from personal responses or emotional comments,” the delegates concluded. However, they declared, “we are of the unanimous opinion that a policy of starvation and inhuman brutalization was enforced at Buchenwald for a prolonged period of time. Such camps symbolize the lowest nadir ever reached by humanity. The memory of what we saw and heard at Buchenwald will haunt us for many years.” (Lital Levin )
Captured Heinkel He 162.
The first claimed victory by an He-162 was on April 19, 1945. Feldwebel Kirchner was credited with shooting down a British aircraft, but he crashed before he could return to base. On April 20, Leutnant Rudolf Schmitt became the first and possibly only pilot to use the jet's ejection seat and survive. Ten days later, Unteroffizier Rechenbach was credited with a British aircraft and confirmed. In early May, Schmitt made the only confirmed kill by an He 162, shooting down a Hawker Tempest flown by Flight Officer M. Austin.11
Heinkel He 162 A-2 120227, at RAF Museum London.
Under heavy enemy fire in Nuernberg, 3rd Infantry Division soldiers cautiously advancing behind a tank on April 19, 1945.
The Abbott and Costello Show
First broadcast on April 19, 1945
Ceremonies mark liberation of 2 Nazi camps 70 years ago
Published April 19, 2015\
Associated Press
FUERSTENBERG, Germany – Officials in Germany solemnly commemorated the liberation of two Nazi concentration camps 70 years ago in the closing days of World War II.
Poland’s first lady, Anna Komorowska, joined in remembrance activities Sunday at the site of the Ravensbrueck women’s camp in northern Germany. Many of the prisoners came from Poland.
Komorowska, wife of Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, planted a memorial rose along with Daniela Schadt, partner of German President Joachim Gauck, and camp survivor Annette Chalut.
Elderly survivors joined black-clad Polish nuns, some of whom held red and white Polish flags. A Mass was said in Polish.
Ceremonies have been held across Germany and Poland throughout the spring marking the advance of Allied troops as Nazi Germany neared defeat. They are even more poignant this year because of the dwindling number of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews by the racist and anti-Semitic regime of German dictator Adolf Hitler.
Read Adolf Galland’s book: “The First and the Last.” He talks about meeting Douglas Bader as a POW. Bader almost talked him into letting Bader test fly an Me109. Of course, Bader would have tried to escape.
I would give Truman more credit -- as a Democrat, he falls into the same category as, say, JF Kennedy meaning: as good as we could ever hope for.
He gets credit for a list of accomplishments, including ending WWII, recognizing Israel, recognizing the Soviet Cold War threat (Truman doctrine), integrating the US military, saving Greece from Communism.
Of course, he was far from ideal, and his "police action" in Korea set the unfortunate example for virtually every US "no win" war since.
But the biggest thing to remember about Truman is that his state of Missouri is today between 2/3 and 3/4 Republican, where even Democrats like Claire McCaskill have to pretend they are semi-conservative Republican-lites.
Yes, Truman's old Jackson County (Kansas City) stomping grounds are now solid Democrat, but state-wide, Truman today would have to run as a Republican:
Senator Harry Truman, 1934:
Today's MO 5th district (Jackson Country) US Representative, Emanuel Cleaver:
Galland was an interesting fellow. He was no Nazi and seemed a genuine German nationalist. He repeatedly clashed with Goering. Of course, he was a natural pilot. He befriended several of the top British pilots after the war.
Early in the war it seemed logical to culminate the island hopping campaign by establishing a base on Formosa to support a landing in China. Japan had so many resources in China, plus it seemed we would need a China base to invade Japan.
The Army, and MacArthur in particular, strongly argued for a Philippine invasion in light of the promises made the Philippine people and the faster than expected success in New Guinea. Taking the Philippines made an assault on Formosa unnecessary. Later, the senior leadership realized the Philippines in conjunction with the Marianas bases and Okinawa could be used to stage an invasion of the home islands without any bases in China.
Plus, in 1944 the Chinese suffered many reverses and we eventually gave up our B-29 bases in favor of the Marianas, so it didn't seem necessary to engage Japan in China.
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