The War Blog

PM Stoltenberg apologises for WWII Jews’ deportation

2012-01-29T13:00:00.000+01:00

Found here.

“Without relieving the Nazis of their responsibility, it is time to for us to acknowledge that Norwegian policemen and other Norwegians took part in the arrest and deportation of Jews.”

“Today I feel it is fitting for me to express our deepest apologies that this could happen on Norwegian soil,” he said at today’s UN International Holocaust Rememberance Day ceremony at Oslo’s Akershus Quayside.

He continued, “This year it is 70 years since the German cargo ship SS Donau set sail from this dock on its shameful mission. Five hundred and thirty-two Jews had been brutally rounded up and stowed on board.”

“Only nine of them were to return. The last of the survivors who is still alive is Samuel Steinmann. I am especially pleased to have you here with us today.”

The Prime Minister also highlighted the fate of Ruth Maier, who was 22 when she was arrested in November 1942. She was killed five days later in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

He mentioned her story would not have been known if it had not been for writer and Gunvor Hofmo and Jan Erik Vold, a lyric poet, translator, and author.

“The Holocaust came to Norway on Thursday 26 November 1942. Ruth Maier was one of the many who were arrested that day. [...] On 26 November, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the sound of heavy boots could be heard on the stairs of the boarding house “Englehjemmet” in Oslo,” said PM Stoltenberg.

“A few minutes later, the slight Jewish girl was seen by her friends being led out of the door of Dalsbergstien 3. Ruth Maier was last seen being forced into a black truck by two big Norwegian policemen.”

Saying whilst there was no question the Nazis carried out the murders, the PM declared, “but it was Norwegians who carried out the arrests. It was Norwegians who drove the trucks.”

“I regret to say that the ideas that led to the Holocaust are still very much alive today, 70 years later. All over the world we see that individuals and groups are spreading intolerance and fear. They are cultivating violent ideologies that could lead to anti-Semitism and hatred of minorities. Norwegian Jews also tell that they are living in fear.”

“In the newspaper Vårt Land, we read that some of our Jews are afraid to be visible as Jews. We cannot accept this in Norway. No one should have to hide their faith, cultural identity or sexual orientation. All people have equal worth. Everyone has equal rights, and that is how it has to be in Norway.”

Out of the 772 Norwegian Jews and Jewish refugees that were deported during WWII, just 34 survived. A total of six million Jews, 1.5 million of them children, were murdered by the Nazis in the Second World War under Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”.

* * *

I'm somewhat puzzled by this apparent need of people three generations past the act to shovel ashes onto their heads, especially in the case of Norway, which was an occupied nation back then. It's a bit like saying sorry to someone who was wronged with your help but with the caveat that at that time you had a gun to your head and your family as virtual hostages! The only thing your refusal to be involved would have caused is the punishment of yourself and your loved ones. If there is someone who needs to apologize, it's the German authorities who ordered the deportations - and I believe we have done pretty much that on a non-stop basis for some decades now. As for "that the ideas that led to the Holocaust are still very much alive today": oh, yes, they are, and they are apparently been nicely fostered by the prime minister's own leftwing circles and Norway's increasing Muslim minority, and not by your usual suspects...

Gaming Market Ready for WW2 Again?

2012-01-26T20:23:00.001+01:00

Both VG24/7 and the Gaming Examiner recently ran the comments of Rebellion studio's Steve Hart who believes gamers are ready for titles set within World War II again as the setting is a “breath of fresh air” compared to those with modern conflicts.

“… I think the market is ready for World War Two. You’ve seen the extra press the likes of Red Orchestra 2 have gotten because all of a sudden WW2 is a breath of fresh air whereas modern conflicts perhaps aren’t.

I wouldn’t say developers moved on, instead they gave it the respect it needed and said ‘Right, we’ve done that to death, let’s go look at something else.’ It just so happens that our timing for a World War Two game is better than others out there, and gamers are ready for that now. Even better for us is that we’re coming out before perhaps another Call of Duty set during World War Two, as I’m sure we’ll be seeing another one of those at some point.”

Now, naturally I love WWII games, and I think it'd be great to get some new ones with the graphics and physics engines newer systems do provide by now. Still, what I really want is not a rehash of the one thousandth Call of Duty clone. Give me something new, give me something daring and fresh. Mix genres. Tell engaging stories. Don't tell me for the tenth time how US troops parachuted down into Normandie on the night before D-Day (or if you do it, do it really well^^). Give me a covert ops campaign, a commando campaign. Use the OSS or the SAS for protagonists.

Hell, give me German FPS campaign! That'd be new, and it'd require some really good storywriting. Make it a compelling moral tale spanning the whole war in some 20 missions or so.

Or make it an alternative history wargame! Or how about a RTS game based on the real European map? Use Google Earth and randomly generated terrain sets and frame it into a dynamic multiplayer setting in, say, the Western Front 1944? Fully destructible terrain, on a Free2Play basis?

Getting serious about video games

2012-01-25T18:00:00.000+01:00

Video games have somewhat of a bad reputation today: individuals have attacked games for their supposed contribution to obscenity and their debilitation of male virtue. Despite these fears, scientists have identified some benefits from gaming, ranging from improved self-worth to augmented surgical skills. In the foreign policy arena, video games can and should serve as a powerful tool for educating civilian and military personnel about war and foreign affairs.

Video games can serve to help bolster America's glaring deficiency in one crucial discipline: history. Video games focused on war and IR provide refreshing bursts of information about often-overlooked leaders and wars. These games can offer descriptive backgrounds of leaders or events (e.g. Age of Empires' description of Genghis Khan or the Crusades). These methods can sometimes provide a deeper and more-engaging understanding of history than just a textbook or lecture.

A subgenre of games, so-called "serious" games, goes further by explicitly trying to educate gamers about historical or political issues. For example, Niall Ferguson in 2007 played the World War II serious game Making History and played out some of his WWII counterfactual scenarios, such as war breaking out over German seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938. His experience led him to conclude that his counterfactual historical scenarios "weren't as robust as [he] thought." As a result, Ferguson ended up advising this series. This episode, forcing critical re-examinations of events, anecdotally illustrates the range of useful educational experiences gleaned from games like Making History or other, current games such as Global Conflicts: Palestine or the future-themed Fate of the World: Tipping Point that can help civilians better understand history and policymaking, thereby making better choices when voting or arguing politics.

All of the above is great for civilians, but what about actual warfighters and policymakers? Games cannot finely simulate actual combat or crises, yet can provide training related to the planning and responses needed for tactical and strategic decisions. Indeed, military officers have engaged in a modern form of Kriegsspiel by using tactical warfare games for their training: for example, the Close Combat series proved so popular that in 2004 the developer released Close Combat: Marines explicitly for military training. Other games, such as the tank-simulator Steel Beasts or the situational training tools of WILL interactive, have been used by the military for realistic simulations of warfighting and decision-making.

Civilian practitioners, however, have not embraced gaming as readily as the military: while think tankers or civilian politicians outside the Pentagon may play games in an unofficial capacity, official efforts like the Woodrow Wilson Center's Serious Games Initiative have petered out. In stark contrast, DOD policy practitioners embrace video games even in non-kinetic planning: Michael Peck's article on a DOD budgeting game shows how policymakers can prepare for things as prosaic as the budget with games. Hopefully civilian policymakers in the future will use games, both serious, educational games and fun strategy games, to prepare for the decision-making necessary during times of crisis.

first seen at Foreign Policy.

Irish Treatment of Jewish Refugees & Polish Promotion of WWII Past

2012-01-25T12:59:00.000+01:00

Just two small news snippets for today.

State 'did nothing for Jews in WWII'

IRELAND can no longer escape the "inconvenient truth" that it turned its back on the suffering of the Jews during World War Two.

In a hard-hitting speech delivered at the opening of a new Holocaust exhibition in Dublin last night, Justice Minister Alan Shatter said the Irish State lost its "moral compass" during and after the war.

"An inconvenient truth is that those who chose to do and say nothing during this unprecedented period in European history included this State.

"In the period following Hitler coming to power and preceding the Second World War, the doors of this state were kept firmly closed to German Jewish families trying to escape from persecution and death," he said.

Records unearthed by the Minister from the Department of Foreign Affairs while he was researching the period many years ago show that the then Irish Ambassador to Germany, Charles Bewley, recommended the Government refuse visa requests from Jews to protect Ireland from "contamination".

"In understanding the Holocaust and maintaining its memory...we should not forget or ignore the failures of this State and this State's responsibilities for such failures," he warned (continue reading here).

Poland Tourism To Promote WWII Headquarters of Adolf Hitler
Poland is looking to boost tourism with the help of headquarters used by Adolf Hitler during WWII. Wolfsschanze or Wolf's Lair is the Adolf Hitler's command headquarters that Poland tourism is looking to promote in order to lure tourists.

The Polish authorities have planned $2 million upgrade of the Wolfsschanze to attract more tourists. Poland officials plans to attract more children at the headquarters of Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

At present around 180,000 to 200,000 tourists visit the site annually. Following the upgrades, Poland tourism expects 20 per cent increase in tourist arrivals. Wolfsschanze is spread in a area of 250 hectare, surrounded by abundance of forest in Rastenburg. Wolf's Lair was the largest of 10 headquarters used by Nazis and Adolf Hitler during the Second World War (continue reading here).

Review - Captain America (2011)

2012-01-24T14:29:00.001+01:00

Since I've got no idea when or even if Red Tails will hit German movie theatres I thought I could just as well give you my impressions of the Captain America movie I saw just recently with a good buddy of mine, and my review mirrors his own. Since it's WW II & alternate history, this one was right down my alley.

Steve Rogers is a pansie, an eighty pound paper towel that could be beaten up by a girl. But it's the 1940s, and the USA is at war. And while Rogers doesn't have the physique to volunteer for service with his friend, he has his heart at the right place - so much, in fact, that he tries every trick in the book to be admitted into the forces. But to no avail, neither the army nor the female half of society takes notice of little Steve. But one man does take notice. An emigree scientist, a Jew having escaped from Germany and now working for the US government on a secret supersoldier program, takes Rogers in. Because who would be the better choice than the man who - on first sight - seems to be the worst choice?

I won't spoil much more of the story, even though it does tend to fit in with the general comic book level of complexity, meaning it could fit on a post-it note. But let's be honest: that's not much of a problem with an action-oriented movie if you get the right tone. And Captain America actually gets most of it right.

For example, we get a really great villain in the form of an uncompromising Red Skull played by an as always perfect Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, Matrix) who had obvious fun in his role. However, "Hydra", his Nazi-esque and even more evil-than-the-Nazis organisation, receives too little exposition and explanation; if you're not a fan of the comics you're bound to end up asking who the hell all those guys in those funny uniforms are?!

The story is told in a rather serious tone that nonetheless leaves some space for quips and moments of (self) irony. The production design is reminiscent of recent WW II movies - that is, until "Hydra" gets its screen time with rather futuristic designs. Which, incidentially, is a good touch as it prevents Captain America from becoming a melodramatic WW II movie.

Nice bridges to Thor (the Odin Cube is the source of "Hydra's" energy) and Iron Man (Howard Stark works for the US government) are built, and the single movies are pulled a bit closer together by that, ultimately helping to establish a connected set of origin stories for the upcoming Avengers movie.

I was also positively surprised by the movie's sense of patriotism, and in two ways in that: for one, unlike the watered down Superman reboot, Captain America is an American fighting for America (and in a wider sense, against evil). This is exactly the core of what that character is supposed to be. And secondly, despite that, the American patriotism is presented so tastefully that international audiences won't be alienated. I believe that a good balance was struck there.

There's a nice cast of interesting supporting characters that is sadly underutilized by rushing the second third of the movie unnecessarily forward. Steve Rogers practically changes on the spot from an icon selling war bonds to fully trained supersoldier. He really does; he's gone through basic training, then goes on a long bond sales tour, and from one moment to the other he switches his posturing on a stage to parachuting behind enemy lines. Sure, he's strong and he's fast, but he lacks the training and experience for this kind of action. This is were the movie falls terribly short. Even a training montage - maybe even just one of he training himself - would have gone a long way to change this for the better.

As I mentioned above, there's a cool cast of supporting characters, but they have terribly little screen time and development. As Markus Antares noted, a great chance to make this into a comic book based Dirty Dozen was wasted here.

In the end, Captain America is less than it could have been in the sense that it is "just" another origin movie leading up to the Avengers. My buddy and I feel that the character wasn't done with WW II yet, and that a great chance has been missed here to fully develop Steve Rogers/Captain America, especially with the movie's end kept in mind.

Final Verdict: B. A must see for afficionados of the genre and those waiting for the Avengers movie. It's above average, but does not rise to the heights of Iron Man.

Extraordinary New Book Rewrites Adolf Hitler’s Childhood

2012-01-23T18:00:00.002+01:00

from Digital Journal.

Edit: Mitro, the founder of the Alternate History Weekly Update, contacted the author of the below mentioned novel and secured a review copy for yours truly! Thanks, Frank and Mitro!

Frank Daversa, author and writer, recently published his new book “Young Adolf: An Alternate History” with AuthorHouse. It revisits Hitler's childhood as an exercise in developmental psychology: can an early romance overcome the domestic challenges of young Adolf's life? The story, written by Frank and Joseph Franciosa Jr., starts with Hitler’s birth, and proceeds through his adolescence. It depicts his childhood in striking detail. You will observe his ordeals, from the rigors of his schooling to beatings by his father Alois. Factual accounts are interspersed with fictional inventions, such as his relationship with a hypothetical girl named Helga. Can young Adolf conquer the personal barriers his difficult childhood presented and become close with her emotionally? How will that change him?

Learn more about Adolf the boy. Experience the molding of his dreams, his prejudices, and his desires in visceral detail. Come to understand the inner-workings of history's most infamous megalomaniac through the perspective of a child’s eyes. Follow Adolf during his younger years. Know the boy before he was the world's most feared man. Witness his courtship with good-natured Helga. Decide whether her influence might have altered the course of history.

Frank is based in Houston, TX. It all began there back in early 2008, when he was thinking of how Adolf Hitler must have had a difficult childhood for him to turn out the way he did. He had no girlfriends during that time to speak of. Then it occurred to Frank, what would happen if someone intervened, someone to show young Hitler true love? Would this be enough to change him for the better as an adult? That is how “Young Adolf” was born.

This does seem like an interesting premise, though I'm rather doubtful as to its overall plausibility. By that I don't mean the possibility of Hitler getting a girlfriend, but of it having an overall impact on his personality and politics. But then I'm rather sceptical of the whole psycho-analysis as an approach anyway since in the end it always seems to boil down to some issue about one's mother and/or sex. Contrary to that I think that even people who one would identify as "good" and even "kind", who had a good childhood and experienced stable relationships, can through deliberations and the setting of priorities come up with ideas and concepts we would rightfully abhorr. Having said that, I may well be doing the whole project premature injustice (...can injustice be mature?^^). It certainly addresses an aspect few if any other writers have tackled in that way. That alone makes me anticipate reading it.

Red Tails Update 2

2012-01-22T20:23:00.002+01:00

As of today, Red Tails has a 34% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, putting it squarely in the "rotten" category. The general consensus seems to be that the characters are flat, much of the dialogue is cheezy, and it doesn't really tackle "big issues".

And you know what? Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn! Red Tails first and foremost appears to be a war movie, and thank God for that. The last thing the genre needed was another overly dramatic and pseudo-philosophical snorefest pleasing the artsy crowd (nothing against you guys, but stay out of my entertainment). Audiences seem to have come to the same conclusion. User reviews on Rotten Tomatoes therefore give the movie a favorable 72% rating.

Having said that, there's still no international release date in sight. However, Korsgaard already has promised to review the movie asap. I'll keep you guys posted.

Edit: Korsgaard's review is up. He was not impressed.

The Tuskegee Airmen, and their many triumphs and tragedies, and is a tale of heroism and courage in the face of adversity that deserves a great film, and Red Tails is not that film. Despite some superb aerial combat scenes, the rest of the film suffers from a predictable plot, despite the best efforts of a talented cast, the characters are wooden and the dialogue simple, and the movie is just filled with cliché after cliché after cliché - so in other words, typical George Lucas fare. Despite some great potential, Red Tails is at best passable, and at worst, tremendously disappointing. You’re better off renting the superb 1995 HBO film, and frankly, unless you are utterly desperate for to see a better bookend to Lucas' career than the Star Wars prequels or Indiana Jones and the Nuked Refrigerator, this movie isn't worth your time or money.

Smert Shpionam

2012-01-21T18:00:00.000+01:00

Until now, no work in the English language has ever come close to giving us a detailed study of Stalin's diabolical counterintelligence organization. SMERSH was Stalin's wartime terror apparatus; a collection of torturers and killers unleashed in 1943 to cut a bloody swath across Eastern Europe. SMERSH's mission was to "filter" the Red Army for spies and, as a result, was responsible for the arrest, torture, and execution of many thousands of innocent servicemen and citizens of countries occupied by the Red Army.

Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, a Russian historian, human rights activist, and molecular geneticist now living in the United States, gives us a comprehensive look at this ruthless death machine in his new book SMERSH. The book gleans much from recently declassified documents from the Russian archives uncovered for the first time, shining a much needed harsh light into the murky dealings of the Stalinist police state. Though SMERSH was part of the government, it was not under the military's control. In fact it was instead an independent secret organization whose director, Viktor Abakumov, reported daily to Stalin himself.

continue at The Huffington Post.

1940 Katyn massacre – the Soviet’s ‘big mistake’

2012-01-21T00:08:00.000+01:00

from Polskie Radio.

New evidence has surfaced in Russia about the WWII Katyn Crime, revealing that Soviet authorities circulated information internally about the 1940 massacre of Poles in 1953. The materials are noteworthy, as Moscow only officially acknowledged guilt for the massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in 1990.

The mainly reserve officers were executed by the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) during the Katyn Crime. The shootings took place at several locations across the Soviet Union. After invading the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans discovered over 4000 bodies in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The Russians claimed that the Nazis had carried out the crimes.

The new evidence concerns the 1953 trial of former Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of the Secret Police, Lavrentiy Beria, who was put on trial shortly after Stalin's death the same year. Previously unpublished documents relating to the case have emerged in a book by historian Oleg Mozochin titled The Political Bureau and the Trial of Beria.

continue here.

War has a female face

2012-01-19T17:13:00.000+01:00

The people over at English Russia have a series of WW2 photos showing women serving in the Red Army. Check them out (and no, they're not hot)!

Red Tails Update

2012-01-18T13:02:00.000+01:00

Hey guys, I'll do a review of Red Tails asap, but it may take a while. Official US release date is January 20 in the USA, but since I'm located in Germany I won't be able to make that. Worse even, IMDB has no international release dates available as of yet.

Tuskegee Airman from South Portland talks truth vs. fiction ahead of 'Red Tails' release

2012-01-17T18:00:00.000+01:00

Jim Sheppard of the 332nd, the "Tuskegee Airmen"

first posted at The Forecaster.

The Tuskegee Airmen get together in a different city every year. The World War II veterans, who were the first black pilots in the U.S. military, meet to catch up with each other and swap stories.

But a few years ago, in Philadelphia, they weren't alone.

They were joined by filmmaker George Lucas, who wanted to make a movie about the aviators. He had come to get their blessing, to ask them what they'd like to see in a film about their exploits in Europe.

"We told them to knock out all the crap," said Jim Sheppard, 87, a Tuskegee Airman who is originally from Harlem and has lived in South Portland for more than 30 years. "We were good enough on our own. We don't need people boosting us."

Sheppard will learn if his advice was heeded when "Red Tails" hits theaters Jan. 20. The movie stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and is named for the red tails painted on the P-51 Mustangs flown by the airmen, who trained at a base in Tuskegee, Ala.

Sheppard was an aviation mechanic for the Army Air Corps' 332nd Fighter Group, as the airmen were then known. At that time, top military officials didn't believe black pilots could be trusted in war.

The unit was seen as an experiment, but its pilots' track record as successful bomber escorts made them some of the very best airmen by the end of the war. Its success was integral to breaking down racial barriers in the military.

"We had to be better than everyone else because the eyes of the War Department were on us," Sheppard said in an interview at his Sandy Hill Road home.

It was at the War Department that the Tuskegee Airmen had the greatest immediate impact. In 1948, President Harry Truman ended military segregation, a testament to the success of the 332nd.

But despite his pride in the accomplishments of the airmen, Sheppard was worried urban legends that developed around his flight group would infiltrate Lucas' movie.

In the 1950s, writers and filmmakers began detailing the exploits of the heroic black pilots in Europe. In trying to tell a good story – and in trying to convince a racially divided America to accept black men as war heroes – they resorted to exaggeration, Sheppard said.

"'The Tuskegee Airmen never lost a bomber,'" he said they wrote. Or top military brass purposefully put black pilots on the front lines to protect white aviators. Sheppard said neither of those things were true.

The story that bothered Sheppard the most, though, was the one that black pilots had to make do with hand-me-down planes.

Sheppard beams when he talks about the planes he worked on in the military. He loved them, and was always impressed by the aircraft his unit had, from the P-40 Warhawks they trained in to the P-51 Mustangs they eventually used overseas.

But Sheppard and his comrades almost ended up never leaving the states. The Pentagon was hesitant to send the black pilots to Europe, and the Tuskegee Airmen were stalled repeatedly before being sent overseas, he said. During that time, the pilots and mechanics kept training.

"Every time they stalled us, we got sharper and sharper," he said. "These guys ate, slept and breathed airplanes. ... That's why we got so good."

When the order came to ship out, Sheppard said he and the crew were excited – not because they were hawkish, but because they wanted to prove themselves.

"No one wants to go to war," he said. "But we wanted to fly, like everyone else."

Sheppard shipped off in early 1944. His squadron moved through Sicily and Italy as far north as Rome, where pilots escorted bombers to Berlin. Sheppard was made crew chief, in charge of the airworthiness of two P-51 Mustangs.

The 332nd shipped back to the U.S. in October 1945. Sheppard was a staff sergeant.

Since then, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen has been told and retold in documentaries, dramas, books and radio specials. Sheppard said he's not surprised the story persists.

"We may draw more attention because we were the first all-black unit," he said. "But war stories always play well in Hollywood. ... I think it's mostly because it's a war story."

He said he hopes the movie won't take too many liberties with his story. He didn't see the need for a romantic subplot, or overwrought moments of racial tension on the ground. That's not how it was, he said.

Even the name, "Red Tails," amuses Sheppard.

The airmen have come to be associated with the brightly colored tails of their airplanes, but the origin is mundane: a commander somewhere said he wanted each group to be color-coded so he knew who he was looking at.

Though there isn't much drama in that story, Sheppard said he's still happy the 332nd got red, and not yellow, or some striped pattern.

"I remember seeing the order for 'glossy, red enamel,'" he said. "I think we got the best color. I love the way that red looked against the metallic."

Legendary WWII Soviet spy dies at 87

2012-01-15T18:00:00.000+01:00

The "Big 3" at Tehran.

from AFP.

One of the legendary Soviet agents of World War II, who infiltrated a British spy school and protected the "Big Three" in the Tehran conference, died aged 87, Russia's intelligence service said Wednesday.

Gevork Vartanyan, working under the codename Amir, in 1942 managed to attend an entire British training course for Russian-speaking spies in Tehran whom London then wanted to send all over the Soviet Union.

According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) - the successor to the Soviet KGB - his work helped expose the British network which existed despite London's wartime alliance with Moscow.

But Vartanyan's greatest exploit was his role in ensuring security at the 1943 conference in Tehran between the Allied "Big Three" of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President F.D. Roosevelt that started to draw up the map of postwar Europe.

Vartanyan - aged just 19 at the time - led a group of young Soviet agents who exposed in its early stages a Nazi plot codenamed "Operation Long Jump" to assassinate the three Allied leaders at the conference.

Operation Long Jump
The plot was approved by Adolf Hitler and headed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. German intelligence had learned of the time and place of the conference in mid-October 1943, after breaking a US Navy code. Otto Skorzeny was chosen by Kaltenbrunner to head the mission. Also involved was German agent Elyesa Bazna (better known under the codename "Cicero"), who transmitted key data from Ankara, Turkey concerning the conference.

However, Soviet intelligence quickly uncovered the plot. The first tipoff came from Soviet agent Nikolai Kuznetsov. Posing as Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Paul Siebert from Nazi-occupied Ukraine, he got SS Sturmbannführer Hans Ulrich von Ortel - who was described as "talkative" and "a drinker" - to tell him about the operation while drunk.

Nineteen-year-old Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian had recruited a small number of agents in Iran, where his father, also a spy, was posing as a wealthy merchant. It was Vartanian's group which located an advance party of six German radio operators who had dropped by parachute near Qum, 60 km (37 mi) from Tehran, and followed them to Tehran, where the German spy network provided a villa for them. They established that the Germans were in contact with Berlin via radio and recorded their communications; when decoded, these revealed that they planned to drop a second group of operatives led by Skorzeny for the actual assassination attempt. Skorzeny had already visited Tehran to reconnoiter and had been followed by Vartanian's group.

Following that, all German transmissions were intercepted by Soviet and British intelligence. However, one of the Germans radioed a message with a secret code indicating that they were under surveillance and the operation was called off. Skorzeny himself considered the intelligence coming from Tehran to be inadequate and did not believe the complex scheme could have worked.(Wikipedia)

"Everyone in foreign intelligence will remember Gevork Andreyevich for his overwhelming love for the motherland and his fidelity to his duty," the spokesman of the SVR, Sergei Ivanov, said in a statement.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described Vartanyan as a "legendary spy, a true patriot of his country and an extraordinary personality."

"He participated in stunning special operations which have gone down in the history of our foreign intelligence," he said in a letter of condolence to Vartanyan's family.

The SVR said in a statement on its website that Vartanyan died on Tuesday. A source in the service told the state RIA Novosti news agency that he died at a Moscow hospital Tuesday afternoon.

During a life remarkable even by the standards of a spy and parts of which are still shrouded in secrecy, Vartanyan worked in tandem with his wife Goar, who was also an agent.

According to the SVR, they worked undercover together for 30 years in different foreign countries as "illegals" after World War II.

The SVR still gives no specifics about this work, saying only that it was in "extreme conditions" and in "complicated circumstances."

They only returned to the Soviet Union in 1986 with Gevork Vartanyan continuing to work in the service until 1992.

"Everything we did was important for the motherland. But the most important things cannot be discussed at the moment," he said before his death in comments broadcast by Channel One television.

He was born in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the son of an Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin, and received top honours from the Soviet Union as well as Russia and Armenia for his work.

His father had also carried out espionage work for the Soviet Union and it was for this that he took the family back to Iran in the 1930s. By the age of 16 the young Gevork was already working to expose "Fascist spies" in Iran.

Popular World War II lectures returning to D-Day Memorial

2012-01-14T18:00:00.000+01:00

The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford will feature a series of lectures this month on medicine and WWII. Bringing back two of its more popular lectures, the Memorial will present "Women on the War Front: The Rochambelles" at noon on Jan. 18 and "The Medicine of War: Combat Medics and WWII" at noon on Jan. 25.

"Women on the War Front" spotlights the only women's group assigned to a combat unit on the European front during WWII. The Rochambelles served under the French General Leclerc's famed Second Armored Division. In July 1944, they crossed the English Channel to Normandy and worked tirelessly to save soldiers' lives by providing an ambulance service that lasted until the end of the war. They were among the first to enter Paris in August 1944 during the liberation.

From November to February 1945, the Rochambelles assisted soldiers at the front line at Strasbourg, Erstein, Lorraine, the Colmar Pocket, and Grussenhein.

The Rochambelles faced constant danger. Driving ambulances at night without proper directions or the use of headlights, in territory that constantly shifted hands, proved treacherous throughout their time in Europe. Mortars, shrapnel, and machine gun fire were everyday occurrences - not to mention the other horrors of war. At the end of the Alsatian campaign, one of the Rochambelles' remaining ambulances had thirty-nine shrapnel holes. Miraculously, only one Rochambelle was killed during the war; however one went missing and was never found and six were wounded.

By the end of the war in Europe, the Rochambelles were held in high esteem by their comrades and considered invaluable to the division even though they initially faced resistance.

The National D-Day Memorial encourages guests to hear more about these extraordinary women, how the Rochambelles came to be, and how they earned the respect of their comrades. The program includes a lecture, slide presentation, and discussion led by April Cheek-Messier, Vice President for Operations and Education at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation.

"The Medicine of War: Combat Medics in WWII will show that the importance of medics in WWII cannot be overstated. Soldiers during the war had an 85% chance of survival if they were treated by a medic within the first hour of their injury.

first seen here.

Allied Victory in World War II Documentary: D-Day to VE Day (WW2 Film 1945)

2012-01-12T10:12:00.000+01:00

Since I seem involuntarily to lean towards a more Axis-oriented content I thought it'd be nice for a change to provide you guys with something centered on the war efforts of the Allies. It's a 90 minutes 1945 documentary about the Allied war effort. Enjoy!

WWII Memories: Local men recount experiences during WWII's Battle of the Bulge

2012-01-10T18:00:00.000+01:00

For a change, today's entry into the series is not from the New Bern Sun Journal, but the BLAIRSVILLE DISPATCH. Thank you for reporting it, and thank you to the veterans who recounted their tour of duty.

* * *

Tony Vigliotti of Burrell Township is 90 now and his memory is failing him, yet he continues to be haunted by nightmares of his long season of combat in World War II. "I was a good Catholic," he said recently at his home. "I was very devout. I had thought about becoming a priest. During the war, I prayed night and day to the Blessed Mary; wherever I was, in a fox hole, it didn't matter, I prayed"
"I don't know how I made it," he continued. "God was with me, I guess. I never knew whether I was coming back (home) or not. That's the thing about war. You never know.
"For years I had dreams about the war. I still do, but not as often."

Vigliotti has been married to his wife, Josephine, for 54 years. She recalled nights earlier in their marriage when her husband would spring from bed. She was afraid, sometimes, that he would hurl himself out a window. "It was like someone was after him," she said. "I guess it was about the war."
For all of that, Vigliotti said he was a superb machine gunner. Attached to the 818th Engineer Aviation Battalion, an airfield construction outfit, Vigliotti laid claim to downing two German airplanes.

During the opening salvos of the Battle of the Bulge, as the enemy continued to rumble menacingly toward Marche, Belgium, the 818th's staging area, the unit was placed on full alert.
The guard was doubled and motorized patrols sallied forth to scout the German advance, according to a monthly unit history written in early January 1945 and available online.

In conjunction with First Army Engineers, the unit prepared to blow up a bridge over the Ourthe River, southwest of Malmedy, Belgium, where German troops slaughtered dozens of American POWs on Dec. 17 and left them lying on the frozen earth.

On the day after Christmas in 1944, parts of the 818th were dispersed to Herderen, Belgium, and Nothberg, Germany, close to where an Allied airfield was to be constructed in Luchem, Germany, northeast of Malmedy.
Owing to the possibility of German parachutists descending on the area, the order was rescinded while a handful of men stayed behind to complete whatever preliminary work they could.
About all of this Vigliotti is silent. A former railroader, he clenches and unclenches his gnarled hands as he talks and tries to remember those days so long ago.

Last ditch effort
The Battle of the Bulge was a last throw of the dice by Germany's World War II dictator, Adolf Hitler. Aiming to sweep Americans and British troops from his front porch and drive them back toward Paris and Antwerp, Hitler hoped to so demoralize the Allies that they would sue for peace, leaving him to confront the Soviet Union's Red Army on its march to Berlin, the German capital.
The gamble failed. Exhausted, the German army backtracked on itself and the Allies were once again on the move by February 1945. The war ended in May with a full German surrender.

Also in the fray
During those weeks when the war in Europe hung in the balance, Albert Cresson of Derry was serving with the 315th Field Artillery Battalion, helping to lob shells at German troop and equipment concentrations. Cresson fought World War II with a slide rule.
In charge of determining detonation levels for his battalion's 12-gun battery of 155 mm howitzers, Cresson says mildly that he remained out of harm's way as the fighting chewed up thousands of weary infantrymen.
"We tried to stay about as safe as we could," he said. "We stayed behind the lines but near the front."
Cresson helped to deliver death and destruction on a long-range scale. The 155 mm cannon was about as lethal a weapon as the United States possessed, with the ability to hurtle shells dozens of miles across the battlefield, obliterating both men and machines.

On Dec. 19 1944, the 315th moved by convoy from Bining, France to Godbrange, Luxembourg, a small village in the countryside northeast of that country's capital.
Cresson said he noticed no letup in the battle's intensity during the time his headquarters company was settled in at Godbrange. Day after day, the cannonading continued, he said.

The Cresson family of Derry Borough sent five sons into military service in World War II. Albert Cresson, now 91, was a draftee, joining the Army in October 1942.
Cresson returned to civilian life in December 1945. He says it was a mistake. He says he should have stayed in the service. Life after the Army was not easy. He married and had a son. First his wife left him, he said, and then his son. He has not seen nor heard from his son for "many, many years" now.
"I raised him until he was 15," Cresson recalled.

After falling ill in recent years, Cresson said he is now recovered and feeling "great." He belongs to a veterans group in Armbrust that among other things arranges for its members to drop by personal care homes to spent time with invalid veterans.
"I'm proud of my service in World War II," Cresson said.

Wounded, but walking
Another proud veteran is John Pollock of Brenizer. Wounded in Nancy, France, by a German shell that claimed the life of the soldier walking next to him, Pollock was on a three-day pass in Paris when the Germans began their winter offensive.
"When I got back to my outfit, they were loading up the trucks," Pollock, 91, said. "Someone had gotten my stuff on board. I went off wearing my dress clothes."
"Not committed" to battle in the December-January time period, Pollock saw the worst of war on the drive into Germany in the late winter and spring of 1945.

Tasked with transporting shells and other ammunition to the front lines with his infantry unit, Pollock spoke of a particular bloody episode that took place in front of Germany's World War I defensive perimeter, the Siegfried Line. The fighting took a heavy toll in American dead, and Pollock recalled being ordered to strip ammunition and weapons from the bodies of stiffened GIs, lest they fall into enemy hands.

Along the way he glimpsed two wounded Germans. One was a mere boy, he said. Both were pleading for help. When Pollock came back around a second time the two Germans were dead.
Struck in the right elbow by shrapnel in Nancy, Pollock said he refused evacuation. There was not much bleeding, he said. Besides, he had seen wounded men taken from the scene of battle and knew from experience they were never the same once they returned.
"I felt before being drafted that if I got into an infantry outfit, I would not be coming back," said Pollock. "I guess I was wrong."

Preserved for posterity
Tony Vigliotti of Burrell Township and John Pollock of Brenizer are among more than 90 local veterans whose contributions to the nation's defense in various combat eras are recounted in the recently published "Veterans of Blairsville and Their Stories, Volume 1."

Sprengpanzer (Demolition Tank) Goliath

2012-01-09T18:00:00.001+01:00

Sprengpanzer Goliath was a German unmmaned small armored vehicle used for demolition, mine clearing or antitank purposes. It could carry between 60 to 80 kilos of high explosive and was radio guided up to 3km. It was powered by an electric (sd.kfz 302) or petrol (sd.kfz 303) engine. Entered in service in 1942 around the Russian fortress of Sebastopol.

first seen on Military.com.

Need some real estate? How about a humungous uboat bunker?

2012-01-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

Two government authorities are in conflict over a huge World War II submarine bunker near the northern German city-state of Bremen, which is to be rented out for commercial use.

The “Valentin” bunker, 426 metres long and 33 metres high, was constructed using the forced labour of tens of thousands of people between 1943 and 1945. A satellite to the concentration camp Neuengamme was set up to accommodate the work, during which 1,600 people are thought to have died.

According to a report in Die Welt newspaper, the German Institute for Federal Real Estate (BIMA), which runs the site, now wants to rent parts of the bunker for commercial use.

But, according to Georg Skalecki, director of the local State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments, this would involve the destruction of walls and fences, seriously damaging the building’s character.

full story here.

Youtube Channel Feature: HCTerrorist

2012-01-06T18:00:00.001+01:00

Just thought I'd direct your attention to this Dutch user's Youtube Channel. HCTerrorist has uploaded a large number of colored WW2 videos, most of them even in HD! So far, he seems to primarily feature films of the German forces, but there are also Russian, US, and Japanese forces featured in very high quality footage. Just click on the Youtube tag. It should take you to his channel with its more than 60 videos. I hope you enjoy it!

By the way, if you know of YT channels featuring good WW2-related content of any side, please feel free to leave a comment!

Wielun Revisited - Beware of Wikipedia

2012-01-04T19:00:00.005+01:00

Reading about Guernica brought me by pure chance back to the Wikipedia page about the September 1st, 1939 Luftwaffe attack on the Polish border town of Wielun. Suffice to say, I was quite surprised. I had referenced that very same page in an article in May 2011 where I lamented the railroaded view of history among some German academics and what effects it has on their students. Just go ahead and compare the two, then grind your teeth.

It's ridiculous. We have three referenced academic sources (British, German, Polish!) independent of one another declaring that the operations hitting Wielun were tactical in nature and aimed against Polish forces spotted by recon the day before. We have near a third of the Luftwaffe's modern divebombers operational on that day taking part in that attack. We have multiple sources reporting bad visibility on that day, including 50+ meters high ground fog and clouds.

And what does the new article claim as "truth"?

That Wielun was an act of deliberate terror bombing! And who is sourced for that accusation? Guess what, it's the guy who wrote the Die Zeit article I referenced in the original post. Yes, the journalist who proved his utter lack of military and technological knowledge back then (that seems to be par for the course for the majority of journalists anway). He's an authoritative source now all of a sudden, but not three military historians. If I wasn't so disgusted I'd be amused by this.

As for "terror bombing": Half the value of terror is with propaganda (your own, and that of the enemy). Terror has to sink in, terror has to demotivate not the victims themselves but the others (hence, Goebbels played down the preliminary numbers he got from Dresden). The location of terror has to remain accessible, primarily for the defenders (as a rallying cry; the attacker simply needs it in enemy hands so that he can point at a searing wound). Vielun was captured around 16:00 hours on the first day of fighting and made no headlines, at all.

German forces committed more than their fair share of atrocities and crimes during WWII. But Wielun wasn't one of them. Stuff like this pisses me off. Going by the knowledge available to the actors on that day, it was a legitimate military target. Even Göring's Luftwaffe was not so complete batshit crazy as to use a full third of the available modern short-range close air support airplanes with the intent of "terrorboming" against a strategically irrelevant small border town - definitively not on Day 1 of the war! For any other military a mishap based on the lack of information age technology would be a foot note in any conflict. But since Germans did it, it has to be sinister. It has to be terror bombing...

WWII Memories: Watching the skies for bombers in Ridgewood, N.J.

2012-01-02T18:00:00.004+01:00

A wartime account written by Mrs. Carolyn Hansen Roth, first published in the New Bern Sun Journal.

During the War, I was a child in Ridgewood, N.J. My father was the neighborhood Air Raid Warden. The men met on Saturdays and sometimes in the evening, either in our garage, or if it was warmer weather, they sat outside on our front stoop. They would drink gallons of my mother’s terrible coffee, and smoke like fiends, and regale each other with stories. It was serious business, though.

Our town was a small whistle stop on the Erie Railroad. In fact, the railroad was up an embankment behind our house. There were very few tall buildings, but a local school was designated as a place for “spotters” to scan the skies with binoculars for enemy planes. One time a suspected “incendiary bomb” fragment was found in someone’s house. Everyone had blackout shades or curtains. Sometimes we sat in the dark during air raids, or suspected raids. If you were out somewhere and you heard the siren, you ran home pell-mell.

[In retrospect, I find it amazing how well-organized and observant the US civilian populace became even without directly having to face the war as their European counterparts. W.B.]

There was rationing. People did not scrub pots — they left them black and often greasy on the bottom. Gas was rationed. My dad often turned the motor off and coasted down the hill to our house, or any other hill he could find. My mother drove a truck for the war effort and my grandmother worked for a time in a munitions factory.

[One cannot emphasize this point enough. One (of course, out of many) reason(s) the Axis lost was that it relied on plunder and not on the thorough mobilization of its civilian work potential. Though if your ideology considers women little more than breeding machines, I guess you're kinda reluctant to put them to work in factories... W.B.]

Everyone was involved. We all had victory gardens. We even raised chickens in our back yard.

[That's not a bad idea, regardless of the circumstances. Modern society is awefully reliant on "on-time" goods. W.B.]

As a little kid, this seemed like a big adventure to me and my neighborhood friends.

[I grew up near a cruise missile base in the 1980s. In fact, I grew up right in the center of half a dozen strategic targets. But we were innocent boys back then and thought all this - the low level jetfighter flights screeching by, the M113s rolling through fields on maneuvers, even the large peace demonstrations - was just great fun. W.B.]

My brother John was born in 1945, the year the war ended.

It was very common to pick up soldiers who were hitchhiking. They had perhaps come in from New York on a bus and gotten off, but still had a way to go to reach their destination. It was a very long walk from the bus station to Upper Ridgewood. There was no fear of being robbed or mugged — they were, after all, fighting the war for our freedom.

My uncle Phil was in the Army. He was a bombardier. His plane was shot down over Burma, and he was never found, though supposedly his dog tags were. My grandmother was of course devastated, as we all were. My uncle Bob, my dad’s brother, was a big cheese in the Army. He was stationed in Antwerp, Belgium. He eventually became a colonel and was in the military for many years. Luckily, he was never injured and came home safely.

I remember those years very clearly, very vividly, and those memories are tinged with sadness and joy, a curious mixture of what life was like back then.

John was just a baby, and it would be a number of years before my other brothers were born. My dad did his part, as did my mother, and grandmother. I was a very proud little kid to have such a patriotic family.

Carolyn Hansen Roth lives in New Bern.

WWII Memories: Former female WWII pilot takes to the skies again

2011-12-31T17:00:00.001+01:00

Every person is filled with stories, and for Tex Meachem, the roar of a propeller is one that tells hers.

The 93-year-old woman lives in John Knox Village in Pompano Beach and her home shows hints of her past: a teddy bear dressed as a pilot, old photographs of her in a jump suit. While men were shipped overseas to fight in World War II, the women held down the fort back home. Meachem was one of a handful of women who pioneered the skies as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. Just last year, she was still able to fly a plane.

continue to read the story here.

Review - "Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable" by James B. Wood

2011-12-29T18:00:00.003+01:00

Verdict: 3.5 / 5 Stars

I believe this is a first for the AH Weekly Update insofar as this is the first review of a non-fiction alternate history book. Now, you may think: aren't those terms mutually exclusive by sheer definition? Yes, they usually are. However, Wood's book combines both traits as he first briefly analyzes various fields that influenced and guided Japanese strategy and plans during WWII, only to summarize counterfactual approaches which could have helped the Imperial Japanese forces in his final chapter.

It is of import to notice that all the counterfactual possibilities presented by Wood share one commonality, which is that they were choices that were actually recognized and advocated by ranking members of the Japanese military. They are, as such, not products of the author's mind and 20/20 hindsight.

Going chapter by chapter, Wood takes a look at Japan's preparations, at the reasons commonly attributed to the nation losing the war and what could have been changed, going from the preventable losses inlicted on its merchant marine, the mishandling of its potent submarine force, the naval leadership's fetish with wishing for a decisive battle and avoiding it at the same time (the Japanese plan for the Battle of Midway is such an example), the shortcomings of its air force and the mishandling of the war by the Japanese army.

Now, each of the factors Wood addresses are significant enough to warrant at least one book of their own. The internal fractures not only between the Army and Navy High Command, but between leading figures within each branch of the armed forces, already on their own deserve a thorough "What if?" treatment.

For example, did you know that Admiral Yamamoto actually threatened that he and the whole Navy staff resign if his plan to attack Pearl Harbor was not adopted? Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, his superior, had favored an attack against the Malaya and Indonesia that would potentially have kept the USA out of the war a bit longer. Most other professional militaries would have called the bluff and sacked such an insubordinate subordinate. But Japan's command structure was so fractured, mired in political infighting, and fragile that this type of behavior became endemic.

Wood's book is not without problems, of which many can be directly connected to the book's short length. Each chapter is, at best, 15 pages long.

I will cite from a very good review on Amazon to specify them:

His critique of Japan's war effort fails to distinguish between strategic mistakes and defeat in battle. When the Japanese lose while pressing their initiative, they are guilty of systematic over-extension; when they lose on the defensive, they are guilty of conceding the fight to the enemy's terms. They are criticized simultaneously for failing to stick to their game plan and for failing to adapt to new situations. Apparently the Japanese can neither have their cake nor eat it.
Likewise, readers must go without a precise definition of the defeat in war that Japan is trying to avoid. Is any negotiated settlement that prevents occupation of the home islands better than a "defeat"? Wood seems content to see Japan lose all its conquests and all its continental holdings, avoid invasion, and call it a draw.

This brings me to the two decisive questions: is the book worth your while, and is it worth your money?

On the former point, the answer is a clear and endorsing "Yes". Yes, it is. It provides ample sources for its points and covers lots of ground, albeit in rather brief epsidoes. If there was nothing else, it'd still serve as a good introductory read for all those interested in the problems (and chances!) of the Japanese military in the Pacific Campaign 1941-45.

The latter, sadly, is a "No". "Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable", discounting the chapter and final bibliographies, covers barely 115 pages worth of text and sells for more than $25 on Amazon at the moment. That is not a favorable ratio for the content that is provided, especially since Wood could easily have made his chapters twice as long. He certainly had enough material to work with for that.

As such, I can recommend "Japanese Military Strategy in the Pacific War: Was Defeat Inevitable" as a book you ought to get from your local library, or if you find it massively discounted from an online retailer. Spend the full price only if you're desperate.

Why Do So Many People Automatically and Angrily Condemn Historical Revisionism?

2011-12-27T17:22:00.002+01:00

Taken from History News Network:

by Robert Higgs. [12/08/2011]

Over the years, especially in writing for the general public, as opposed to my professional peers, I have been struck repeatedly by the frequency with which certain conclusions or even entire classes of conclusions elicit not merely skepticism, but angry denunciation. Again and again, I have been called a fool, a traitor, or an America-hater because of my commentaries on history and public affairs. Although I take no pleasure in these denunciations, I find myself not so much depressed by them as curious about them. I wonder why people react as they do, especially when my commentary rests—as I hope it generally does—on well-documented facts and correct logic.

I surely do not consider myself immune to errors, of course. But if my facts are incorrect, the critic has an obligation to say why my facts are incorrect and to state, or at least to point toward, the correct facts. If my logic has run off the rails, the critic has an obligation to state how I fell into fallacious reasoning. More often than not, however, the critic resorts immediately to name-calling and to wild characterizations of my statements and my person. Thus, I have often been called a socialist, a Marxist, a conservative, an apologist for corporations or the rich, a (modern left) liberal, or something else that by no stretch of the imagination properly describes me or my intellectual or ideological position.

Certain topics are virtually guaranteed to elicit such reactions. When I write about the welfare state and especially about government programs ostensibly aimed at helping the least-well-off members of society, I confidently expect that critics will assail me as a fascist or as an ivory-tower dweller who has no understanding of how poor people really live and no compassion for them. When I write about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in relation to U.S. economic warfare in 1939-41, I invariably attract angry personal abuse from people of delicate nationalistic sensibilities, from those chronically on the look-out for traitors, and from those who cannot imagine that the nation’s leaders, in general, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in particular, might have deliberately provoked a Japanese attack or refrained from warning U.S. commanders in Hawaii that an attack was coming.

When people are offended or otherwise greatly displeased by historical analysis, they often employ the term “historical revisionism” as a synonym for falsified, distorted, or doctored accounts that fly in the face of what they, their history teachers, and perhaps even the most respected university historians believe to have been the case.

The irony of such use of the term “historical revision,” which makes it practically a swear word, is that revisionism is and always has been an integral part of historical research and writing. As a rule, professional historians do not seek simply to pile up more and more evidence for what historians already generally believe. Historians who proceed in this way cannot expect to make much of a name for themselves. Instead, historians try to find new evidence and new ways of interpreting old evidence that change the currently accepted view. That is, they seek to revise the current orthodoxy. In doing so, they need not be ideological mavericks, although those who are may have an additional reason for their revisionist efforts. In short, revisionism is an unremarkable aspect of workaday historical research and writing. Why then do so many readers go ballistic about it?

One reason why revisionists are sometimes seen as subversives stems from the tendency of historians in general to accept the most fundamental aspects of their own society as right and desirable. So, however much political historians may dispute the details of particular campaigns, elections, and policy-making by elected officials—and such disputation runs rampant, to be sure—one hardly expects these historians to conclude that the democratic process itself is little more than a snare and a delusion, a vast apparatus for fooling the masses into believing that they have genuine control over how they are ruled. And however much military and foreign-policy historians may argue with one another about how various wars were entered into and conducted, one hardly expects these historians to conclude that wars almost invariably hurt the mass of the people and benefit, if anyone at all, only the national leadership, its supporting elite, and a ragtag band of hangers-on (which includes, we might note, the “court historians”).

When a historian strays outside the 40-yard lines within which the bulk of the historical writing and teaching takes place, however, he is likely to be met with the dreaded accusation that he is not an honest, competent, or “respected” historian, but a revisionist—a writer who seeks to propagate socially destructive and utterly unfounded ideas in order to rend the fabric of national unity and undermine the nation’s virtues. Thus, one who challenges the standard account of Pearl Harbor can expect not simply to be disbelieved, but also to be personally condemned and vilified. Readers will say that he dishonors the brave men who gave their lives to preserve our freedoms, and so forth. Many people possess a loaded ideological gun with a hair trigger, and the slightest shake suffices to cause them to fire away. Moreover, they shoot first and reserve their fact-checking and more careful thought for later, if indeed they ever reach that stage.

One is tempted to suspect that such quick-draw reactions reveal an underlying lack of confidence in their own beliefs. If my views are so manifestly stupid and anti-social, why respond to them at all? Is it not more sensible to ignore them than to spend time in lavishing calumny on their author? In the age of the Internet, however, many people seem to get their kicks by denouncing and insulting anyone who offends their own sensibilities and their own cherished beliefs. Anyone who seeks examples of ad hominem arguments may easily collect them by the thousands and perhaps by the millions at the websites that feature news and commentary on public affairs. Every other species of logical fallacy may be found there in abundance as well, but my guess is that the ad hominem fallacy occurs more often than any other. Moreover, few people—even seemingly well-educated people—seem to be able to stay on point. So if a revisionist’s argument cannot be refuted, his critics freely set up and knock down straw men that they represent as the offender himself. Careful reading is not the most notable activity of those who engage in such flailing away. Many attackers do not even complete their reading, but begin their assault on an author immediately, after having read only a few sentences or paragraphs, as they sometimes admit.

Well, nobody ever promised the revisionist a bed of roses, especially if he challenges ideas that are widely accepted and valued. Americans want to believe that their nation is the greatest that ever was, that they themselves are better than other people in almost every way, including morally. They want to believe that at least some of their government leaders were virtuous and heroic, that their soldiers sacrificed more nobly than the enemy’s did, that their country is the last, best hope of humanity, blah, blah, blah. Much of this catalogue of taken-for-granted outlooks and beliefs is ludicrous, but woe unto the writer who laughs out loud at it. “Revisionist, revisionist!” the mobs will cry, expressing the demand that he “get out of the country” and the hope that every species of bad luck and personal misfortune will befall him. If I were one of those social psychologists who enjoy labeling any ideological trait they dislike as a form of mental illness, I might declare that the hair-trigger enemies of historical revisionism are a gaggle of sickos.

WWII Memories: Bugle duty, Atlantic and Pacific

2011-12-24T18:00:00.000+01:00

Another entry in our "WWII Memories" series. Today: the wartime experiences of Mr. Don Washer. Thank you, sir!

* * *

Six months after Pearl Harbor, I turned 17 and I tried to join the Navy. They just laughed at me because I was too small and low weight. I was 4-foot 10-inches and only weighed 105 pounds. My parents had allowed me to try and get in and there were not surprised that I was rejected.
I had a friend whose father was a Navy doctor over in N.Y.C. He arranged for me to get another physical and sure enough I was accepted and 2 weeks later was on my way to boot camp at Newport, R.I.

Boot camp only lasted 3 weeks and it was tough for me because I only wore a size 5½ shoes; it took a week before I received them so I had to use my civilian shoes until then. Near the end of boot camp, I was invited to join the Bugle Chore as I had learned to play the bugle when I went to scout camp four years before. After I returned from boot leave, I was assigned to the Bugle Squad. It lasted only 4 more months as the Enlisted Man’s Training Center was made an Officer’s Training Center and they wanted a full band. So, we were transferred to various ships and locations.

I was transferred to the USS Schorder and it was put in commission Jan. 1, 1943, the day I went aboard. We soon went to Portland, Maine, for our shakedown and the temperature up there was 30 degrees below zero. It was a very tough time for all of us. We returned to New York and then escorted a new aircraft carrier, USS Lexington, to Trinidad for its shakedown. What a great change for all of us. We then joined a large convoy of supply ships going to Casablanca, where the first landings were made by the Invasion Force. We returned to Norfolk, Va., and escorted another new carrier, USS Yorktown, to Trinidad for its shakedown.

We then went through the Panama Canal to the Pacific and up to San Francisco and had more anti-aircraft guns installed at Mare Island Shipyard. This took a couple of weeks, and we all got 5 days leave, so we got to see some of California.

We then left the states and joined the fleet at Pearl Harbor. We traveled to many islands and bombarded and bombed the Japanese at the places they had taken from us in the first few months after Pearl Harbor.

After a couple of months of this, we were reassigned to a landing force of Marines that was getting ready to retake the Gilbert Islands. We were to enter the Tarawa Lagoon near the landing area, so we could be close and give them support, but the pilot who was supposed to know the area, ran us aground astern, so our screws were damaged and we stayed in the lagoon for the rest of the invasion. We fired all of our 5-inch guns until we ran out of shells and our 40 mm aircraft guns also ran out.
While the battle continued for 3-4 days, the landing officer on one of the transport ships got permission to try and recover the wounded Marines. He would pick them up and bring them to any ship in the lagoon that had a doctor. We had a doctor, so we took on over 30 wounded Marines. We only lost a few and the rest stayed aboard until we returned to Hawaii.

Thank goodness that the Battle of Tarawa was over.

After returning to Pearl Harbor, the ship was put in dry dock and repaired. I was one of about 15 men who were transferred back to the states to serve aboard new ships. I was ordered to Bremerton, Wash., where there were forming crews and we were sent to Astoria, Ore., to serve on the USS Rudyard Bay CVE 8, a small aircraft carrier that was built by Kaiser.

I remained aboard until the end of WWII. I became the only bugle master on board. I had 4 assistants and spent general quarters on the bridge. I had my own room on the hangar deck so I would be available at all times if needed. We were at many more locations that were taken over again including the Philippines and then Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We returned to the states and I started playing in parades in N.Y.C. as head of a bugle choir for returning honorees.

I never knew that the officer aboard the transport ship that picked up wounded Marines at Tarawa was a movie star … Eddie Albert … and he received the Navy Cross for his heroism, and for many years, attended the USS Schroeder’s ship reunions as a special honorary member. I earned 11 battle stars for my service in WWII.