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George Lucas’ new movie Red Tails open today, about the exploits of the unit known as the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. Before you see it, read the real story of Tuskegee Airman Dr. Roscoe Brown.
“The most difficult part is something that the movie refers to: overcoming the negative beliefs about blacks that we couldn’t do certain things. Our training was relatively fair; however, once we went into combat, initially they didn’t want us to be in the high-responsibility positions escorting the bombers. Once they realized they were losing so many bombers, they wanted as many people as possible to escort them; we were given that mission, and we did it extremely well. Then, once people began to hear about us, they said, ‘We want those guys, they’re really good!’ We were probably as good as many of the white pilots, but many of the white pilots would leave the bombers and shoot down planes to become heroes; our commander insisted that we stay with the bombers, which is why the bombers would like seeing our Red Tails flying over them.
Brown also talks about how he came to be a pilot, some close calls, and the indignities the Airmen endured in the military. Link
There’s a good reason why this Spitfire is painted pink. It helped its pilot hide in the clouds. Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how:
To make sure they were rarely seen from above, these planes were painted to fly just under cloud cover. Although the planes were ideally meant to fly at sunset and sunrise, when the clouds took on a pinkish hue and made the plane completely invisible against them, they were also useful during the day. Clouds are pinker than we give them credit for. We perceive them as white against the sky because the particles in the sky scatter blue light, sending some of it down towards us and letting us see the sky as blue. Clouds scatter every kind of light, and against the intense blue sky look whitish gray. But their color depends on what kind of light gets to them, and what they are floating next to.
Although we see the sky as a radiant blue, the particles are actually filtering out a lot of the blue light that gets down to the earth’s surface. When the blue light is scattered, a good deal of it goes right back up into space, which is why the atmosphere of earth glows blue in some pictures. This filters out a good deal of the blue that gets to the clouds. The clouds scatter what they have, which is a spectrum of light with at least some of the blue filtered out, shifting the overall light ever so slightly towards red. Add to that the fact that the water droplets in clouds can diffract light at different angles, and the clouds are often rife with pastel shades of pink, orange, and green. They look white compared to a glowing blue sky, and a quick glance leaves people with the impression that they are white, but a long look should reveal this shifting, if minor, shades. A light pink plane is safer against them than anyone would expect.
There’s a video at the link that demonstrates the effectiveness of this camouflage scheme.
Seventy years ago today, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Base brought the U.S. into World War II. Franklin Roosevelt announced a declaration of war on Japan the next day. Wired has a synopsis of what happened. Link
Today, about 120 survivors of that attack have returned to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for a commemoration service, including a moment of silence at 7:55AM local time. In previous years, thousands of veterans attended such events. Fewer veterans remain each year, and age has caused many to forgo the trip. Link
You can also read more about the attack on Pearl Harbor in the Neatorama archives:
Dustbin of History: The Pearl Harbor Spy
Mysterious beings that disable computers are called bugs. Before computers, mysterious beings that sabotaged vehicles and other machines were called gremlins. This use of the term originated in the 1920s to describe unexplained problems with military aircraft, according to Wikipedia. Gremlins were blamed for factory mishaps during World War II, as this safety poster reminds us. See more wartime industrial safety posters at vintage ads. Link -via Boing Boing
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Everyone joined in the war effort during World War II, helping out however possible stateside. Disney artists decided to join the cause by creating various forms of propaganda, like this surreal animated short, meant to show how food will help the Allies win the war. Using morbidly obese Americans to “black out all of Berlin” never seemed like a valid wartime strategy until this short came out!
Mental_floss is marking 11/11/11 by posting lists of 11 things all day long! It’s also Veterans Day, so what better time to learn about some heroes that you might not otherwise know, like eleven women of various nations who served in World War II. One was Nancy Wake, a New Zealand native who was living in France when Germany invaded.
Wake immediately went to work for the French resistance, hiding and smuggling men out of France and ferrying contraband supplies and falsified documents. She was once captured and interrogated for days, but gave no secrets away. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, Wake managed to escape to Britain in 1943, and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence agency. After training with weapons and parachutes, she was airdropped back into France -as an official spy and warrior. Wake had no trouble shooting Nazis or blowing up buildings with the French guerrilla fighters known as maquis in the service of the resistance. She once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.
Read what happened to Wake and ten others in this list of eleven at mental_floss. Link
Colonel Doolittle (second from left) and his flight crew.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.
After Japanese air power struck a stunning tactical blow to the U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, a retaliatory strike against the Japanese was a priority for president Frankin D. Roosevelt, who challenged his general staff to devise a way to attack the heart of Japan.
PAYBACK PLANS
By mid-January 1942, a carrier-based air strike against Japan was accepted as the most plausible solution to FDR’s request. When Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of Naval Operations, was asked to evaluate the possibilities, he passed the idea to General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, who then asked Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle to work out the details with the Navy. In the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, service rivalries took a back seat to striking a blow against the enemy.
B-25s specially modified for this mission are ready to go.
After preliminary test flights, the North American B-25 Mitchell bomber was selected for the mission. Eighteen B-25s flew from their Oregon home base to Indiana for modifications. The range of the unmodified Mitchell was only 1,300 miles on a favorable day, so additional internal tanks were added to allow for more fuel. At the last second, 10 five-gallon cans of gas were stowed in the radio operator’s seat. The heavy guns were removed, along with the highly secret Norden bombsight, whose classified technology couldn’t fall into Japanese hands. In the planned scenario, the Norden bombsight wouldn’t have been very accurate at the low altitude that would be flown anyway, so it was replaced with a simple metal aiming sight. Aircraft radios were also removed, since the mission would be executed under strict radio silence. These changes allowed each aircraft to carry just over 1,100 gallons of usable fuel, which under typical flight conditions would allow for a range of 2,400 miles. After all of these radical modifications, four 500-pound bombs barely fit into the bomb bay.
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John Foster of Accidental Mysteries blog came across this piece that crystallizes the words "swords into plowshares" into a real life object:
I purchased this from my friend Joshua Lowenfels, who found it at a flea market in NYC. He purchased it from an old German fellow who was parting with a few things from his life. The handle is only about two feet long, so it appears to have been used as a sort of ladle for scooping and pouring wet concrete. I got weak-kneed when I saw it. If this isn’t the most perfect statement on the whole failed Nazi experiment, and of war in general, I don’t know of one.
In October, internet users always look for the strangest, most inexplicable Halloween costumes to post. Here’s one that illustrates how little Americans and the British understand each other, despite the supposedly common language. This costume of a World War II Evacuee was posted at reddit. Some commenters thought it might be a costume from the Chronicles of Narnia films; others thought it was supposed to be Anne Frank. It actually depicts one of the many children who were temporarily sent away from Britain during the war. But the explanation has to do with schools in the UK, which teach history by designating dress-up days.
Parents get letter informing them that their little darling has to dress up as an Evacuee, Victorian child, Roman, etc.
Time-poor, stressed parents don’t want to have to spend ages researching and making said costume when they could be spending their time w/their actual child (or OK watching TV) (this doesn’t really apply for the Roman one because that costume is a sheet)
Parents grumblingly shell out their 15 pounds or so. All kids at school end up dressed identically. Costume company laughs all the way to the bank.
Well, there you go. Link
Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, US officials were worried about a Japanese invasion and occupation of those islands. One particular concern was the disposition of US currency in banks in Hawaii. They could not allow that money to fall into Japanese hands. So the military governor of Hawaii found a clever solution:
In January of 1942, the military governor of Hawaii (the territory was under the military’s control after the Pearl Harbor bombing) recalled most of the currency in the future state, with some allowances as to not pull all of the cash out of the islands’ economy. Five months later, bills like the one pictured — called “Hawaii overprint notes” — were issued. The theory was simple: if Hawaii fell into Japanese hands, these bills would no longer be legal tender in the United States. This contingency plan never came into play.
In total, over 65 million Hawaii overprint notes were created (totalling over $300 million), in four denominations — $1, $5, $10, and $20, with the $5 note pictured above the rarest of the quartet. On October 21, 1944, ten months before Victory over Japan Day, the required use of these bills ceased.
It’s a pity that they didn’t put Lincoln in a Hawaiian shirt. He always looked good in Hawaiian shirts.
Link | Image: Coins & Banknotes
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While being held in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, British officer Major Alexis Casdagli did everything he could to resist his captors. He was skilled with a needle and thread, so among other projects, Casdagli made an excellent cross-stitch sampler which told the Nazis in a coded message where to shove it:
Over the next four years his work was displayed at the four camps in Germany where he was imprisoned, and his Nazi captors never once deciphered the messages threaded in Morse code: “God Save the King” and “F*ck Hitler”.
This subversive needling of the Nazis was a form of defiance that Casdagli, who was not freed from prison until 1945, believed was the duty of every PoW. “It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing their rounds,” says his son, Tony, of his father’s rebellious stitching. It also stopped him going mad. “He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity,” says Tony.
Link -via Craft | Photo: Graham Turner | Quote edited for content
Members of the Army’s 84th Infantry Division who served together in World War II have been meeting annually for 66 consecutive years. Every year there are fewer survivors among the veterans, who are mostly in their late 80s. Marie McDonald, who attends each year with 85-year-old veteran Brownlee Bush, says traveling has become difficult for many, and the final reunion comes as a relief.
The 84th Division’s 16,000 men began basic training in January 1943. They entered combat on Nov. 18, 1944, with an attack on Geilenkirchen, Germany, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and crossed the Rhine River on April 1, 1945. Within two weeks, the unit had reached the Elbe River, where it halted its advance and patrolled the banks until the war’s end. The men spent 170 days in combat and earned seven distinguished unit citations.
“These guys fought a war,” McDonald said. “We won a war in four years, when now the area they’re fighting in is no bigger than Texas, and they’ve been there 10 years, and it’s sad. We had a reason to fight. We wanted to be free.”
The group held its first stateside reunion in Cincinnati in July 1946, just months after returning home. About 700 showed up.
Last year, only about 100 veterans attended, quite a few of them in wheelchairs. That’s when they decided that this year’s reunion will be the last one. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: David Carson)
World War II Bulgaria didn’t have a Schindler, and it didn’t have a list. It had a white-bearded mystic named Peter Deunov and an entire nation standing behind him. Together, they saved Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Bulgaria wasn’t in the best position during the Second World War. Fenced in by the Soviet Union on one side and Europe on the other, it was forced into the middle of the action. That’s why it’s all the more impressive that Bulgaria is one of only three mainland European nations where the entire Jewish population survived the Holocaust. (Denmark and Finland were the other two, but their relatively small Jewish populations were geographically isolated.) For staying strong in the face of Hitler and his Nazi directives, the Bulgarians credit one man—Christian mystic Peter Deunov. As Albert Einstein would later say, “The whole world bows down before me. I bow down before the master Peter Deunov.”
Philosophical Fitness
Peter Deunov’s philosophy wouldn’t appear to be anything revolutionary at first. He based his beliefs on those of Christ and preached universal love and religious tolerance—only with a more mystical, cosmic slant. Known as Master Beinsa Douno, he garnered a following in Bulgaria in the early 20th century for his teachings, now known as Esoteric Christianity. In fact, during Deunov’s time serving as the Vatican’s ambassador to Bulgaria, the future Pope John XXIII called him “the greatest philosopher living on the Earth.”
But Deunov had his controversial qualities, too. A strong believer in astrology and phrenology (determining personality traits based on the shape of people’s skulls), Deunov also considered physical fitness to be crucial to spiritual development. He designed health camps for his disciples that included climbing to the 9,600-foot summit of Musala, Bulgaria’s highest peak. In addition, he promoted strict vegetarianism and liberal doses of water. But perhaps most controversial was his belief in Paneurhythmy (“sublime cosmic rhythm”), sacred dances Deunov invented to utilize “positive energies.” Unnerved by some of his more unusual ideas, the powerful Bulgarian Orthodox Church went so far as to denounce his teachings.
But far beyond scaling mountains and preaching the joys of good health, Deunov advocated world peace. Unfortunately, that too was seen as contentious by some. During one of his lectures in 1917, he spoke out against Bulgaria’s entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers. Although Deunov would later prove to be right about that decision, that didn’t stop the government from exiling him for a year.
Avoidance Tactics
At the start of World War II, Bulgaria picked the losing side again. Hoping to reclaim the ancestral lands it’d lost during WWI (Thrace and Macedonia), Bulgaria joined the Axis powers in 1941. And although the Nazis did gain control of those territories, Bulgaria reclaimed them in name only. What’s worse, Hitler forced the Bulgarian government to pass oppressive laws against its Jews as part of the deal.
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In 1939, Adolf Hitler commissioned the Friedrich Krupp A.G. company of Essen, Germany to build a gun that would breach the French Maginot line. They responded with the “Gustav Gun,” the largest gun ever built.
Named after the head of the Krupp family, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the Gustav Gun weighed in at a massive 1344 tons, so heavy that even though it was attached to a rail car, it still had to be disassembled before moving so as to not destroy the twin set of tracks as it passed over. This 4-story behemoth stood 20 feet wide and 140 feet long. Its 500 man crew, commanded by a Major-General (that’s two stars), needed nearly three full days (54 hours, to be exact) to set it up and prep for firing. But when it did fire, whoowhee, hold on to your hat.
The description of this gun’s destructiveness is at Gizmodo. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: American Rifleman, February 1998)
The folks at Collector’s Weekly used to delete references to Nazi items from their forum, but then considered the question of why people collect such things. Not everyone who collects Nazi memorabilia is a Neo-Nazi or a Hitler fan. Some subscribe to the philosophy summed up in a George Santayana quote: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” They are also aware that some find any instance of the Nazi swastika offensive.
But for collectors like Kevin Mackey, Nazi memorabilia, particularly those bearing the swastika, are unambiguous reminders of this suffering. Though upsetting to many, Mackey believes these pieces have a place in any discussion of World War II. “To obliterate the symbols of Nazi Germany,” he says, “would be to obliterate that period from our knowledge, and to forget what took place. We need to be aware of what caused Nazi Germany, what happened, and how much horror came to this world because of it.”
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But you don’t have to look very far, Mackey says, to see what happens when history, however upsetting, is expunged from a culture or society. “We have a leader of Iran today who says the Holocaust did not take place. But even my youngest daughter knows better, and she’s in junior high school. So we should not remove these pieces from the public knowledge, from public view. I don’t see it as a glorification of Nazi military items. I’m a historian—these are pieces of history.”
Included in the post about Nazi memorabilia are the opinions of Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, author and sociology professor Stanislav Vysotsky, veterans, and other collectors. Link -Thanks, Ben Marks!
Yes, it’s fetching, and there’s a real story behind this dress, as well. The parachute saved the life of pilot Maj. Claude Hensinger when he bailed out of his disabled B-29 over Japan in 1944. It was his blanket and pillow as he waited for rescue. In 1947, he gave it to his girlfriend when he proposed to her, and she made it into the skirt portion of her wedding dress. The dress was also worn by their daughter and then by their son’s bride in later weddings. Now it belongs to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Link -via Boing Boing
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces. It was selected to run today on the 67th anniversary of the Allied Invasion of Normandy, also known as D-day.
“The boy’s alive and we’re going to send someone to save him…and we’re going to get him the hell out of there.” -from Saving Private Ryan
FACT OR FICTION?
In 1998 Saving Private Ryan gave moviegoers an infantryman’s view of the 1944 invasion of Normandy on D-day. The film follows Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and the survivors of his unit as they battle their way onto Omaha Beach. Then, instead of getting a hoped-for rest, they get another dangerous assignment -to go behind enemy lines and find a missing soldier, Private James Ryan (Matt Damon). Private Ryan’s three brothers have all recently died in combat and, in accordance with War Office policy, the last living son must return home alive to his family. Private Ryan must be “saved.”
Directed by Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan won five Academy Awards and the admiration of World War II veterans who said the movie faithfully depicted their experiences. The film renewed interest in the men who fought at Normandy, but filmgoers also wanted to know of there was a real-life Private Ryan.
THE REAL PRIVATE RYAN
Sergeant Frederick "Fritz" Niland
The fictional Private Ryan was inspired by Sergeant Frederick “Fritz” Niland -a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division and 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. Just after midnight on D-day, June 6, 1944, a plane dropped Sergeant Niland into France. He was supposed to land near the city of Carentan, but -like Private Ryan- got “lost” when his plane was hit by enemy fire and he had to jump miles away from his target.
Fritz, 24, was born in Tonawanda, New York, the youngest of four brothers, from oldest to youngest, Edward, Preston, Robert, and Fritz. Their mother Augusta “Gussie” Niland, later recalled that the brothers had always been best of friends. They graduated from Tonawanda High School and attended local colleges, but they were all attracted to military service. Their father had been a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War, and they grew up listening to his war tales. By spring 1944, they were all overseas: Robert was a mortar sergeant in the 82nd Airborne, Preston was a lieutenant in the 4th Infantry Division, and Edward was flying B-25s for the Army Air Force in the Pacific. Robert, Preston, and Fritz were all stationed in England, waiting for the invasion of Europe.
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Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division is a group of World War II heroes you might know from the book or the miniseries Band of Brothers. They fought at the D-Day Invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Market Garden, and liberated concentration camps, yet they came home and went on with their lives. No one knew much about what they did until the book came out. But these men gained quite a bit of wisdom from their war experiences, tempered by age, which they gave us in their stories. The Art of Manliness took some of those quotes and made them into a series of awesome motivational posters. Link -via Gorilla Mask
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.
In 1942 five brothers made a sacrifice that showed just how much a family could give to the war effort.
PATRIOTIC FERVOR
January 3, 1942: After ringing in the New Year, the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, enlisted in the Navy. The brothers were George, 28; Francis, 27; Joseph, 24; Madison, 23; and Albert, 20.The brothers all joined the Navy, which (along with the rest of the military) discouraged family members from serving together in a highly dangerous area. It was not forbidden, though, and the brothers wanted to stay together. So they requested permission to serve on the same ship, the USS Juneau, a new light cruiser. It first took them to fight in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean, and then set off for Guadalcanal in September.
FIGHTING SPIRIT
The Battle of Guadalcanal was one of the most important fights of World War II. Japan wanted control of the island to build a strategic base, and U.S. and Allied forces waged a campaign to stop them. The entire battle lasted two months, and the USS Juneau was just one of the ships involved.
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It’s amazing what a little camouflage can do. Apparently during World War II to avoid potential bombing the government went to great lengths to disguise an aircraft plant. Check out more of these amazing photos at the link.
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
You know it as Slaughterhouse-Five, but it goes by another name, too. The complete title of Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed novel is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, A Fourth-Generation German-American Low Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.
Weird, yes. But when you get to know the book, it actually makes a lot of sense. Even the bit about the flying saucers. Allow us to explain.
THE STORY
Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t told in the standard, chronological way. On the contrary, its main character, Billy Pilgrim, is an unwitting time traveler. One moment he’s living in 1945, then 1968, then 1954.
Arguably the novel’s most compelling sections take place during World War II, when young Billy is serving as a U.S. soldier. The Germans capture Pilgrim, who’s lost behind enemy lines, and take him to Dresden, a beautiful city untouched by war. There, he and other POWs are kept in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where they escape the Allied bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker. Although they are safe, they can still hear the firebombs pounding above. And when they emerge, everyone has been killed, and everything destroyed.
Pilgrim returns to these memories frequently. But after coming home from the war, he marries, graduates from optometry school, and becomes a respected businessman. Despite such positive steps, tragedy seems to follow him. First, he turns up the sole survivor of a plane crash. Next, his wife dies in a car accident. Following these events, Pilgrim starts telling people he was kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who taught him that the past, present, and future don’t really exist. Instead, they believe time is a conceptual whole. Pilgrim accepts the Tralfamadorian theory, and as he floats through the unalterable events of his life, he accepts that he has no power over his fate.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Dresden, Germany was indeed firebombed on the night of February 13thy, 1945, and Kurt Vonnegut was one of the POWs who witnessed the attack. On that evening, Allied forces killed at least 25,000 people (although some estimates that as many as 130,000 people died). Vonnegut decided to write about his experience in Dresden as soon as he returned from the war, but it took him more than twenty years to finish the book. While crafting the novel, he realized that conventional narrative structure imposed logic on events -and that the events he witnessed in Dresden had none. Slaughterhouse-Five therefore lacks conflict, climax, and conclusion. Thus, the short, episodic style of the novel doesn’t allow the reader to draw morals from the story, nor allow the characters to find peace. To underscore this point, he inserts himself into the narrative, making it clear that even the author can find no way to form a lesson from such horror.
WHY THE STORY MATTERS
ANTI-PLOT, NON-HERO: Vonnegut abandons traditional storytelling by drastically altering chronology. This strategy allows him to reflect Pilgrim’s disjointed reality and avoid a conventional plot. Vonnegut also discards the traditional literary hero. Christ-like in his suffering, Pilgrim does not act, but is instead acted upon -a victim of destiny without any motivation beyond basic survival. Through Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut paints all participants of war as the “listless playthings of powerful forces.”
LITTLE GREEN CREATURES IN FLYING SAUCERS: The science-fiction segments of Slaughterhouse-Five strike most readers as bizarre, even distracting. Out of nowhere,. Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped, displayed in an alien zoo, and mated with a movie star. Vonnegut never says his alien stories are imaginary, but Pilgrim does read science-fiction novels with similar plots. Real or not, the Tralfamadorians are a coping mechanism that enables him to accept empty tragedies. He clings to the Tralfamadorian saying about life and death: “So it goes.”
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Literary VIPs
BILLY PILGRIM: Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on POW Billy Pilgrim. His first name (Billy, not William) marks him as permanently childlike. His last name identifies him as a voyager, but with one poignant exception: Billy is on a pilgrimage without a purpose.
KURT VONNEGUT: Vonnegut appears as a character in his own book, both in the semi-autobiographical first and last chapters and occasionally in the body text itself. He uses these appearances to remind the reader that many of the events are true, and that he experienced them himself.
Scenes to Remember
* Vonnegut visits his war buddy Bernard O’Hare to talk about Dresden. He’s surprised by the hostility of O’Hare’s wife, Mary, who accuses his books of portraying war as glamorous, as in a movie with Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. Vonnegut promises her Slaughterhouse-Five won’t have a part in it for Sinatra.
* Two days after the war ends, Pilgrim rides on the back of a green cart pulled by two horses. If he could choose to remember only the happy times and ignore the bad, this would be the moment he’d choose: lying in the sunshine with the birds singing in the trees. This is Pilgrim’s happiest memory -not his wedding day or the birth of his children, but an experience of simple animal comfort.
Famous Last Words
* “I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the German had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, ‘I know, I know, I know.’”*
*Though horrified by Nazi atrocities, Vonnegut refused to allow for a “just war” or a “right side.” He tried to curtail the inevitable criticism of the book by addressing it within the novel itself.
* “I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve sad before, bugs in amber.”
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The above article by Elizabeth Lunday is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
What happens in war when an enemy rescues endangered civilians? In 1942, a German U-boat sunk a ship carrying 400 Allied troops, dozens of civilians, and (unknown to the Germans) 1800 Italian POWs. The attack left a couple of thousand survivors floating in lifeboats or treading water in the ocean.
The survivors faced a certain and protracted watery death.
Then, the U-Boat commander Werner Hartenstein (left), made an extraordinary decision that went beyond all protocol.
He ordered the U-boat to surface he ordered his submariners to save as many of the marooned survivors as possible.
This act of humanity would save the lives of many hundreds of people. Yet the tragedy of the Laconia was not over yet.
A U-boat cannot accommodate so many people. What happened to the survivors of the RMS Laconia is the subject of discussion even today. Read the whole story at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
From Uncle John’s Dustbin of History, here’s the final installment of our story about the person most responsible for making Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as devastating as it was. Part one is in this post.
BEFORE THE STORM
On the evening of Saturday, December 6, 1941, Yoshikawa sent what would turn out to be his the last of his coded messages to Tokyo:
VESSELS MOORED IN HARBOR; NINE BATTLESHIPS; THREE CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE SEAPLANE TENDERS; SEVENTEEN DESTROYERS. ENTERING HARBOR ARE FOUR CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE DESTROYERS. ALL AIRCRAFT CARRIERS AND HEAVY CRUISERS HAVE DEPARTED HARBOR. …NO INDICATION OF ANY CHANGES IN U.S. FLEET. “ENTERPRISE” AND “LEXINGTON” HAVE SAILED FROM PEARL HARBOR. …IT APPEARS THAT NO AIR RECONNAISSANCE IS BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FLEET AIR ARM.
Though Yoshikawa provided much of the intelligence used to plan the attack on Pearl Harbor, he did not know when -or even if- it would occur. (“To entrust knowledge of such a vital decision to an expendable espionage agent would have been foolish,” he later explained.) He learned the attack was underway the same way that Hawaiians did: by hearing the first bombs go off as he was eating breakfast, at 7:55 a.m. on the morning of the 7th.
INFAMY
Yoshikawa had been feeding the war planners in Japan a steady stream of information for eight months, and his efforts had paid off. The Japanese military accomplished its objective with brutal effectiveness: The naval strike force, which included nine destroyers, 23 submarines, two battleships and six aircraft carriers bristled with more than 400 fighters, bombers, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes, had managed to sail more than 4,000 miles across the Pacific undetected and then strike at the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet while its ships were still at anchor and the Army Air Corps planes were still on the ground.
Twenty American warships were sunk or badly damaged in the two-hour attack, including the eight battleships along Battleship Row, the main target of the raid. More than 180 U.S. aircraft were destroyed and another 159 damaged. The destruction of the airfield on Ford Island, in the very heart of Pearl Harbor, was so complete that only a single aircraft managed to make it into the air. More than 2,400 American servicemen lost their lives, including 1,177 on the battleship Arizona, and another 1,178 were wounded. It was the greatest military disaster in United States history.
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, remains one of the most infamous events in U.S. history. Yet the spy who played a key role in the sneak attack is a forgotten man, unknown even to many World War II buffs.
UNDER COVER
On March 27, 1941, a 27-year-old junior diplomat named Tadashi Morimura arrived in Honolulu to take his post as vice-consul at the Japanese consulate. But that was just a cover- “Morimura” was really Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese Imperial Navy Intelligence officer. His real mission: to collect information about the American military installations in and around Pearl Harbor.
Relations between the United States and Japan had been strained throughout the 1930s and were now deteriorating rapidly. In 1940, after years of Japanese aggression in China and Southeast Asia, Washington froze Japanese assets in the U.S., cut off exports of oil and war material, and moved the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, bringing it 2,400 miles closer to Japan.
The fleet was in Pearl Harbor to stay. But if Japan wanted its funds unfrozen and the crippling economic embargo lifted, the United States insisted that all Japanese troops had to leave China and Southeast Asia. This was a demand that Japan was unwilling to meet. Instead, it began preparing for war, and by early 1941, the eyes of Japan’s military planners had turned to Pearl Harbor.
THE AMERICAN DESK
Yoshikawa had become a spy in a roundabout way. He’d been a promising naval academy graduate, but his career hopes were dashed in 1936 when, just two years after graduation, stomach problems (reportedly brought on by heavy drinking) forced him out of the Japanese Navy. The following year he landed a desk job with Naval Intelligence, where he was put to work learning all that he could about the U.S. Navy.
From 1937 until 1940, Yoshikawa pored over books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, reports filed by Japanese diplomats and intelligence officers from all over the world, and anything else he could find that would give him information about the U.S. Navy. “By 1940 I was the Naval General Staff’s acknowledged American expert,” he recounted in a 1960 article in the journal Naval Institute Proceedings. “I knew by then every U.S. man-of-war and aircraft by name, hull number, configuration, and technical characteristics. I knew, too, a great deal of information about the U.S. naval bases at Manila, Guam, and Pearl Harbor.”
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For several months after the US entry into World War II, Americans feared air raids or even invasions of the continental United States by Germany and Japan. An article in the March 2, 1942 issue of Life magazine suggested several possible invasion routes that Axis forces might take. These include a Germany landing at Norfolk, Virginia supported by fifth columnists hidden in the US. At the link, you can view maps of a few other fanciful scenarios.
Link | Image: Time Warner
You’ve probably seen the 1957 move The Bridge On the River Kwai, but you might not know how much of the film was real and how much was fictionalized. The real history of how the railway between Burma and China was built, including the bridge, is a horrific story. The British didn’t build the railway in the 19th century because it would be too expensive. During World War II, the invading Japanese took on the project, but expected it to take five years to complete. Those plans were drawn before they found a source of free labor: the Allied POWs. Because of the inhuman amount of labor forced on the prisoners, the railway line that was expected to take five years to complete was ready in only 16 months.
Starvation provisions, overloading of work, dismal or absent accommodation and sanitation, and the individual viciousness of Japanese and Korean engineers and guards, took their expected toll. Disease (predominantly dysentery, malaria, beriberi and cholera), brutality (69 men were beaten to death by their guards) and 12 to 18 hour daily work shifts made for a high death rate. In fact, the work went on 24 hours a day with the aid of oil pot lamps and bamboo/wood fires that were kept burning all night long. When looking down on the wok area at night it looked like working in the “jaws of hell” – thus the workers gave it the name “Hellfire Pass”.
Read the rest of the story at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image credit: ©Pascal Engelmajer)
Listverse has pictures and descriptions of ten strange weapons developed by the Allies during World War II. Among them were sound mirrors, some of which still dot the British coast:
They are the long-forgotten acoustic reflectors, dubbed by locals as the “listening ears.” These lonely structures were built to protect harbors and coastal towns from airborne attacks. Serving as an early warning system, microphones placed at the focal point of the reflector enabled it to detect sounds from flying aircraft over the English Channel, at a range of 30 kilometers. Thanks to acoustic pioneer William Tucker, who helped the radar teams pinpoint enemy aircraft and their movements, the system helped a seemingly inferior, and nearly obsolete, radar system effectively detect German bombers and fighters, and to, ultimately, help win the Battle of Britain.
Link via First Things | Photo by Flickr user Between a Rock used under Creative Commons license
During World War II, the Allies tried to estimate the number of tanks produced by Nazi Germany. But these estimates often contradicted each other. So they asked statisticians to come up with a solution. The statisticians noted that the Germans gave their tanks serial numbers, and guessed that they were given sequentially. This led to an accurate estimate, as described in this Guardian article from 2006:
The German tanks were numbered as follows: 1, 2, 3 … N, where N was the desired total number of tanks produced. Imagine that they had captured five tanks, with serial numbers 20, 31, 43, 78 and 92. They now had a sample of five, with a maximum serial number of 92. Call the sample size S and the maximum serial number M. After some experimentation with other series, the statisticians reckoned that a good estimator of the number of tanks would probably be provided by the simple equation (M-1)(S+1)/S. In the example given, this translates to (92-1)(5+1)/5, which is equal to 109.2. Therefore the estimate of tanks produced at that time would be 109
By using this formula, statisticians reportedly estimated that the Germans produced 246 tanks per month between June 1940 and September 1942. At that time, standard intelligence estimates had believed the number was far, far higher, at around 1,400. After the war, the allies captured German production records, showing that the true number of tanks produced in those three years was 245 per month, almost exactly what the statisticians had calculated, and less than one fifth of what standard intelligence had thought likely.
Link via Now I Know | Photo of Tiger II tank by Flickr user cliff1066 used under Creative Commons license
Jackie Roy Tuner, a US veteran of the invasion of Normandy, plays the trumpet. In this video, he shares a story about one night when, on the front line, he played his trumpet to entertain troops on both sides.
via reddit
Der Spiegel has an image gallery of “Trummerfrauen,” or “rubble women” who were charged by the occupying Allies with cleaning up the wreckage of German cities bombed during World War II. There weren’t enough German men left to do the job, and the women had to use their bare hands and whatever equipment they could round up on their own. The job still took years. Recovered materials were sorted to be reused. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
