“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

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.

Link | Photo: Airshow 1

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:

The Truth About Pearl Harbor

Dustbin of History: The Pearl Harbor Spy

The Pearl Harbor Spy, Part II

Doolittle’s Raid

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

(YouTube Link)

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!

Link

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.

The Army and Navy finally agreed on a near-dusk takeoff and night raid on Tokyo as the plan that stood the best chance of achieving complete surprise. he plan depended on a fast carrier run-in at night to get as close to the mainland as possible just prior to launch. After the planes were away, the fleet would make an immediate turn back toward Hawaii and run for waters beyond the range of Japanese land-based aircraft to preserve the limited fleet that remained in the Pacific. On April 13, Naval Task Force 16 gathered near Hawaii and proceeded toward the Japanese mainland with 16 ships, including Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey’s flagship, the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

THE BEST-LAID PLANS

Doolittle’s plan was to lead 16 planes with five-man crews ahead of the rest of the aircraft, to attack Tokyo with incendiary bombs, and to set fires that the others could follow to the city. But the B-25 crews were forced to launch early when the nighttime attack plan was disrupted by Japanese picket boats that spotted Task Force 16 early on the morning of the 18th. There were no other acceptable options; the mission had to launch immediately.

Owing to the added distance at the takeoff point, there was no plan for how or where to land these aircraft when Doolittle took off at 8:20AM. Doolittle recognized that the mission was already in jeopardy and might end with a parachute bailout at sea. Halsey and Doolittle shared the responsibility for the launch decision, with the clear intention of completing the mission.

OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

A B-25 just before the raid.

The USS Hornet steered into the wind while the deck pitched in heavy seas. Engines roared to life and Doolittle taxied his plane forward a few feet onto three cork pads that provide enough friction for the tires to hold the B-25 s the engines were pushed to full throttle. Minimum-distance takeoff procedures practiced on dry land in Florida worked as advertised on the deck of the ship.

After traveling more than 700 miles, miniscule errors in heading control were amplified, putting the pilots many miles off course. Several of the B-25 crews were totally lost when they finally made landfall around noon. Doolittle himself flew well north of his planned route, but quick work by his navigator steered him back on course. Those following him were much relieved at the rapid course correction. The sun was shining brightly about half past noon when Doolittle became the first pilot to bomb the Japanese homeland in fulfillment of FDR’s orders.

DOOMED FROM THE START

Unknown to Doolittle’s Raiders, the aircraft carrying the homing radio beacons for the landing fields in China had crashed, and with it any chance of finding the strips at night and in bad weather. Fortunately, the original targets planned for night recognition and attack were large industrial zones, so hitting at least part of the complex would be much easier in broad daylight.

The attack was not intended to do maximum damage; rather, it was intended to make a spectacle. The attack was designed do that the Japanese people would clearly know that a foreign enemy had bombed Tokyo. In the original plan, Doolittle had hoped to set fires to serve not only as beacons to the following 15 B-25s, but also to dramatically -and undeniably- announce that the capital city had been bombed. An order forbidding the bombardment of the radio towers near Tokyo indicated that immediate dissemination of the news by Japanese radio was desired and expected.

TRIUMPH FROM TRAGEDY

Taking off for Tokyo.

In almost every case, primary targets were bombed. The damage done far exceeded expectation largely as a result of highly inflammable Japanese construction, the low-altitude attack, the clear weather over Tokyo, and the careful target studies that the crew had done. All 16 planes had descended to extremely low altitudes, attacked, and egressed the target area at high speed. All 16 crews began to calculate how much fuel they had left and how far they could fly. Initial calculations were not encouraging. Navigator Lieutenant Eugene F. McGurl halfheartedly joked, “Hey, I don’ t think we’re gonna have to swim more than one hundred miles.”

Doolittle’s Raiders got another lucky break that evening. A stiff tailwind had developed between japan and China and, much to the surprise of the navigators, several of the planes appeared to be getting pretty good gas mileage and making good time. Only one bomber had insufficient fuel to make the Chinese mainland and diverted to Russia instead. That plane’s five crewmen were interned in Russia until they managed to escape into Iran in May 1943.

Once the raiders made landfall over China, luck ran out. The Chinese, fearing air raids by the Japanese and not knowing of the timing of Doolittle’s raid on the Japanese capital, extinguished all ground lights when the B-25 engines were heard. In addition, bad weather over the China coast made safe landings impossible and all of the planes either landed in the water near the coast or the crews parachuted out. Four were killed during bailout or ditching and eight were captured by the Japanese. Four of those who were captured survived until they were freed by U.S. troops in 1945.

Doolittle's Raiders in China.

FIRST TIME’S THE CHARM

The Tokyo raid was the first, and at that time, the only combat mission flown by these 80 men. In the weeks following the raid, American morale soared. For the planning, execution, and leadership during the raid, Doolittle received the nation’s highest military award. On May 19, 1942, President Frankin D. Roosevelt, the man who had ordered the mission, personally decorated the newly-promoted Brigadier General James H. Doolittle with the Medal of Honor in a private White House ceremony.

__________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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.

Link

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

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

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.

Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria

Thanks to a tolerant national population, Bulgaria’s Tsar Boris III was able to avoid enforcing anti-Semitic policies—at least for a while. Eventually, though, the political and military pressure from Hitler became too great. In March 1943, Boris was bullied into signing off on the deportation of 11,343 Jews from Thrace and Macedonia to Auschwitz. Of them, only 12 survived. When the deportation became public knowledge, most Bulgarians were so outraged that Boris went into hiding. Anything he faced would be a lose-lose situation—whether it was the wrath of the Nazis or the wrath of his own people. When Hitler demanded the deportation of all Bulgarian Jews, Boris caved.

Hide and Go Seek

What happened next was one of the most fateful strokes of luck in history. The signed directive from Boris passed through the ranks and into the hands of one of Deunov’s followers, who quickly informed his guru. Eager to stop the deportation, Deunov sent one of his most trusted devotees, a senior official named Lyubomir Loulchev, to try and change Boris’ mind. Deunov knew that Boris respected him (in large part because Deunov had “predicted” the devastating results of WWI), but he also knew the tsar respected Loulchev. Deunov told Loulchev: “Find the tsar and tell him that if he lets Bulgarian Jews be sent to Poland, that will be the end of his dynasty.”

Unfortunately, locating the tsar wasn’t an easy task. Boris was still in hiding, and not even his most trusted advisors knew his whereabouts. Loulchev desperately searched the country, but he was running out of time, so he returned to Deunov for help. According to one biographer, Deunov meditated on Boris’ location in his room for a few minutes, then opened the door and said one word: “Krichim,” the name of an obscure town in southern Bulgaria. Loulchev left for the town immediately and arrived to discover a very surprised tsar.

Not long after, Boris called for the release of all Bulgarian Jews awaiting deportation. It’s uncertain whether the about-face was the result of Loulchev’s appeal to Boris’ conscience, the power of Deunov’s advice, or the pressure he discovered he was receiving from other top Bulgarian officials. Members of the parliament had banded together to try and protect their Jewish population, but with the tsar in hiding, their hands were tied. Deunov’s involvement changed all of that.

The Fury of a Führer

Hitler was more than a little irritated by this turn of events, as well as by Boris’ refusal to engage in war with the Soviet Union. In August 1943, the Führer summoned the tsar to a private meeting in East Prussia—a trip from which Boris never recovered. He returned exhausted and depressed, and died mysteriously just days later, at age 49. It’s widely suspected (but still unproven) that foul play was involved.

Tsar Boris and Adolf Hitler

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a happy ending for Deunov, either. In 1944, Soviet forces invaded Bulgaria, and the Christian guru died two days before Communist authorities could arrest him for his spiritual teachings. The government continued to harass and persecute his followers until the fall of Communism in 1989.

Since then, however, there’s been a rise of interest in Deunov’s philosophies, and his teachings have slowly spread throughout Europe. But even those Bulgarians who aren’t particularly inspired by his religion still respect Deunov for his vital role in saving 48,000 Bulgarians from the Holocaust. But perhaps the main reason he’s remembered so fondly is because he inspired his nation to do the right thing. In 1998, the Anti-Defamation League honored the entire country of Bulgaria with its Courage to Care Award. And while due credit has been given to Boris III, Bulgarians also remember that the tsar could just as easily have allowed his Jewish subjects to perish (as he’d done to Jews in the ancestral lands) were he not convinced otherwise. Of all the Bulgarians who played a role in their nation’s proudest moment, none are more esteemed than Peter Deunov.

________________________________

The article above, written by Mark Juddery, appeared in the September – October 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don’t forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!

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)

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.”
*****
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 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.

But 1944 didn’t go well for them. On May 20, Edward’s plane was shot down over the jungles of Burma. On June 6, Robert parachuted into France and was killed in heavy fighting at the village of Neuville-au-Plain. The following day, Preston, who’d landed at Utah Beach, died while defending the wounded. And Fritz, of course, was “lost” somewhere behind enemy lines.

Edward, Preston, Robert, and Frederick Niland.

THE TELEGRAMS ARRIVE

In Saving Private Ryan, one of the women in the military’s secretary pool is typing condolence letters to parents of dead soldiers when she notices that three letters are all going to the same name and address. She brings the matter to the attention of her commanding officer, and the order goes out to search for Private Ryan.

On D-day, Gussie later said, she was thinking how glad she was that Edward was far from Normandy’s fierce fighting; then the telegram came with the news about his plane crash stating that he was presumed dead. On June 21, another War Office telegram arrived, this one about Preston’s death, followed two days later by one about Robert. The courier who delivered the telegrams begged not to be sent back to deliver the second and third telegrams. Within the space of a few weeks, the Nilands were grieving for three sons lost to the war.

Father Sampson

In Spielberg’s film, Private Ryan knows nothing of his brothers’ fates until Captain Miller finds him. Fritz, separated from his unit, also knew nothing of his family’s pain. When he regrouped with Company H, he got the news about Edward’s plane being shot down. Then Robert’s company commander found the grieving sergeant and told him that his brother Robert had been killed and was buried at a cemetery in the French village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Stunned by the loss of two brothers, Fritz sought out the company chaplain, Father Sampson, and asked for a ride to Robert’s grave. New cemeteries had been hastily created for the Allied dead. Fritz and Father Sampson searched the village but were unable to find Robert’s grave. They tried another cemetery, and when Father Sampson saw Preston Niland’s grave, he thought that the wrong name had been recorded in error and showed it to Fritz. The distraught young man said, “Father Sampson, Preston is my brother, too.” Eventually they found Robert’s grave, and Fritz realized he’d lost all three brothers.

LOST BANDS OF BROTHERS

What about the film’s premise that the War Department would send a soldier home after his siblings had died in battle? Many people believed that the United States had a law forbidding families to serve on the same ship or in the same military unit -a myth repeated in the movie. In fact, no such law existed. Instead, the War Department adopted the “sole survivor” policy. If a soldier or sailor’s siblings were killed, he was not allowed to serve in combat zones. After Father Sampson brought Fritz back from the cemetery, he filled out paperwork to notify the Army that Fritz was the Niland family’s sole survivor and had to be sent home.

THE ONLY BROTHERS I HAVE LEFT

When Captain Miller finally finds Private Ryan, the young man is defending a bridge from the Nazi’s and refuses to leave his post. He explains that he’s with “the only brothers I have left …I wouldn’t desert them.” Private Ryan could have been speaking for Fritz Niland, who refused to leave his fellow soldiers, insisting, “I’m staying here with my boys.” Determined to avenge his brother’ deaths, Fritz managed to remain on the front lines until August, when he was finally ordered to return stateside. He served out the rest of the war as an MP, always longing to get back to Company H. He would later say that it took an edict from President Roosevelt to get him to leave the front.

In a miraculous turn of events, Edward, presumed dead, came home in May 1945 after nearly a year in a Japanese prison camp. Though happy to have Edward back, Fritz never fully got over the deaths of Robert and Preston. Fritz’s daughters were invited to see the premiere of Saving Private Ryan, but their father never got to see it; Fritz Niland died of a heart attack in 1983.

__________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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

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.

An intercepted Japanese message revealed that a large battalion of enemy ships were coming. The Allies prepared themselves for their arrival -five cruisers, including the Juneau, and eight destroyers stood ready. On November 13, just after midnight, the Japanese brigade arrived: one light cruiser, two battleships, and 11 destroyers. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Allies also suffered poor radar reception that failed to show the location of the enemy ships.

USS Juneau

DAMN THE TORPEDOES

The intense battle that followed didn’t take long. It was only 15 minutes before two Japanese destroyers, a Japanese battleship, and five American destroyers were felled. The Juneau was hit by a torpedo, so it cruised away to seek repairs at Pearl Harbor.

But the massive boat could only make speeds of 18 knots, and reaching Pearl Harbor seemed impossible. So a few hours later, the Juneau turned around and rejoined the battle. The bloody confrontation raged until almost noon, when the Allied forces retreated. The Juneau limped along at a speed of 13 knots before it was hit again. The time, the torpedo split the cruiser in half; it sank almost immediately.

About 600 men on board were killed right away, including Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert Sullivan. The eldest brother, George, was severely wounded but made it into a lifeboat. More than 100 men from the Juneau were also still alive, but the odds were greatly stacked against them.

IN THE WATER

Finally, the Japanese left, and with the surviving men of the Juneau in need of rescue, the captain of the USS Helena radioed the sinking ship’s position and asked for aircraft assistance. Unfortunately, that message never reached its intended audience.

For a full week, the remaining servicemen had to fight exposure, exhaustion, and sharks. Many died from the wounds they had already suffered. Only three crowded lifeboats were available for the entire remaining crew, and sharks circled each of them, waiting for anyone to fall overboard.

George’s wounds were serious but not life-threatening. He might have made it, but was attacked by a shark when he attempted to quickly clean himself in the ocean. The last remaining Sullivan brother had perished. And by the time a rescue ship returned to the area, just 10 survivors remained.

Back in Waterloo, Iowa, the Sullivans’ parents did not know of their sons’ deaths. The U.S. military, in an effort to keep the Axis from knowing how much damage its forces had sustained, did not make the cruiser’s destruction public. The Sullivan parents suspected something was wrong only when they stopped receiving letters from their sons. They did not receive an official notice until January 12, 1943.

HEROES REMEMBERED

The nation mourned the loss of all aboard the Juneau, but especially the sacrifice of the Sullivan family. The brothers’ parents, Thomas and Alleta, were left behind, as was a sister, Genevieve, and Albert’s widow and son. Pope Pius XII sent his condolences. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to the Sullivan parents in which he said, “I am sure that we all take heart in the knowledge that they fought side by side.” President Roosevelt also asked Mrs. Sullivan to christen the new naval destroyer, the USS The Sullivans, in San Francisco in April.

The Navy awarded the brothers several posthumous medals, including the Purple Heart; the American Defense Service Medal, Fleet Clasp; the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal; the World War II Victory Medal; and the Good Conduct Medal.

Thomas and Alleta remained staunch supporters of the war effort, and they began a tour to promote the buying of war bonds. Genevieve joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), a female service corps employed by the Navy during the war.

The house the Sullivan brothers grew up in has since been torn down. In its place stands a park dedicated to the family. Waterloo, Iowa, also hosts the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center, and the city’s Grout Museum opened a wing called The Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veteran’s Museum in 2004.

THE LEGACY LIVES ON

The first USS The Sullivans served the U.S. Navy through the Korean War. After the conflict, it was decommissioned and now resides in Buffalo, New York, as a tribute to the brothers. A second USS The Sullivans was launched on August 12, 1995, and is still in service.

USS The Sullivans

A movie about the Sullivan brothers’ sacrifice, The Fighting Sullivans (originally titled just The Sullivans), was released in 1944 and was nominated for an Academy Award. The film Saving Private Ryan, which won five Academy Awards, was partially inspired by the brothers’ deaths but did not directly tell any part of the story.

The Fighting Sullivans (segment 9 of 9)

(YouTube link)

Today, there’s a widespread belief that a law was enacted after the death of the five Sullivan brothers to prevent family members from serving together on the same ship, but that’s not true. The Navy does, however, continue to recommend against it, as do the other branches of the military. Still, if enlisted servicemen and women fill out a request form, the rule can be bent.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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.

Link

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.”

**********

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!

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

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.

The Japanese losses were miniscule in comparison: 29 planes and five midget submarines were lost, 64 men killed, and one submariner taken prisoner -the first Japanese P.O.W. of the war- when his submarine ran aground in Oahu.

INVISIBLE MAN

The FBI raided the Japanese consulate within hours, but by then Yoshikawa had burned his code books and any other materials that would have identified him as a spy. He was taken into custody with the rest of the consular staff, and in August 1942 they were all returned to Japan as a part of a swap with American diplomats being held in Japan.

Yoshikawa worked in Naval Intelligence for the rest of the war. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, he hid in the countryside, posing as a Buddhist monk, fearful of what might happen to him if American occupation forces learned of his role in the Pearl Harbor attack. After the occupation ended in 1952, he returned to his family. In 1955 he opened a candy business.

By that time Yoshikawa’s role in the war had become widely known, thanks to an Imperial Navy officer who identified him by name in a 1953 interview with the newspaper Ehime Shimbin. If Yoshikawa thought the exposure would bring him fame, fortune, or the gratitude of his countrymen, he was wrong on all counts. Japan had paid a terrible price for starting the war with the United States: On top of the 1.6 million Japanese soldiers who died in the war, an additional 400,000 civilians were killed, including more than 100,000 who died when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Few people wanted anything to do with the man who helped bring such death and destruction to Japan. “They even blamed me for the atomic bomb,” Yoshikawa told Australia’s Daily Mail in 1991, in one of his rare interviews with the western press.

The candy business failed, and Yoshikawa, now a pariah in his own land, had trouble even finding a job. He ended up living off of the income his wife earned selling insurance. He never received any official recognition for his contribution to the war effort, not a medal or even a thank-you note, and when he petitioned the post-war government for a pension, they turned him down. By the end of his life he had returned to the same vice that supposedly landed him in the spying business in the first place: alcohol. “I drink to forget,” he told a reporter. “I have so many thoughts now, so many years after the war. Why has history cheated me?” He died penniless in a nursing home in 1993.

FINAL IRONY

Yoshikawa was the only Japanese spy in Honolulu before the outbreak of war; only the consul general know his true identity and purpose, and with the exception of the geishas, his driver, and others who assisted him without fully realizing what he was up to, he worked alone.

And yet it was the Roosevelt administration’s fear that other Japanese spies might be out there, both in the Hawaiian Islands and on the West Coast of the United States, that prompted the federal government to round up 114,000 Japanese Americans and incarcerate them in internment camps for the duration of the war. Many were given only 48 hours to put their affairs in order and as a consequence lost everything they owned.

Not a single internee was ever charged with espionage, and no one understood better than Yoshikawa that they were innocent. He knew because he had tried to recruit Japanese Americans, sounding them out about their loyalties without revealing his purpose, and had failed. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke,” he admitted to the Daily Mail. “You see, I couldn’t trust them in Hawaii to help me. They were loyal to the United States.”

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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.”

MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE

In August 1940, Yoshikawa was ordered to begin preparing for a spy mission in Pearl Harbor. And he was probably surprised by what his superiors told him next: He wasn’t going to receive any training in the art of espionage- none at all. He wasn’t going to receive any support from Japan’s Hawaii spy network, either, because there wasn’t one. He would be the only Japanese spy in Hawaii, posing as one Tadashi Morimura, a low-level diplomat assigned to the consulate in Honolulu, and only the consul-general would know his true identity and mission. The job paid $150 a month, plus $600 every six months for expenses. In March, 1941, Yoshikawa arrived in Honolulu.

A MAN WITH(OUT) A PLAN

Now what? Yoshikawa had received very little guidance on how to go about his job, but his worries ended when the consul-general, Nagao Kita, took him to dinner at Shuncho-ro, a Japanese restaurant on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor. From a private dining room on the second floor of the restaurant, Yoshikawa could see both the Navy base and the nearby Army Air Corps base at Hickam Field laid out below. The Shuncho-ro was the perfect location for studying the flow of ships and aircraft in and out of the harbor, and it even had telescopes. It also happened to be owned by a woman who came from the same prefecture in Japan as Yoshikawa, and she happily made the private dining room (and telescope) available to the up-and-coming young diplomat whenever he requested it.

THE NATURAL

Yoshikawa quickly discovered that he could accomplish much of his spying without attracting attention, and without even breaking any laws. After all, Pearl Harbor was no isolated military installation; it was part of Honolulu, the Hawaiian Islands’ capital city and largest commercial port. Civilians, foreigners, and sightseeing tourists were everywhere. Even if the military had tried to shield Pearl Harbor’s operations from prying eyes, it would have been virtually impossible.

Yoshikawa collected a lot of useful information from his observations at the Shuncho-ro, and also by hiking the hillsides that overlooked Pearl Harbor. He could even rent planes at a nearby airport whenever he wanted to take aerial photographs of the ships at anchor. He blended in easily with the large Asian-American population, and he was careful to vary his routine, never visiting any one place too frequently, and never staying any longer than necessary. Sometimes he posed as a laborer; other times he put on a loud Hawaiian shirt and masqueraded as a tourist. When he felt conspicuous traveling alone on, say, a visit to a military air show or plane or boat ride around the harbor, he’d take one of the geisha girls who worked at the Shuncho-ro or one of the female consular staff on a “date”, always being careful not to reveal his true identity or mission to his companion. An experienced long-distance swimmer, Yoshikawa also made many swims around the harbor to study its defenses. By breathing through a reed, he could swim underwater when needed to avoid detection.

NICE TO MEET YOU

After a long day of spying on land or in the water, Yoshikawa passed many an evening picking up hitchhiking U.S. soldiers or buying drinks for servicemen in bars, prying as much information out of them as he could without arousing suspicion. (Soldiers who were tight-lipped around male foreigners often happily spilled the beans to the geishas at Shuncho-ro, so Yoshikawa made sure to question them, too.) After the restaurants and bars closed, he would pose as a drunken bum and scour the dumpsters outside of military installations for any documents he could get his hands on.

Yoshikawa rarely took photographs, and he never drew diagrams or wrote anything down while making his rounds. He never carried a notepad; Instead, he relied on his photographic memory to record every detail -locations and numbers of ships and aircraft, the timing of their arrivals and departures, the depth of water in different parts of the harbor, everything- so that if he were stopped and questioned, there would be no evidence on him that suggested he was a spy. He never even carried binoculars for fear they would call too much attention to him or arouse suspicion.

PACKING A PUNCH

If Japan had planned its attack on Pearl Harbor without the data Yoshikawa gathered, it’s quite possible it would have been a mere glancing blow, one that damaged the Pacific Fleet but did not knock it out of commission. But the information Yoshikawa provided was devastating:

* When he reported that air patrols rarely watched the waters north of Oahu (where the seas were thought to be too treacherous for an enemy to mount an attack), the Japanese military planners decided to attack from that direction.

* When he told them the water in the harbor wasn’t deep enough for ordinary torpedoes, they devised a torpedo with special fins that would work in shallow water.

* When Yoshikawa told them that the ships along “Battleship Row” were moored in pairs to protect the inboard ships from torpedo attacks, the planners decided to attack those ships with armor-piercing bombs dropped from dive-bombers.

* When he reported that ships commonly left the harbor for maneuvers on Monday and returned to the port at the end of the week, the planners set their attack for the weekend.

* When they asked Yoshikawa which day of the weekend the most ships were likely to be in the harbor, he replied simply: “Sunday.”

Continue reading this two-part story.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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

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

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

The Denver Post has printed a gallery of color pictures taken by photographers of the the US Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information during the Great Depression and World War II. Most were transferred from color slides. The photographs are now part of the Library of Congress. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

Documentary filmmaker Philippe Mora tells how his father (aka Mr. Mayonnaise) worked with the French Resistance and mime, Marcel Marceau, (pictured above with Mora), to rescue refugee children during WW2.

His father, who had escaped from Germany after the book-burning, noticed German soldiers would never search sandwiches containing mayonnaise in case drips stained their uniforms.

So the Resistance wrapped the identity papers of Jewish children being smuggled over borders in greaseproof paper, smeared them with mayonnaise and inserted them into sandwiches.

Link Via Grandpa Wiggly

So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called “World War II”.[...]

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there’s no way to take the Japanese home islands because they’re invincible…and then they realize they totally can’t have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified”. In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before – drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

…and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin’ unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you’re starting to wonder if any of the show’s writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

Link via io9 | Photo: National Park Service

Edith Shain was the nurse who became an icon when photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped her picture as she received a kiss from a sailor on VJ Day in New York City. She died at her home in Los Angeles yesterday, at the age of 91. To commemorate her passing, Buzzfeed posted a collection of recreations of that kiss. Link

Image credit: Flickr user Mike Stimpson (featured previously at Neatorama)

Richard Sullivan posted this lovely color footage from August 14, 1945.

65 Years Ago my Dad shot this film along Kalakaua Ave. in Waikiki capturing spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender. Kodachrome 16mm film: God Bless Kodachrome, right?

There is more information about the film in the comments at the vimeo link. -Thanks, Duke!

“I’m just so honored, so very honored to be here today,” he said as he got ready to walk onto the football field of Brighton High School with the rest of the class of 2010.

It is safe to say that Ayala was likely the only graduate of the day with 13 grandkids and 18 great grandkids.

When his name was finally read, it is also safe to say that Ayala was the only member of the class to receive a standing ovation from the entire crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to present to you Mr. Rueben Ayala, 2010 graduate of Brighton High School,” the speaker said.

Ayala slowly walked to the front grinning as wide as is humanly possible. His daughter, Susan Meador, wiped away a few tears.

“I really think this is a dream come true to him, something that he waited his entire life for,” Meador said.

Ayala graduated with the help of Operation Recognition – Veterans Diploma Project, which helps veterans whose education was interrupted by the war service. Link

The twelve men who flew on the world’s first nuclear bombing mission in 1945 made history, as they deployed “Little Boy” over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The youngest was only twenty at the time. For the rest of their lives (only two still survive) they were asked about their motivation and whether they thought it was worth it. Mental_floss has quotes from almost all of them, and a discussion in the comments from those of us who can only see the event in hindsight. Link

Mark Hogancamp is the master behind an elaborate fantasy world we can follow in pictures and video.

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the “real world”, both physically and emotionally – something he continues to struggle with today.

A documentary about Marwencol premiered Saturday at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Link -via Metafilter

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) were volunteers who learned to fly during World War II to supplement the US military, which was suffering from a shortage of pilots.

A few more than 1,100 young women, all civilian volunteers, flew almost every type of military aircraft — including the B-26 and B-29 bombers — as part of the WASP program. They ferried new planes long distances from factories to military bases and departure points across the country. They tested newly overhauled planes. And they towed targets to give ground and air gunners training shooting — with live ammunition. The WASP expected to become part of the military during their service. Instead, the program was canceled after just two years.

They weren’t granted military status until the 1970s. And now, 65 years after their service, they will receive the highest civilian honor given by the U.S. Congress. Last July, President Obama signed a bill awarding the WASP the Congressional Gold Medal. The ceremony will take place on Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

Fewer than 300 WASPs are still alive to receive the honor today. Read the story of the program and a few of the pilots at NPR. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Texas Woman’s University)

Some of the prisoners liberated from Auschwitz in 1945 recreated the scenes of their lives there in art. An online exhibit places those artworks side-by-side with photographs of Auchwitz taken many years later.

In 1979, The Auschwitz Museum Archive reproduced selected pieces of art and sent them to writer/photographer Alan Jacobs.
After years of related work and many more trips, Jacobs, and his son Jesse, returned to the camps in 1996 to find and photograph the identical scenes depicted in the art. Krysia Jacobs then devised a way to present them as you see here. They are the result of work over a 24 year period.

An explanatory text, which may be disturbing, accompanies each image. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak/Auschwitz Museum Archive)

The system of exploiting slave labor to assemble missiles began in 1943. It expanded dramatically after the August 1943 bombings of Peenemünde by the British Royal Air Force. The widespread destruction led the Nazi leadership and the missile staff to move underground and use forced labor. The chosen site was a mine/fuel depot near the town of Nordhausen in Thüringen. Slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp came to extend the tunnels for an underground V–2 factory called Mittelwerk. The new concentration camp outside the tunnels was code named Dora and was later renamed Mittelbau. More than 60,000 prisoners were interred at Dora. Some of them built 6000 V–2 rockets between August 1943 and April 1945. They experienced squalid housing, starvation diets, and draconian discipline with frequent executions.

Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Dora. Others were sent off to death camps as their usefulness faded. When the US Army liberated Dora in 1945, they found 750 workers and 3,000 corpses.

Following combat units were teams associated with various American intelligence groups intent on capturing German technology and experts. The US Army collected parts of 100 V–2s from the underground factory and, under a larger program best known as Paperclip, brought more than 125 German V–2 missile engineers, scientists and technicians to America. The Army interrogated them to determine their involvement in Nazi organizations and war crimes. However the Army wanted their expertise for the Cold War, so officers sometimes consciously overlooked or buried incriminating information.

Similarly, the US–led Dora war crimes trial at Dachau in 1947 led to no heightened American understanding, in large part because the US media had lost interest in such trials. The Dachau proceeding tried guards, kapos and the Mittelwerk general director, but its convictions narrowly focused on individual cruelty to prisoners. US Army Ordnance shielded its German missile engineers from public scrutiny by preventing Wernher von Braun, the leader of the group, from traveling to Germany to testify. Afterwards the Army classified the trial records as secret to guard information about Mittelwerk.

The story of slave labor at Dora accompanies a photographic exhibit at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The extensive website also includes many links to outside sources. Warning: some photographs may be disturbing. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Walter Frentz)

You’re familiar with historical re-enactment groups who get together to stage battles from history. Here’s one with a twist: a group of woman who portray the German Red Cross, or Deutches Rotes Kreuz (DRK) of World War II. Aachen Stadt I does not endorse the politics of the Nazi party; in fact they say right up front that they will not tolerate racist ideology. They participate in WWII battle re-enactments and attend educational events to tell about the role of the Red Cross. And they have a 2010 calendar for sale as well! Link -Thanks, Erin!

Mr Lobethall told him he had a sister Susana who had escaped to England as a child, on the eve of war. Back in his own camp, Mr Avey contacted her via a coded letter to his mother.

He arranged for cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from Susana to be sent to him and smuggled them to his friend. Cigarettes were more valuable than gold in the camp and he hoped he would be able to trade them for favours to ease his plight – and he was right.

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Avey never spoke of his Auschwitz experience after the war, and didn’t know what became of Lobethall until recently. Lobethall moved to the US and lived a long life.

But before he died Mr Lobethall recorded his survival story on video for the Shoah Foundation, which video the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. In it he spoke of his friendship with a British soldier in Auschwitz who he simply called “Ginger”. It was Denis.

The BBC brought the 91-year-old Avey and Lobethall’s sister Susana Timms together to watch Lobethall’s testimony and captured their meeting on video. Link -via Arbroath

Lorrie at Clueless in Carolina recently found a newspaper in her mother’s home announcing the news that World War II had ended. Besides news, it contained sponsored ads celebrating VJ Day.

You could almost feel the joy and relief wafting off of the page. Holding the newspaper made me feel happy, as if the happiness of the people who printed, delivered and received the paper was somehow still preserved. Okay, I’m a weirdo! But I wish I could put it in your hands and see if you felt the same way.

See scans of several ads and features from the Charlotte Observer, August 15th, 1945. Link

Sugihara discussed the plan with his wife Yukiko and decided to risk his career and his entire future by defying his superiors. The couple then spent 29 days issuing travel visas, up to 300 a day, as thousands of refugees stood in line at his office. Yukiko would prepare and register the visas while Chiune Sugihara would sign and stamp them, hour after hour, without breaking for meals. They would work late into the night until Yukiko would massage her husband’s weary hands in preparation for the next day. Sugihara was under orders to leave, which he could no longer delay. The family departed on September 1st, but he kept signing visas even as he boarded the train. Sugihara then tossed his official stamp out to the crowd, as he hadn’t time to stamp them all.

Sugihara’s actions enabled around 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape the Holocaust. For his efforts, Sugihara was imprisoned by the Soviets and fired from his job by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Read the entire story at mental_floss. Link

Historian Patrick Elie took old pictures of the rubble-strewn French city of Normandy in 1944, during the height of World War II, and painstakingly took photos of the same spot from the same general perspective:

Elie, who has devoted his life to chronicling D-Day and the effects of the war on his home country of France, worked tirelessly to find the exact locations of dramatic photographs from 1944 and then took his own photos of the modern-day sites.

WebUrbanist has more photos: Link | Check out Patrick Elie’s website for more.

Is the Hitler moustache history?  Since World War II it has not been popular, but long before Hitler rose to power, the toothbrush was the signature look of Charlie Chaplin.   In fact, the tiny moustache was quite fashionable at one time.

Now comedian Richard Herring is sporting a toothbrush moustache for his Edinburgh show, ‘Hitler Moustache’, in which he rails against voter apathy and fascism.  Herring said of his new moustache, "As people passed they would start laughing about five yards behind me. A group of lads called me ‘Adolf’. I haven’t had any sense of anger but I think some people were intimidated or scared."

With such a hairy past, it shouldn’t be suprising that his moustache would get a lot of lip.  But Herring is convinced that a Hitler moustache might grow on us — provided we don’t turn up our noses.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Kalel.

In 1940, Hitler, incensed by the successful bombing of Berlin by the RAF. ordered the construction of three enormous flak towers to protect the city. Soon afterwards, this idea quickly spread around Germany. 

Considered invulnerable at the time – and they pretty much were – many of these colossal structures still stand today, albeit serving much more "civilian" purposes:

The L Tower in Vienna is now, well, you take a guess. If your German is any good then its current name – Haus des Meeres is a complete giveaway. If not, then you may be surprised to discover that it is an aquarium. Instead of weapons of war and people huddling from falling bombs it now houses over three and a half thousand animals, with huge fish tanks containing sharks, turtles and piranhas (in different tanks one assumes). There is even a new tropical house with free flying birds and free-running monkeys.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

(image credit: US National Archives)

John William Finn is our nation’s oldest living recipient of its highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor (MoH). He is also the last surviving MoH recipient who earned his medal on Dec. 7, 1941, the last living recipient of the Navy’s MoH from World War II, and the only MoH recipient having his Navy rating, that of an Aviation Ordinanceman, to ever be awarded the MoH in the history of the United States Navy.

…when the attack came on that first Sunday morning in December, Chief Finn single-handedly mounted a 50-caliber machine gun on a stand on the base’s aircraft parking ramp and began firing on any attacking enemy aircraft that he could bear on.
John’s position was totally exposed to enemy strafing and bombing attacks, but he kept it up for more than two hours while under attack, despite being wounded five times and in severe pain. Fellow sailors implored him to seek medical care for his wounds, but John steadfastly refused to vacate his firing position until he received a direct order to do so from a superior officer.
Twenty pieces of shrapnel were removed from John’s body by the base’s medical staff

Finn was honored by local civic organizations last month. He is spending his birthday as a guest of George W. Bush and his wife in Crawford, Texas. Link -via Fark