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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.”
more …
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
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)
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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
LiveJournal user squid314 has posted a great rant. He loves Babylon 5 because the story is pretty consistent, but hates Doctor Who because it isn’t. He rips into Doctor Who good and hard, but reserves his harshest criticism for the writers of World War II:
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)
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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!
Rueben Ayala of Brighton, Colorado had completed three years of high school when he was drafted to serve in World War II. He didn’t like to talk about the war, and his children didn’t know that he didn’t graduate from high school until recently. Sixty-six years later, he has that diploma.
“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)
Many Americans know the V-2 rocket mainly as the beginning of the space program. That was Wernher von Braun’s dream from the beginning, but the Nazi war machine saw it as a very important weapon. During World War II, the rockets were built at a concentration camp called Dora, where prisoners were used for slave labor.
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!
As a British soldier in World War II, Denis Avey was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison camp, which was connected to the Auschwitz camp. While most inmates were concerned with getting out, Avey was trying to get in to the death camp to find out about the conditions. He made friends with Auschwitz prisoner Ernst Lobethall and swapped uniforms with him for overnight visits to each other’s camps. Lobethall got needed rest and food in the POW camp, and Avey gathered information from the death camp.
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
Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was stationed in Lithuania when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Thousands of Jewish refugees came to the consulate seeking travel documents in order to escape the Nazis. Sugihara’s superiors in Tokyo ordered him not to issue any travel visas.
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
CAEN (L) 10 July 1944 – Residents looking after a Canadian bulldozer clearing rubble in the streets. Photo: Archives Canada (R) Photo: Patrick Elie
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.
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.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.
(image credit: US National Archives)
John William Finn {wiki} of Pine Valley, California reached the age of 100 on Thursday. He was honored on the occasion by a biography in the Ramona Sentinel newspaper.
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
The Nazi Horten 2-29 fighter plane looked like something from a Star Wars prequel: an all-wing jet capable of speeds up to 600 mph, made mostly of wood.
Designer Walter Horten had lost hundreds of Luftwaffe colleagues during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and he was keen to avenge their deaths by developing a plane that would be pretty much invisible to Britain’s radar system.
He and his brother built and flew the prototype Ho 2-29 just before Christmas 1944, but the war ended before the plane could enter mass production.
The only remaining Horten 2-29 is kept hidden from public view at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility outside Washington, DC.
Did the plane truly have stealth capability against WWII radar? A team from Northrup Grumman built and tested a full-scale replica to find out.
Photo by Linda Reynolds/Flying Wing Films
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
“My hobby deals strictly with World War II militaria & insignia.
However, rather than collecting the actual items, I collect and use high resolution photos of them to create Photoshop images that show myself in the uniform of a Captain (or equivalent rank) in whichever armed force and branch of service those insignia were worn by.
Link -via Metafilter
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