WW II History

Regardless of what the critics say, aircraft carriers will continue to be indispensable to our national security.

Midway Airport. Some think its name comes from being “midway” between New York and the West Coast. Others mistakenly think it is named for the “Monsters of the Midway,” Alonzo Stagg’s legendary University of Chicago Maroon football teams, the name later adopted by the Super Bowl champion 1985 Chicago Bears.

Actually, it is named for the decisive blue water naval engagement that turned the tide of World War II in the Pacific. Eighty years ago this month, June 4-6, 1942, a combined Japanese fleet that included four aircraft carriers, one light carrier, and 11 battleships prepared to destroy U.S. naval airpower in another surprise attack near Midway Island, a lonely Pacific outpost 1,500 miles from Pearl Harbor.

A US spymaster inadvertently helped the Nazis develop one of the most effective disinformation campaigns of the second world war by spreading rumours about Hitler’s plans for a Where Eagles Dare-style Alpine redoubt, a historian with access to classified US military records has found.

The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.

Gwen Strauss was enjoying a leisurely lunch with her 83-year-old great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky.

Hélène was French and Gwen, an American author, lives in France.

It was 2002 and the conversation turned to Hélène’s past. Gwen knew her great-aunt had worked in the Resistance in France during World War Two, but didn’t know anything about that time in her life.

Hélène told the story of how she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and deported to Germany to a concentration camp. As the allies drew near, the camp was evacuated and she was forced to walk for miles on a Nazi death march.

“Then I escaped with a group of women,” she said briefly.

December 7 will mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack that killed 2,403 American service members, dealt a grievous blow to our fleet, and forced the United States into World War II. As we mark this anniversary, our inadequate response to China’s military build-up shows that we are not taking the lessons of that infamous day seriously.

Nine years ago, while stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, I put on my whites and took part in the annual Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day commemoration. Watching the ceremony, I must admit that the horrors of that attack seemed quite distant. More than the beautiful tropical setting, I knew that I was a part of the most dominant naval force in human history. With the Cold War long past, no other country could threaten America’s fleet.

The forgotten history of Pearl Harbor – Why Japan’s attack on the US 80 years ago was not a surprise.

In a straight line between the US and Japan, Hawaii is the first piece of land due west of San Francisco. In 1941 its shallow-water port, Pearl Harbor, provided the best place to anchor in the whole Pacific. There, at 7.49am (local time) on 7 December of that year, a first wave of torpedo bombers began to destroy the US Pacific Fleet.

The Second World War revolved around not just Europe and the Atlantic, nor even the Pacific, but the whole of Asia, too. Japan occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, and in 1931 it used Korean troops when invading Manchuria, a vast territory of China north-east of Beijing. By 1937, in the then capital of China, Nanjing, Japan had killed 300,000 inhabitants in six weeks. By 1939, it had taken over the large island of Hainan, off China. By the next year, it had invaded French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia).

Acting on a tip about stolen Nazi art, German investigators raided a home near the northern German city of Kiel in 2015. Instead, they discovered an underground garage containing a World War II-era Panther tank, a torpedo, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition and other weapons.

I posted on this previously but have come across some interesting history about the tank’s origins. Seems it was one of several cobbled together by the British in German factories at wars end and transported to the UK for evaluation. See the video below. I follow historian Mark Felton on YouTube, he posts a lot of interesting stuff.