World War Two
Published 27 Dec 2022The popular image of the Gestapo is as black leather-jacketed fiends whose spies keep the nation under constant surveillance. They are so powerful that the terrified population has no choice but to sell out its family and friends. But how true is this? Are all Germans living in fear of the Gestapo all the time?
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December 28, 2022
The Myth of the Nazi Police State – WW2 Documentary Special
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December 26, 2022
The Battle of Ortona with Jayson Geroux
OTD Canadian Military History
Published 21 Dec 2022Join me as I welcome Jayson Geroux to the OTD channel to discuss the Battle of Ortona. We will be discussing the urban combat that took place in Ortona in December 1943. [The discussion of the actual battle begins around the 6 minute mark.]
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2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade Christmas celebrations in Ortona, 1943
The folks at the World War Two channel on YouTube posted this to their community page on Christmas Day:
On Christmas Day, 25 December 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division is still engaged in brutal urban combat against the 1. Fallschirmjäger-Division for control over the town of Ortona. But among the rubble of the “Italian Stalingrad”, soldiers of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, along with other units [of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade], manage to keep the Christmas spirit alive.
Colonel S. W. Thomson will recount this most unusual Christmas celebration many years later:
“I knew that we would be fully engaged with the enemy on Christmas day. However our most enterprising Quartermaster, Captain Bordon Cameron, was anxious to provide something special for the men at Christmas. Three companies were in the line with one in reserve, often the norm. We decided to feed the reserve company first and feed the remaining companies in relays. as one company finished it would go forward some 300 or 400 yards and relieve the next. Tables, linen, chinaware and candles were scrounged by the reserve company. The tables were set up in rows in our great church Santa Maria with four foot thick walls and my rear H.Q. What a picture, what an appropriate setting for a Christmas dinner on Dec. 25.
“Soup, roast pork, vegetables and Christmas pudding along with a bottle of beer for each of the tattered, scruffy, war weary soldiers was served by HQ and B echelon staff. The Q.M. boys excelled themselves, the impossible had happened. There was a spirit of good-fellowship throughout the church. The signals officer Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve played the organ, and our much loved padre Roy Durford led the carol singing. Pipe Major Esson played his pipes several times during the meals drowning out the odd enemy shell burst outside.
“Christmas in Ortona, the meal, yes, but the spirit of the occasion, the look on the faces of those exhausted, gutsy men on entering the church is with me to-day and will live forever.”
To all our followers, readers, and viewers: We wish you a Merry Christmas!
From: Canadian Military History, Vol. 2 (1993)
Picture: Canadian soldiers celebrate Christmas in Ortona, Italy
Source: Canadian Armed Forces
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December 25, 2022
Stalin’s Christmas Surprise – Major Offensives to Come – WW2 – 226 – December 24, 1943
World War Two
Published 24 Dec 2022Twas the night before Christmas and the war was grinding on. The Moro River Campaign continues in Italy with Canadian infantry pushing past the Gully and into “Little Stalingrad”. Generally, the Allied advance to Rome is turning into a stalemate though, but Winston Churchill still believes an amphibious landing is the way to break this. Joseph Stalin also has some pretty big plans to bring the USSR back to its pre-Barbarossa borders. In the Pacific, there is attrition over Rabaul and stalemate on Bougainville.
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December 23, 2022
A Jungle Miracle – War Against Humanity 092
World War Two
Published 22 Dec 2022Two escapes, one from the Nazis in Kovno (Kaunas) Lithuania, from the prison at Fort IX, and one from Japanese terror on Panay in the Philippines this week, will help to document the crimes of the Axis powers.
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December 21, 2022
The Nazi Quest for Thor’s Hammer – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 20 Dec 2022Books, films, and comics are filled with Nazi scientists and explorers travelling the globe to get their hands on ancient artifacts or summoning daemons with black magic. But how much of it is grounded in reality? Well, some of it. In the neo-pagan religion invented by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the world can only be explained through the occult.
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December 18, 2022
A Super Bomber to Break Japan – WW2 – 225 – December 17, 1943
World War Two
Published 17 Dec 2022This war has now lasted as long as the Great War did, but there’s no signs of it slowing. The Soviets have three offensives going on on the Eastern Front, in Italy the Allies are attacking at San Pietro and over the Moro River, in the Pacific there are Allied landings on New Britain, but in Pacific Command, the big talk is all about a new super bomber.
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December 17, 2022
The RAF’s Worst Day of the War – War Against Humanity 091
World War Two
Published 15 Dec 2022The United Nations Allies has some success bombing the Nazi German Reich, but it comes at a heavy price. In the village Kalavryta in Greece, the Wehrmacht massacre hundreds of men and boys.
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December 14, 2022
The Polish Armed Forces in Exile
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2022The Polish state was the first to fall in this war, yet across the globe Polish soldiers are fighting on land, air, and sea as part of the United Nations alliance. The story of the tens of thousands of men and women fighting for Polish liberation is equal parts hope and hardship as they battle the enemy and even sometimes their own allies.
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December 13, 2022
Egypt’s postwar Nazi military advisors
In The Critic, James Barr reviews a book on the roles of former Nazi military and political figures in the Egyptian forces, Nazis on the Nile: The German Military Advisers in Egypt 1949-1967 by Vyvyan Kinross:
One of the paradoxes of the early postwar era is that, after Germany’s defeat, the Nazis were vilified at the same time that their expertise was sought after by both Cold War superpowers. Germans played key roles in both sides’ space programmes. Less infamous is the part they also went on to play in the Egyptian rocket programme, one of the subjects in this fascinating and disturbing book.
After suffering a humiliating defeat in the war that followed the establishment of Israel, the Egyptians wanted revenge. As the British had refused to help them — despite maintaining a deeply unpopular and large presence astride the Suez Canal — Egypt’s sybaritic King Farouq turned to his enemy’s enemy instead. In 1949 he commissioned an Afrika Korps general, Artur Schmitt, to review the Egyptian army.
Having checked in to a Cairo hotel under the name “Herr Goldstein”, Schmitt inspected Egyptian units and went on to Syria to survey Israel from the Golan Heights. The Egyptians’ failure to combine tanks, artillery and infantry effectively, he decided, explained their “inability to take advantage of the early stages of fighting to wipe the State of Israel off the map”.
Schmitt’s forthright conclusions were unwelcome, and he did not stay long. But some younger Egyptian army officers shared his views and, after they had overthrown Farouq in 1952, they picked up where the king had left off. Within days they offered Fritz Voss, the former head of the Skoda arms factory in Pilsen, the job of masterminding the retraining of the army and the establishment of a military industrial base that could produce jet aircraft and missiles.
Voss in turn invited old contacts to join him, including Wilhelm Beisner, an SS officer who had been part of Einsatzkommando Egypt, which would have spearheaded the Holocaust in Palestine had Rommel won at El Alamein. The Germans found Egyptian working conditions challenging. “Here one has to act much more slowly than in Prussia,” complained a German instructor who found “Oriental sloppiness” irritating. Of forty tanks lined up for a parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the coup, just twelve made it past the junta’s rostrum.
The author, Vyvyan Kinross, is a consultant by profession. He has advised Arab governments and clearly understands the fundamental problems. “The battle” for the Germans, he writes, “was always to reconcile finance, resourcing and the expertise required to execute a sophisticated manufacturing process with the challenging conditions and logistics that prevailed in a country that was late to industrialise and financially underpowered.”
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QotD: Postwar Germany
Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Specters Haunting Dresden”, City Journal, 2005-01.
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December 11, 2022
An Amphibious Landing to take Rome? – 224 – December 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Dec 2022There are plans afoot to hit the enemy from behind in Italy. Allied leaders are meeting again in Cairo to go over other plans, notably what to do about China and Burma. There is active fighting on two fronts in Italy too, though this week it doesn’t go particularly well for the Allies. Attacks in the USSR are unsuccessful for the Soviets, but do go well for the Germans, and there are Allied attacks by air in the Marshall Islands and over France.
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December 9, 2022
V-1: Hitler’s Deluded Revenge Plan – War Against Humanity 090
World War Two
Published 8 Dec 2022Japanese planes bomb Calcutta when it is still being crushed by the weight of the Bengali famine. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer are obsessively trying to increase war production so Germany can begin launching its vengeance weapon against Britain. The wars of resistance continue across the Balkans with continued brutality and a new resistance force emerges in Italy.
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December 8, 2022
Is the Luftwaffe Defeated in 1943? – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2022Outnumbered and outproduced, the once mighty Luftwaffe is battling to hold its own across three fronts. Every month brings new pain for the force. But the Luftwaffe still has a few tricks up its sleeves and can make the Allies bleed heavily. If only Hitler and the Nazi leadership weren’t sabotaging its chances …
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December 7, 2022
Pearl Harbor: Before and After December 7th
Geographics
Published 20 Sep 2022
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