World War Two
Published 27 Apr 2024The battle for the German capital rages on all week, as the Soviets get ever closer to the Reich Chancellery, under which lies Hitler’s bunker. Berlin is surrounded, but can it be relieved? There are also Allied advances in East Prussia, Czechoslovakia, and in Western Germany, but beyond that, it looks like the Axis lines have completely collapsed in Italy. The Allies are also advancing — and quickly — in Burma toward Rangoon, though not much at all on Okinawa, and it is the Japanese who are on the move in Western Hunan. It’s a real rollercoaster of a week.
Chapters
01:10 Recap
01:43 Soviets fight their way into Berlin
07:45 Berlin surrounded
10:28 Rokossovsky advances
12:48 Göring and Himmler betray Hitler
13:57 Fighting on the Eastern Front
15:23 Allied advance in the West
15:51 German collapse in Italy
17:31 4th Corps racing through Burma
19:36 The Battle of Western Hunan
21:40 Okinawa and the Philippines
22:59 Notes
23:59 Conclusion
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April 28, 2024
The Battle of Berlin! – WW2 – Week 296 – April 27, 1945
April 21, 2024
300,000 Germans Surrender in the Ruhr – WW2 – Week 295 – April 20, 1945
World War Two
Published 20 Apr 2024The Soviet drive on Berlin continues, but it is now very much a race between the forces of Georgy Zhukov and those of Ivan Konev. In the west, over 300,000 Germans surrender to the Allies as the Ruhr Pocket is eliminated, though there are advances by all Allied armies this week on the whole Western Front. There is even an Allied breakthrough in Italy, though on Okinawa American attacks get nowhere. The Japanese are advancing in China, and in Burma the Allied drive for Rangoon continues.
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April 19, 2024
The Führerbunker – Hitler’s Grave
World War Two
Published 18 Apr 2024The man who once conquered Europe, Adolf Hitler, now cowers underground in the Führerbunker as bombs and artillery rain down on the ruins of the Reich. Today Sparty gives you a tour of the damp and claustrophobic concrete maze that will soon become the dictator’s coffin.
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April 17, 2024
Soviet Berlin Offensive Begins – WW2 – Week 294B – April 16, 1945
World War Two
Published 16 Apr 2024The final Soviet assault on Berlin begins today. The Soviets have two million men supported by tens of thousands of guns, tanks, and aircraft. Opposite them stand millions of men and boys of the German Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth. The forces of Nazism are weakened and disorganised but determined to fight on as long as possible.
00:41 Roosevelt’s death
03:09 Preparations for the Soviet drive on Berlin
08:49 Zhukov’s Offensive
12:48 Konev’s Offensive
14:57 Summary & Conclusion
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February 4, 2024
Is the Red Army too fast for its own good? – WW2 – Week 284 – February 3, 1945
World War Two
Published 3 Feb 2024Soviet forces have reached the old German border in force, however, logistical issues and a strong enemy presence possibly threatening their flanks means that a drive on Berlin may not be doable just now. Heinrich Himmler is in charge of the new Army Group to defend the Reich, and he has a host of problems. On the Western Front, the Allies finally eliminated the Colmar Pocket, and in the Philippines, the American advance reaches Manila, and the battle for the city is about to begin.
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August 24, 2023
Life and Death at the heart of Nazism – On the Homefront 018
World War Two
Published 22 Aug 2023The Nazis love to spread the myth that they have transformed the German capital from a city of sin, unemployment, and Marxist street violence to the centre of a glorious new Reich. But the reality is that right now, Berliners are trapped between the Allied bombing and the Nazi regime’s tightening grip. And yet, the men and women of Berlin continue to support this war. For them, it’s a war of survival.
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July 21, 2023
The Führer Adolf Hitler is Dead!?
World War Two
Published 20 Jul 2023Stauffenberg, Olbricht and the plotters launch Operation Valkyrie. The army moves in to seize power, troops surround the government quarter in Berlin, and Joseph Goebbels is arrested. But things start going wrong pretty much immediately and far away in East Prussia the Nazi fightback begins.
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April 24, 2023
Even fighter pilots and gunners have love lives
In The Critic, John Sturgis reviews a new book by Luke Turner titled Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, which considers the myths and reality of wartime relationships during the Second World War:
Spitfire pilot Ian Gleed shot down five enemy aircraft in just a week in May 1940 — the fastest time in which this had ever been done, making him an official “ace” who would be quickly promoted to Wing Commander.
Gleed had become a poster boy for “the few”, the hero pilots of the Battle of Britain to whom so many would owe so much. He lived up to the popular image with his talk of “a bloody good show” and shooting down “damned Huns”, after which he’d sink a few warm beers and spend some “wizard” free time recuperating with his girlfriend Pam, whom he “loved now more than ever”.
Gleed’s luck finally ran out over Tunisia in April 1943 when his plane was hit by a German fighter and crashed into dunes. Gleed was killed. He was just 26.
It would only emerge decades later that much of the popular image he had cultivated simply wasn’t true. Gleed was gay. Pam was an imaginary character he had invented as a cover to keep his double life as a sexually active homosexual firmly secret.
Gleed’s story is one of many similar vignettes in this alternative history of the Second World War. Its author Luke Turner’s previous book was a memoir about his own grappling with issues around his identity as a bisexual. Here he takes up the question of how this would have played out for him and other sexual non-conformists in 1939–45.
Turner grew up obsessed with the war — everything from Airfix kits and Dad’s Army to Stalingrad and the Berlin bunker — and here he examines what it was to live through that period as a sexually active person of whatever hue. It proves a particularly rich subject matter as sex seems to have been everywhere in war time: everyone was sleeping with everyone else, apparently. It’s a perennial truth that you or I might be hit by a bus tomorrow — but make that bus a bomb, and suddenly this seems to create a sense of urgency which frequently manifests itself sexually, lending daily life what Turner calls “an aphrodisiac quality”. As Quentin Crisp put it when describing the shenanigans in blacked-out, Blitz London: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed.”
Whilst war may see an explosion of sex of all kinds, the establishment was not always comfortable with this. A Home Office report on public behaviour in London during the Blitz noted, “In several districts cases of blatant immorality in shelters are reported; this upsets other occupants of the shelters.”
One contemporary account suggests, “In wartime a uniform, whether of the Army, Navy or Air Force, to the average girl ranks as a fetish.” This had consequences in the field: Dear John letters from home could be a real problem in this regard. As an Army report in 1942 put it, morale is often damaged by “the suspicion, very frequently justified, of fickleness on behalf of wives and girls”.
Amongst all this sex was, of course, sex with Americans. Turner cites George Formby who captured this mood in the song “Our Fanny’s Gone All Yankee”: “She don’t wait for the dark when she wants to have a lark/In a bus or train she does her hanky panky.”
Then in a dark reversal of this two-nations-colliding-sexually motif, we get the horror of the Red Army’s organised rape of as many as 1.4 milllion German women during the Russian advance on Berlin, whose residents would later refer to the city’s grandiose monument to Soviet war dead as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”.
April 22, 2023
Hitler’s Revenge on the Italian People – War Against Humanity 101
World War Two
Published 21 Apr 2023As the RAF closes in on Berlin and the German Army is running dangerously low on men, the Nazi leadership is determined to use their resources to spread their crimes deeper into Hungary and Italy.
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December 2, 2022
Bombing Berlin with Ed Murrow of CBS – War Against Humanity 089
World War Two
Published 1 Dec 2022Ed Murrow accompanies the RAF on a bombing raid on Berlin, and files one of his most iconic broadcasts with CBS. In Teheran, Winston Churchill walks out on a dinner with Joseph Stalin, after the USSR Premiere suggests mass murdering German officers.
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November 27, 2022
The Costliest Day in US Marine History – WW2 – 222 – November 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 26 Nov 2022The Americans attack the Gilbert Islands this week, and though they successfully take Tarawa and Makin Atolls, it is VERY costly in lives, and show that the Japanese are not going to be defeated easily. They also have a naval battle in the Solomons. Fighting continues in the Soviet Union and Italy, and an Allied conference takes place in Cairo, a prelude for a major one in Teheran next week.
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November 25, 2022
The Secret Radio in Auschwitz – War Against Humanity 088
World War Two
Published 24 Nov 2022In Auschwitz the inmates gathering evidence of Nazi crimes score two successes, while the RAF score a direct hit on Goebbels as they set Berlin aflame. In the Pacific the accidental sinking of the SS Suez Maru triggers a Japanese war crime.
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September 5, 2022
Amon Göth: The Super Nazi – WAH 076 – September 4, 1943
World War Two
Published 4 Sep 2022While the Allies give up on the first Battle of Berlin, Amon Göth goes on a murderous rampage in the Tarnow Ghetto.
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September 2, 2022
Alliance For Peace (1951) North Atlantic Treaty Organization Promo Film
PeriscopeFilm
Published 14 May 202sProduced by NATO and the Signal Photographic Service of the U.S. Army, this black & white film is about the formation of NATO and its importance in the defense of the free world. Copyright 1951. The film features a score by William Alwyn. The film dates from the time when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was supreme commander of NATO (1950-52), a post he left in order to run for President of the United States.
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August 29, 2022
The Astonishing Nazi Underground Slave Factories – WAH 075 – August 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 Aug 2022While the RAF and USAAF continue to try to bomb Germany into submission, the German Nazis move their war production underground. In the process they create an underground slave camp that defies imagination.
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