Lesser Known Facts of WWII 1944, 1945
1944
MONASTERY BLUNDER
On February 15, 1944, US bombers dropped 427 tons of  bombs on the mountain top monastery of Monte Cassino in  Italy. The operation was planned by the US General Ira Eaker at the request of the  Allied ground forces, believing the monastery to be a German stronghold. Very few  enemy troops were there at the time but over 300 women and children from the town  of Cassino, who had fled the fighting and taken refuge in the monastery, were killed.  By the time that the Polish 12th Podolski Lancers, under General Anders, raised  their regimental flag on the ruins of Monte Cassino at 9.30am their casualty rates  were 3,779 killed or wounded. The flag was hastily sewn together from pieces of  a Red Cross flag and soldiers' handkerchiefs. The Monastery was rebuilt after the  war and reconsecrated by Pope Paul VI in 1964. (General Wladyslaw  Anders lies buried in the Polish Cemetery at Monte Cassino.)
The ruins of the Saint Benedict Monastery on Monte Cassino.
OPERATION ‘JERICHO’ (February 18, 1944)
Code name for the bombing of Amiens prison in northern  France. Precision-attacked by thirteen Mosquito aircraft, the bombs blasted a hole  3.5 metres wide in the high wall of the prison. Of the 717 inmates a total of 258  escaped. Sadly, 87 prisoners were killed and 182 were recaptured. Many were due  to be executed next day, mostly members of the French resistance, which was why  the daring attack had to be made exactly when and as it was.
The necessary repairs made to the prison wall can still clearly be seen today.
INCREDIBLE ESCAPES (1944)
On the night of 3/4 May, 1944, RAF Sgt.  Jack Worsfold, aged 19, was a tail-gunner on a Lancaster of 101 Squadron.  Its mission was the bombing of German tank concentrations in France prior to D-Day.  A total of 300 Lancasters took part and  Worsfolds plane was hit by flak and  set on fire. The plane then blew up killing the rest of the crew. The tail section,  with Worsfold inside, was seen by civilians on the ground to fall some 7,500 feet,  hit some high-tension wires then bounce on to a fir tree before hitting the ground  near the village of Aubeterre. Jack Worsfold crawled out with a broken thigh and  rib fractures. Captured by German soldiers he spent the rest of the war in prison  camps.
In a bombing raid against Stuttgart a Lancaster was hit by an 88 mm ack-ack shell  which tore through the fuel tank engulfing the fuselage in flaming petrol. The tail-gunner, RAF Sergeant N. Alkamade reached for his parachute only to find  it a mass of flames. He had no other option but to jump and threw himself into the  night at 18,000 feet. The next thing he remembered was opening his eyes to find  himself lying in deep snow in a pine forest. Looking up he noticed broken branches  on the trees that had reduced his speed, the snow did the rest. Soon he was taken  prisoner by the locals who refused to believe his story. An investigation was carried  out and he was released. When he eventually arrived home he carried in his pocket  a certificate signed by a German colonel attesting to the fact that he had fallen  three and a half miles without a parachute.
FIRST GERMAN GENERAL EXECUTED March 22/23, 1944
The first German General executed to be executed  after the war was General der Infanterie Anton Dostler. On  during a small scale operation behind enemy lines in northern Italy, a  group of 15 Italian-Americans of the US 2677th Headquarters Company were on a mission  to blow up an important railway tunnel but were captured and taken prisoner before  the mission (Operation 'Ginny') was completed. They were summarily shot on the instructions  of 55 year old General Dostler who had simply passed on the order from higher authority  (Hitler's Fï¿½frerbefehl of October 18, 1942) which stated that all enemy encountered  in Commando actions were to be executed. The plea of "following superior orders" did not save Dostler from the firing squad. After a five day trial he was found  guilty of a War Crime and sentenced to death. On November 27, 1944, the Mediterranean  Theatre Commander, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgeway, confirmed the sentence.  At 8 a.m. on the morning of December 1, 1944, General Dostler was tied to a stake  on the firing range of the 803rd Military Police Battalion located near Aversa,  Italy. A black hood was placed over his head, a white marker pinned to his chest  and the order to fire was given to the 12 enlisted men of the US Army who composed  the firing squad. (General Anton Dostler lies buried in the German  War Cemetery at Pomezia some miles south of Rome.)
General Dostler receives the Last Sacrament.
HUNGARIAN JEWS
After Hitler's armies occupied Hungary on March 27, 1944, (Operation Margarethe) its government actively supported  the Nazis in the deportation of its Jews. Up till 1944, the Hungarian Regent, Admiral  Horthy, had steadfastly refused Hitler's offer to resettle the Hungarian Jews. But  after the occupation, and after Eichmann and his SS units moved in, the deportations  began on May 15, 1944, the first train reaching Auschwitz on the 17th. The pro-German  Government co-operated by ordering its policemen to escort their deportees to Auschwitz.  When their uniforms were seen by the Hungarian prisoners already in the camp, scenes  of "unbelievable jubilation were witnessed as the prisoners ran to the wire cheering  and sobbing in the belief that their policemen had come to rescue them." Around  365,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to their deaths after the occupation of  their country. The majority of women and children were murdered within hours of  their arrival. Fit and healthy men were spared for a while for slave labour. Over  300,000 were still in Hungary awaiting their doom. This included just over 70,000  in the Budapest ghetto (fortunately all these survived the war). French Vichy police  also collaborated in the rounding up of Jews. Starting on August 27, 1942, they  arrested 9,872 Jews in Vichy-controlled Lyon and transported them to Drancy, near  Paris, prior to deportation to Auschwitz.
In an effort to negotiate with the Allies the SS offered to exchange Jews for  1,000 trucks. This offer was rejected and as a gesture of good faith the SS allowed  a train, containing 1,684 Hungarian Jews to leave Budapest for the safety of Switzerland.  The train eventually ended up at the Belsen Concentration Camp near Hanover. There,  the Jews were kept for about six months before being allowed to proceed to Switzerland.  This must be the only recorded case where the SS actually saved Jews.
(Between 1933 and 1938 a total of 453,721 Jewish refugees from  Europe were settled in 27 different countries. The Jewish population of Europe in  1939 was 7,870,700.)
LITTLE BROTHER
Although not generally known, Albert Gï¿½ring, the younger brother of Reich Marshal  Hermann Gï¿½ring, was an outspoken anti-Nazi. Arrested several times by the Gestapo,  each time being released by the intervention of the Reich Marshal. Albert was born  near Mauterndorf in 1900 and became a successful businessman and in later life the  Export Director at the Skoda Armament Works in Czechoslovakia. During his work there  he helped many Jews escape the horrors of the Holocaust by forging his brother's  signature on their travel documents. The Jewish wife of composer Franz Lehar was  one of those helped by Albert. Returning to Germany after the war he was everywhere  shunned just because of his name. Living on a government pension he married his  housekeeper as a sign of gratitude so she could receive his pension after he died.  One week later, in 1966, he died,
SWISS NEUTRALITY
On a bombing raid on German military installations near the German/Swiss border  on April 1, 1944, a force of 23 B-24 bombers from the USAF  392nd Bombardment Group, on its 59th mission, inadvertently entered Swiss air-space  and owing to a navigational error mistakenly bombed the Swiss town of Schaffhausen. Fifty Swiss civilians were killed. The real target was to  have been the chemical works at Ludwigshafen, 120 miles away. In 1949, the US agreed  to pay $64 million in compensation. This was an attempt to secure Switzerland as  an ally in the 'Cold War'. The greedy Swiss demanded that interest be paid on the  $64 million, claiming that the damaged property had not been able to earn any money  since the bombing. This demand was rejected.
The British Royal Air Force also flouted Swiss neutrality a couple of times and  attempted to bomb a ball-bearing factory in Basel suspected of producing ball bearings  for the German Army but both times the bombs missed the target. During the war a  total of 167 American bombers and 12 British bombers made emergency landings in  Switzerland. Severely damaged in combat over Germany and unable to return to their  bases in England their only alternative was to head for neutral Switzerland. In  one day, on March 18, 1944, no less than eleven American bombers made emergency  landings at the Dubendorf airfield. The crews were interned by the Swiss authorities  in camps at Adelboden, Grippen, Les Diablerets and in the notorious punishment camp  at Wauwilermoos (for escapees). They were supposed to be treated like P.O.W.s under  the rules of war but in many cases living conditions were little better than German  concentration camps.
In all, around 1,500 American servicemen were interned in neutral  Switzerland.
HIGHEST NIGHT PHOTO
The highest night photograph of the war was taken on April 18,  1944, over Osnabruck. The RAF Mosquito crew used a target indicator flash  and took the picture from 36,000 feet.
An RAF Mosquito, the most versatile plane of WWII, flying at great altitude.
AIR TRAGEDY
An old B24 Liberator bomber, stripped of all equipment and fitted with a radio  control system to be operated from a 'mother' plane after the B24 crew had baled  out, blew up in mid-air during a trial flight in preparation for 'Operation Aphrodite' the code name for the bombing of the flying bomb sites on the Continent. An electrical  malfunction triggered the explosion killing the pilot and co-pilot. The pilot was Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy, the older brother of John F Kennedy  the future President of the USA.
INACCURATE BOMBING
December 6, 1942.  Operation 'Oyster' The RAF daylight bombing raid on the Philips  Radio Works at Eindoven, Holland,  now under Nazi control. Fourteen planes were lost but sadly 148 Dutch civilians  lost their lives. 
March 13, 1944. In a raid on Le Mans, France, by RAF Bomber Command, some of the bombs  were dropped short of the mark, killing some 100 civilians. Fifteen locomotives  and around 800 railway freight cars were destroyed. The killing of innocent civilians  during raids on specific targets became an increasingly severe problem for bomber  crews.
April 9/10, 1944. The attack by 186 RAF bombers on the  rail yards at Lille-Deliverance, France, killed 456 civilians  and destroyed over a thousand homes. At the rail yards around 2,000 freight cars  were destroyed.
April 10/11, 1944. One hundred and twenty-two Royal Canadian  Air force Halifax's dropped 600 tons of bombs on the Merelbeke-Melle rail yards  at Ghent, Belgium. Unfortunately, the rail yards being located  in a built-up area, 438 Belgian civilians were killed.
April 19/20, 1944. Around 200 bombers, mostly Canadian  Halifaxes from 46 Group, attacked the rail yards at Noisy-le-sec near Paris. Many bombs fell on a built-up area of the town destroying over 700 houses  and killing 464 civilians. Some 370 were injured.
March 3, 1945.  Over 500 inhabitants of the suburb  of Bezuidenhout, a suburb of The Hague, Holland, were killed  when Allied bombers missed their intended target, the V-2 launching sites in the  Hague Forest, and dropped their bombs on Bezuidenhout.
vital officers: BIGOTS
As D-day approached a special security procedure was put in place to protect  all documents concerning the time and place of the invasion (D-Day). It was the  highest security classification of all. General Eisenhower had ordered that no one  with any knowledge of D-Day be sent on operations where there was the slightest  danger of being captured. Those with such information were called 'Bigots'.  The word is derived from the two words 'To Gib' which was  stamped on papers and baggage of all officers being sent to Gibraltar prior the invasion of North Africa in November, 1942. The letters were reversed  to form the code-word 'Bigot' and used to list all persons with the secret information  about D-Day. During 'Operation Tiger' ten officers were known to be Bigots. Top  priority was given to find and identify the bodies. Fortunately all bodies were  recovered and the secrets of D-Day were safe.
JEDBURGHS
The code name given to the teams of specially trained men who were parachuted  into France before and after D-Day. Their mission was to link up and co-ordinate  the resistance groups in sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the German occupying  forces prior to and during the Normandy invasion. Men were selected from the British  SOE, the American OSS and the Free French, Belgian and Dutch armies. The name Jedburgh  comes from the southern Scottish town of Jedburgh where most members did their initial  training before moving on to Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, England. In all, around  280 'Jeds' were formed into teams of three men, one British, one American and one  French. After a punishing period of physical training they were dropped behind enemy  lines from planes of 38 Group squadrons to begin work with the Maquis. (The story of the Jedburghs only became public after records became  de-classified in 1985.)
 DISASTER DURING 'OPERATION TIGER' (April 23-30, 1944)
In preparation for the D-Day landings on Utah beach, the US Forces were conducting  a series of exercises on a stretch of beach called Slapton Sands,  near Plymouth. In an area comprising around 30,000 acres a total of 3,000 people  (750 families) 180 farms with livestock were evacuated. This enormous task had to  be completed in six weeks.
During the actual exercise, while manoeuvring for position in Lyme Bay on the night of April 27 the landing ships were  attacked by nine German motor torpedo boats, E-boats, from Cherbourg in France.  Two of the landing craft, LST 507 and LST  531 were sunk and others damaged. On board the two landing ships the casualties  were severe, 638 men killed (197 sailors and 441 soldiers) and hundreds injured.  This was more than ten times greater than the casualties sustained in the real assault  on Utah Beach on June 6 (43 Americans killed, 63 wounded). Altogether,  including casualties from other ships and those killed by friendly fire on shore,  a total of 946 Americans gave their lives during Operation Tiger.
CARELESS TALK
In spite of all precautions taken to protect the secrets of D-day, some officers  still engaged in 'Careless Talk'. One such case was that  of US Major General Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the US 9th Air Force,  who, during a cocktail party at London's elegant Coleridge's Hotel, talked freely  about the difficulties he was having in obtaining supplies. He added that things  would ease after D-day declaring that would be before June 15. (When Eisenhower learned of this indiscretion he ordered that Miller be reduced  to the rank of colonel and sent back to the US where shortly after, he retired from  the service.)
MILLION-TO-ONE
Around midnight on June 5, 1944, Private C. Hillman, of Manchester, Connecticut,  serving with the US 101st Airborne Division, was winging his way to Normandy in  a C-47 transport plane. Just before the jump, Private Hillman carried out a final  inspection of his parachute. He was surprised to see that the chute had been packed  by the Pioneer Parachute Company of Connecticut where his mother worked part time  as an inspector. He was further surprised when he saw on the inspection tag, the initials of his own mother!
D-DAY
D-Day stands for Designated Day, the actual day on which an operation would begin.  H-Hour, the starting time for the attack to begin. This expression was first used  on September 20, 1918, during World War I. The US First Army issued Field Order  No 8 which read, "The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day  with the object of forcing the evacuation of the St. Michael Salient."  After  the landings on June 6, 1944, many believed that the D stood for 'Deliverance.'
On June 28, 1943, a conference code named 'Rattle' was held in a hotel in Largs,  Scotland. It was attended by around 20 Generals, 11 Air Marshals, 8 Admirals, 15  high ranking Americans and 5 equally high ranking Canadians. Presided over by Admiral  Lord Louis Mountbatten. It was at this conference that the uppermost  question of where the Allied armies would land in Europe, was settled.
D-DAY LANDINGS (June 6, 1944)
Utah Beach - 23,250 American troops were landed. US 1st Army and 5th and   7th US Corps.
Omaha Beach - 34,250 American troops were landed. 29th and 1st US Div.
Gold Beach - 24,970 British troops were landed. 50th Division, British 2nd   Army.
Juno Beach - 21,400 Canadian troops were landed. 3rd Canadian Div.
Sword Beach - 28,845 British troops were landed. 3rd British Div.
By June 12, 326,000 troops were on the beaches, plus 54,000 vehicles. By July  2, another 929,000 men and 177,000 vehicles were put ashore. The ship armada at  Normandy totalled 6,939 vessels of all kinds. In the 10 days after D-day (June 6  to June 16) a total of 5,287 Allied soldiers were killed. The number of French civilians  killed during the landings has never been established but must number in the hundreds.  From D-Day till the end of the war, British casualties were 30,280  dead and 96,670 wounded.
The only American General to land with the initial seaborne  assault at Utah Beach was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr, assistant commander  of the US 4th Division. At age 57 he was also the oldest soldier to come ashore.  Sadly he died in France a month later of a heart attack.
The German surrender was signed 337 days after the D-Day landings.
PIGEONS AT WAR
Thousands of carrier pigeons accompanied the troops to Normandy on D-day and  brought back essential details to Allied Headquarters in a capsule tied to their  legs. A special loft was erected at the secret code deciphering centre at Bletchley  Park. Considered vermin by many, these pigeons, were first used as early as  the year 1150 AD and played an important part in both world wars. News of Wellington's  victory at Waterloo first came by pigeon post. Many of these birds were specially  bred in Belgium prior to 1939. Often used as a distress signal from downed aircraft,  a pigeon named 'Winkie' escaped from  a bomber after coming down in the English  Channel in 1943. It flew back 120 miles to its base at RAF Leuchers in Scotland  in time for rescue boats to reach and save the crew of the stricken bomber. Winkie  was awarded the Dickin Medal (the animal version of the Victoria Cross) the first  pigeon to be awarded with the medallion. Many of these pigeons were dropped by specially  designed parachutes to be picked up by members of the French resistance. They were  soon on their way back to Britain with Important information. At this time the Germans  were training Falcons to intercept the pigeons while in flight and many were killed  this way. In all, thirty-two animal VCs were awarded to pigeons during WWII. Founded  by Maria Dickin in 1943, the Dickin Medal was awarded to any animal, bird or dog,  displaying conspicuous gallantry during war. Other Pigeons so awarded were, to use  their code names, William of Orange, the hero of Arnhem, Mary of Exeter, Duke of Normandy and Paddy, to name but a few. Managed by the elite division  MI-14, the office in charge of Pigeon operations, these pigeons were responsible  for the saving of thousands of military lives.
The city of Colvi in Italy was occupied by British troops  on October 18, 1943, at 10am, well ahead of schedule. The US Air Force was to bomb  the city an hour later to help the British entry. Attempts by radio to cancel the  raid failed. A pigeon, GI Joe, borrowed from the Americans  at the nearby airfield to accompany the troops, was released with the important  message to cancel the raid, tied to it's leg. It arrived just as the bombers were  about to take off. It is estimated that around a thousand British soldiers could  have died if the raid had proceeded. GI Joe was the only  bird or animal in America to receive the Dickin Medal. It died on June 3, 1961,  aged 18, and  can be seen today, mounted, in the Historical Centre at Fort  Monmonth, New Jersey.
WRONG AIRFIELD CHOICE
On June 21,1944, a large force of Allied bombers attacked  the German capital, Berlin. Included in the force were 184 American planes which,  after they had dropped their bombs, decided to continue on to Poltava,  the US shuttle base in the Soviet Union. Later that night the airfield was attacked  by German fighters inflicting heavy damage. A total of 47 B-17s were destroyed and  19 severely damaged. On September 13, these shuttle bases were closed as the advances  of the Red Army placed them too far from the front.
FIRST USE OF NAPALM
First used on July 17, 1944, when US P-38s attacked a  fuel depot at Coutances, near St Lo. The next use of napalm was on April 15, 1945,  when American bombers attacked the Atlantic coast town of Royan at the mouth of  the Gironde. In the Pacific, napalm was used when US forces invaded the island of  Tinian in the Marianas. It was also used in the bombing of Tokyo. This jellied fuel became the standard fuel explosive, later used  widely - and notoriously - during the Vietnam War.
Gï¿½RING'S VERMEER
In 1944, Hermann Gï¿½ring paid ï¿½165,000 for the painting 'Woman  Taken in Adultery' by the rarest of all Dutch painters, Vermeer. The painting  was found in Emma Gï¿½ring's home in Austria. It was later proved to be a forgery  by Hans Van Meegeren. In 1945, Van Meegeren was arrested by Dutch authorities and  sentenced to one year in jail. He died just nineteen days after his jail sentence  began. Today, Gï¿½ring's fake Vermeer is hidden away in the strong  room of the Dutch State Collection in the Hague, never to be shown to the public  or sold.
FIRST D-DAY CASUALTIES
It has been generally accepted that Lieutenant  Den Brotheridge of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment,  British 6th Airborne Division, became the first British soldier  to be killed in the invasion of Europe (D-Day, June 6, 1944) While he led his platoon of twenty-one men on the attack on the Orne Canal bridge  at Benouville, he was hit in the neck by a bullet fired from the guns of the German  sentries defending the Pegasus Bridge. Seconds before, a burst of fire from Brotheridge's  Sten-gun killed one of the sentries, seventeen year old Private  Helmut Romer, who became the first German to die in the  defence of Hitler's 'Fortress Europe'.
It has since been discovered that when Lieutenant Brotheridges's  glider landed near the bridge, 29 year old Lance Corporal Fred  Greehalgh of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, drowned  when exiting the glider. This would make him the first D-Day casualty. Just months  before the 50th anniversary of the landings, the Pegasus Bridge was demolished and  part of it was rebuilt and placed in the  nearby  Pegasus Bridge Museum  where visitors can now walk walk over it. 
Meanwhile, over the town of Sainte-Mare-Eglise, the first town liberated  on D-Day, twenty eight year old Lt. Robert Mason Mathias of the 508th Parachute Regiment, US 82nd Airborne Division, was preparing to jump  from his C-47 Dakota, when he was wounded by a shell burst. In spite of the wounds  in his chest he commanded his men to 'Follow me' and hurled himself from the aircraft.  Some time later, his men found his dead body, still strapped in his chute. Lt. Mathias  was the first American soldier killed on D-day. Also at  Sainte Mare-Eglise, Private John Steele found himself hanging  from his parachute from the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  After some hours he was rescued by one of the German defenders, a Rudolf May.
US CHUTE'S DEADLY DELAY
The 957 men of the US 82nd Airborne Division suffered a 16% casualty rate on  landing among the Normandy hedgerows. Twenty five men were killed, fourteen missing  and 118 wounded. Everything depended on a quick dispersal after landing and to get  to the nearest cover. The delay caused by the difficulty of getting out of their  chute harness proved fatal to many.In later drops, the buckles  were dispensed with and the British quick-release mechanism was adopted.
AIR-POWER JOKE
The failure of the German Luftwaffe to appear over the D-day beaches caused the  Wehrmacht soldiers to quip "if a plane in the sky is silver, it's  American, if it's blue, it's British, if it's invisible, it's ours!"
THE TRAGEDY OF VERCORS
The Vercors Massif is a limestone plateau surrounded  by many cliffs, ridges and valleys, its highest point being the 2,346 metre high  Grand Veymont. Situated not far from Grenoble in central France it became the scene  of the greatest and most tragic battles involving thousands of men of the French  resistance. Just after D-day these men had rallied to Vercors to assist the Allies  by slowing down the German forces on their way to Normandy. Completely surrounded  by the enemy (estimated at 10,000 under the command of General Karl Pflaum) these  brave resistance fighters hoisted high the French Tricolour, to be clearly seen  from the German headquarters at Grenoble, and proclaimed the plateau the Free Republic of Vercors - the first democratic area of France since the  start of the German occupation in 1940. On July 22/23, 1944, about twenty enemy  gliders landed and out poured some 500 SS soldiers who began shooting everyone in  sight and raping all females regardless of age. Houses were set on fire with whole  families inside. Ground troops then attacked the town of St Nizer and by nightfall  some ninety-three houses were smouldering ruins. The air support promised from Algiers  never arrived. In the town about forty wounded maquisards were captured, all proudly  wearing an armband with the letters FFI (Forces Francaises de Interieur) then tortured  and shot. The men of Vercors fought heroically to the bitter end when on August  18 the last of the German troops pulled out of Vercors when the Allied landings  began in the south of France. Some 840 people had been killed on Vercors (639 FFI  and 201 civilians) since the first day of the German assault. On August 13, the  first American tanks rumbled through the crowded streets of Grenoble. (The whole sad epic of Vercors is detailed in the book 'Tears of  Glory' by Michael Pearson.)
G.I. RAPIST HANGED
The first Allied soldier to be hanged after D-Day was Private  Clarence Whitfield, a black US soldier of the 494th Port Battalion. He was  convicted of the brutal rape of Aniela Skrzyniarz, a Polish farm girl working on  a farm at Vierville Sur Mer, just behind Omaha Beach, on  June 14, 1944. On August 14, Private Whitfield was hanged on a  gallows that was erected in the garden of the Chateau at Canisy, five kilometres  south of Saint Lo.
GRIM REPLY
General Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, when ordered  by Field Marshal Von Kluge to hold the line at all costs, replied angrily "out in front every one is holding out. Every one. My grenadiers  and my engineers and my tank crews, they are all holding their ground. Not a single  man is leaving his post. They are lying silent in their foxholes, for they are all  DEAD."
SURRENDER OF US TROOPS
During the Ardennes Offensive (aka The Battle of the  Bulge) troops of the US 106th Infantry Regiment suffered 564 killed and 1,246 wounded  before being taken prisoner. Around 7,000 men fighting on the pine covered hills  of the Schnee Eifel were forced to surrender. This was the biggest  surrender of American troops since the American civil war. The Battle of the Bulge  delayed the Allied offensive by six weeks.
JAPANESE MASS SUICIDE
On July 8, 1944, American troops were stunned by the discovery of some 8,000 Japanese troops and civilians who had committed mass suicide in the final battle during the invasion of the island of Saipan in the Pacific. Pushed back into Marpi Point at the northern tip of the island,  they were told by the Japanese commander, Lt. General Saito, that they would be "tortured and killed by the Americans." Hundreds of women  then threw their children over the cliffs before jumping themselves. Thousands of  bodies were found floating in the pounding surf, and thousands more piled up on  the jagged rocks. Lt. General Saito committed ritual suicide (hara-kiri) his body  was then burned by his aides. His ashes, when found by the Americans,  were given a military funeral.
CASUALTIES IN ITALY
Allied losses in Italy amounted to 31,886 killed, 19,471 of them were Americans.  US losses for Italy and Sicily (1,233) combined were 36,169 dead. British and Commonwealth  casualties in the 39 day Sicilian campaign were 2,721 men killed.
FREE FROM COMMUNISM
As Hitler's armies advanced on Stalingrad they overran the Cossack regions of  the Don, Terek and Kuban. Hundreds of thousands of Russians willingly enrolled in  the German army to form a Cossack Army under the Russian General Krasnoff. Hitler  promised that they would be settled in "lands and everything necessary  for their livelihood in Western Europe". Their new homeland was to be in  north-east Italy in the valley of Carnia on the plain of Undine where they would  live their national life free from the confines of Bolshevism.
Italian families in the area were ejected from their homes which were then used  to house the Cossack soldiers and their families who had arrived in fifty trains  during July and August 1944. To the Cossacks this was paradise far removed from  their dreary life in the Ukraine. Hitler had named this new independent state 'Kosakenland'.  Many atrocities were committed by these Russians against the Italian civilians,  particularly the women, causing one Archbishop to write to Mussolini "It is terrible to think that Friuli will be governed by these  illiterate savages". Discipline was soon restored when General Krasnoff himself  arrived. Cossack officers were under no delusions, they knew they were there to  shed blood for the Nazi cause. With the Allied armies approaching from the south  and Tito's IX Yugoslav Corps approaching from the east, the 'Free  Republic of Carnia' soon disintegrated and the Cossacks and their followers  forced to trundle north towards Austria and internment by the British.
USAF ACCIDENTAL DEATHS DISCLOSURE
On October 4, 1944, the US War Department discloses that a total of 11,000 men  of the US Air Force have been killed in 5,600 fatal air accidents since the attack  on Pearl Harbor.
V WEAPONS HIT LONDON
The V1 weapons were Argus As 014 pulse-jet powered, not rocket. The first attack on Britain started on the night of 13 / 14  June, 1944, and ended on March 29, 1945. A total of 10,500 missiles were launched  and 3,957 were destroyed by defences, 3,531 reached England and 2,353 fell on London. The death toll from these missiles was 6,184 killed  and 17,981 persons were seriously injured. The last of the V1s (Doodlebug) was destroyed  over Sittingbourne in Kent on March 27, 1945.
The V2 rocket attack saw a total of 1,115 rockets arrive  over England of which 517 fell on London, killing 2,754 people, 6,523 were injured.  The V2 rocket attack lasted seven months starting on September 8, 1944, the first  destroyed the home of Mr and Mrs Clarke at No 1, Staveley Road, London. On November  25th, 164 people were killed when another V2 rocket hit the Woolworth's store in  South London. The last V2 rocket to fall on England fell at 4.45pm on March 29,  1945, on the town of Orpington in Kent. Hitler had planned to destroy the whole  of Britain with V-weapons. In charge of the entire missile project was Dr Hans Kammler, later promoted to SS Major General.  On September 8, 1944, at 6.48 pm, the first of Kammler's V2s exploded on London.  In the closing days of the war, a search for Dr Kammler was launched but he was  never found. To this day, he remains perhaps, the only German general  to have disappeared without trace.
LONDON AUXILIARY AMBULANCE SERVICE.
During the bombing of London in 1940-41 and the later attacks by V1s and V2s  in 1944-45, the men and women of the LAAS, another neglected  branch of war-time services, worked 12 hour shifts for a wage of around ï¿½2 per week.  Driving an ambulance through London's blacked-out streets with bombs falling all  around called for courage of the highest order. To recover the dead and dying, some  with appalling injuries, and transporting them to hospitals or First-Aid Stations  was no mean feat. Dismembered bodies, bundled into body bags, were taken to the  largest refrigeration system in London, the Billingsgate Fish Market, there to await  some form of identification. Land mines, dropped by parachutes, were another hazard.  One ambulance unit, when entering the Thermionic Club, a gentleman's club in Portland  Place, just after a mine exploded, found several headless gentlemen still sitting  in their armchairs, their heads having been blown off by the blast. There were 139  Auxiliary Stations in and around London employing some 1,200 full-time and 883 part-time  personnel, the majority being female. Others were men too old or sick for military  service and also quite a few conscientious objectors. For their courage and devotion  to duty, three members of the LAAS were awarded the George Cross and nine were awarded  the British Empire Medal.
V WEAPONS HIT ANTWERP
The city to suffer most from Hitler's vengeance weapons (the V1s and V2s) was  the Belgian port of Antwerp. After four years of German occupation the city was  now to suffer the agonies that London had endured, only this time much worse. The  first V2 rocket struck the city at 9.45am on Friday. October 13, 1944, killing 32  people. On October 28, a V1 killed 71 persons and destroyed forty homes. On November  27, a V2 impacted on Teniers Square as an Allied military convoy was passing through. The explosion killed 157 persons including 29 Allied soldiers.
The worst disaster of all was on December 12, 1944, when a V2  rocket hit the REX CINEMA in Antwerp killing 492 people,  mostly British troops. Another 500 were injured. Over a period of 175 days and nights  a total of 106 V1s and 107 V2s hit the city killing 3,752 civilians and 731 Allied  soldiers. Some 3,613 properties were destroyed.
COINCIDENCE
On July 20, 1944, a flight of Heinkel 177s, commanded by Obstlt. Horst von Riesen,  was circling the Masury Lakes near Hitler's HQ in East Prussia, when the engine  of one plane caught fire. An order to jettison the bomb load was given. By pure  coincidence the bombs exploded at exactly the same time as Stauffenberg's bomb went off in the Fï¿½hrer's conference room. On landing, Von  Riesen was arrested and faced a court martial but was released some hours later  when the bomb plot was confirmed.
GAY GORDON'S BATTALION LOSSES
During the eleven month campaign, from Normandy to the Baltic, Scotland's 51st  Highland Division's battalion the Gay Gordon's had suffered  986 casualties among its ranks. On top of this, seventy five officers had been killed  or wounded. This amounts to almost a complete turn round of the famous battalion.
UPRISING IN WARSAW
A rebellion against the Nazi occupiers of Poland's capital city started on August  1, 1944. The Polish underground army (AK, Home Army) started the operation to liberate  the city from the invaders and enable them to act as hosts to the approaching Red  Amy. The operation which was to last an incredible 63 days and cost the AK around  6,000 lives with some 50,000 wounded. The Red Army stopped its offensive just miles  outside the city just to let the Poles and Germans fight it out amongst themselves  hoping no doubt that the Germans would annihilate the anti-communist Polish Home  Army, thus saving the lives of many Russian soldiers.  The AK, under the direction  of Polish General 'Bor', Komorowski was forced to capitulate on October 2.  He was interened in Colditz Castle as a POW .
COWRA BREAKOUT (August 5, 1944)
The greatest prison break in history took  place from the Prisoner of War camp No. 12 at Cowra situated  in the Lachlan Valley in New South Wales, Australia. The compound contained Japanese  and Italian P.O.W.s. On the night of 4/5th August, 1,104 Japanese prisoners broke  out of Compound B believing that dying while attempting to escape would wipe out  the shame of capture. In the wholesale indiscriminate shooting that took place during  the breakout, 231 Japanese prisoners were killed and 107 wounded. Only four Australian  camp guards were killed and four wounded. Eighteen of the twenty-odd huts were set  on fire in which 20 prisoners had already committed suicide. In all, 334 Japanese  escaped from the camp and in the hunt that followed, 25 died by shooting and suicide.  All those recaptured were punished with up to twenty-eight days solitary in the  Old Melbourne Gaol.
Fearing reprisals against Australian P.O.W.s in Japanese prison camps, the whole  incident was kept top secret for over six years. The Japanese Cemetery at Cowra  contains the graves of 522 Japanese nationals who died in Australia during World  War II. A similar incident happened at the Japanese P.O.W. camp at Featherstone,  New Zealand, when during a stand off between prisoners and guards, the prisoners  rushed the guards, who opened fire with machine guns killing 48 Japanese and wounding  74 more.
The Cowra Breakout was alarming news to wartime Australians.
DUKLA PASS BATTLE (September 8/October  25, 1944)
The Dukla Pass cuts through the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Slovakia  and Poland. Five days after the Slovak National Uprising began (a rebellion against  the German occupation of their country) Soviet troops attacked the area around the  Polish town of Dukla in an effort to break through and link up with the 5,000 members  of the Slovak insurgents and together overthrow the pro-German government and expel  the Nazi troops from the territory. The 50 day battle, in terms of casualties, became  the bloodiest ever fought on Slovakian soil. It is also perhaps the least known  of all battles fought in Europe during World War II. The Soviet 38th Army had 10,491  men killed and 64,743 wounded. In the 1st Guards Army another 10,500 men were killed  and 24,200 wounded. Casualties among Slovak soldiers were 1,100 killed and 4,330  wounded. On the German side an estimated 52,000 men were killed, wounded or missing.  Clearing the area of mines continued up 1960 during which 78 Army engineers and  289 civilians lost their lives. Soviet troops took a total of 31,360 prisoners.  Today the battle area, covering 20 square kilometres, is an open-air battlefield  museum in which dozens of T-34 tanks and various artillery pieces are strewn all  over the area. A look-out tower has been built giving visitors a panoramic view  of the whole battlefield.
OPERATION ‘ASTONIA’ (September 10-12,  1944)
Code name for the attack and capture of the French port of Le  Havre. The ports of Dieppe and Ostend had been captured by the Canadian First  Army but Le Havre was assigned to the British 1 Corps under Canadian command. Prior  to the actual attack the town was subjected to a massive co-ordinated bombardment  by British naval guns and RAF bombers leaving 80 per cent of the town in ruins.  The attack on Le Havre took the lives of 5,126 civilians including 2,053 civilians  killed during the bombardment. This in spite of a request by the German commander,  Oberst Eberhard Wildermuth, to be given a two-day armistice to evacuate the residents  from the besieged city. He had earlier rejected the British demand of unconditional  surrender. The attack on Le Havre lasted 48 hours in which 11,302 German soldiers  were captured and around 600 killed. British losses were less than 500. After VE-Day  an estimated 3,675,000 American troops had passed through the port on their way  home.
TUNNEL TRAGEDY
A freight train carrying hundreds of civilians, who had jumped on board because  no other transport was available, stalled in a tunnel near Salerno,  Italy, on December18, 1944. Toxic fumes from the engine filled the tunnel and within  a short time a total of 426 people died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
AIR CRASH
A US 8th Army Air Force B-24 Liberator bomber crashes into the Holy Trinity School  in Lytham Road in Freckelton, Lancashire, on August 23,  1944, killing 38 children. Twenty-three others, including teachers, civilians and  the three man bomber crew, also died. This was the worst aircraft crash in Britain  during the war. The bomber, from the American Base Air Depot No. 2 at nearby Warton,  was on a test flight when the pilot received a radio signal to land immediately  as an electrical storm was heading their way. The B-24 never made it back to base  but at 10.30 am crashed in heavy rain into the village school. The village centre  was turned into a sea of flames as nearly 3,000 gallons of aviation fuel ignited.
COPY CAT
In 1944, three of the most advanced strategic bombers to date, the B29 Superfortress, made a forced landing on Soviet territory  after a raid on Japan. Stalin ordered that they be impounded. Two were dismantled  completely and rebuilt in every last detail. The Soviet version  made its first appearance after the war as the Tupolev TU-4.
HORSES
Horses have played a significant role in warfare since the 19th century BC when  they were used in Chariot warfare. The last major use of these animals was in Poland  when the Polish cavalry used them in a last-ditch attempt to defend their country  against enemy tanks. The total number of horses captured by the Allies in France,  Belgium and Holland amounted to 10,794. These animals were all disposed of to farmers,  except those used for work at the Antwerp docks. In the German army a key element  in the field of transport was horses. Non-motorized infantry divisions were allotted  4,800 horses. When the war began the German ground forces had well over half a million  of these animals and at war's end a total of 2,700,000 horses had served in the  war. This was twice the number used by Germany in the Great War of 1914-1918.
JEEP
Nearly 649,000 of these vehicles were produced during WWII, 631,873 were delivered  to the US Army and Air Force. Mostly used to support the Allied armed forces in  war. In 1939 the US Military asked 135 companies to submit designs for an all-purpose  vehicle. Only three companies responded to the request, Willys, Ford and Bantam.  Willys-Overland was granted the manufacturing contract. The word 'Jeep' comes from  the code letters GP the G meaning Government and the P a code letter meaning '80  inch wheelbase reconnaissance car' the name given to the Ford prototype and adopted  by Willys as their trade mark. When slurred together the letters GP sounds like 'Jeep'. Peak production at the Willys-Overland plant in Toledo,  Ohio, was one Jeep every 80 seconds.
VOLKSWAGEN
The 'Peoples Car' designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche in 1934 and promised to German  workers through the 'Strength Through Joy' (Kdf) scheme. Known originally as the Kdf Wagen, subscriptions amounted to around 280 million  German Reichmarks from 336,668 subscribers who were encouraged to save five marks  weekly. Not one subscriber received the car. In 1944, 650  Jewish women were transferred from Auschwitz to work at the Volkswagen plant to  manufacture bazookas and mines. To house these workers a satellite camp was established  at Neuengamme.  In 1945. the factory was captured by the US 102nd Infantry  Division and as the site lay within the British zone of occupation, the British  took over the badly bombed factory, fifty-eight percent of which lay in ruins. A  Military Government team, led by Major Ivan Hirst of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical  Engineers, got production going and produced the first post-war Beetle Volkswagen  car in early 1946. In March of that year the 1,000th Volkswagen rolled off the production  line and by the end of the year a total of 9,871 were built. It soon became one  of the world's most popular cars. In the museum at the Volkswagen Works at Wolfsburg,  near Hannover, you can see the original Prototype No 3 Kdf Wagen with a astonishing  400,000 kilometres on the clock. In 1970, the 14 millionth 'Beetle' was presented  to the United Kingdom.
SHELL SHOCK
The US Army suffered a total of 929,307 cases of 'Battle Fatigue' during the war. In June alone, in Normandy, an alarming 10,000 men were treated  for some form of battle fatigue. Between June and November, 1944, this amounted  to a staggering 26% of all US casualties.
COURT MARTIAL
During the battle for Normandy, four British officers  and 7,018 other ranks were court martialled for desertion. Fifty-nine officers and  3,628 other ranks were court martialled for other offences.
THE LOST DIVISION
This was the name given to the American soldiers who had deserted in France and  in Germany at the end of 1945. They numbered around 19,000, many living on farms  and working as labourers, as black market racketeers, or in safe hiding places in  their new found girl friends' houses. By 1948, about 9,000 had been found. In 1947,  the British Government announced an offer of leniency for British deserters and  837 gave themselves up.
NITRO BLAST
During the Allied assault on the Scheldt Estuary on (October  20, 1944) (Operation Switchback), the British 248 Armoured  Assault Squadron of the Royal Engineers took up position in a field near the village  of Ijzendijke. No. 3 troop was assigned the task of operating  a mine-clearing device known as a Condor, a 300 foot length of canvas hose launched  empty across a minefield and then pumped full of liquid nitro-glycerine which was  then detonated, clearing a wide path through the minefield. While unloading the  nitro-glycerine from three Canadian lorries, a tremendous explosion rocked the area  sending shock waves that flattened everything in its path. Trees, farm buildings  and military vehicles were set on fire or completely wrecked by the blast. The three  lorries carrying the glycerine simply disappeared leaving three large craters on  the site. This accidental explosion, the largest in North-west Europe during WWII,  took the lives of 26 British and 15 Canadian soldiers and wounding 43 others. Fifty-three  years later, in 1997, a memorial was unveiled on the site commemorating the victims.  The ceremony was attended by over a hundred British and Canadian veterans.
JAPAN'S NEW IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS.
In the mountainous region of Nagano on the island of HONSHU,  construction began on 11th November, 1944, to build Japan's new Imperial  Headquarters and accommodation for Japan's 124th ruler, Emperor Hirohito and his  wife. From here, Japan's  last stand in WW11 would be directed. About 120  families were evacuated from the area before work began. To build this vast  complex of underground bunkers and tunnels some 7,000 to 10,000 Korean  workers were forcibly brought to Honshu as slave labourers. These workers toiled  under gruesome conditions. Tunnels were bored that stretched for kilometres  under the mountain peaks of Mount  Maizuru, Mount Zozan and Mount Minakami  at 95 metres below ground. At Maizuru there were 20 main tunnels parallel to  each other and measured 4 metres wide and 2.7 metres high with a total length of  6 kilometres. It is estimated that around 1,500 of these slave workers perished  during construction. At the end of hostilities on August 11, 1945, all work  ceased  leaving the complex 75% completed. After the war, what was meant to  be Hirohito's palace was converted to an orphanage.  Today some of these tunnels are now open to visitors.  It was through General McArthur's benevolence that Hirohito was never brought to  trial for war crimes. Instead he was asked to  acknowledge in public that  he was indeed a mortal being and not divine being. This he did on August 15,  1945, when the Japanese people heard his voice for the very first time. He then  proceeded on a tour of Japan's devastated cities. He died on January 7, 1989,  after a 62 year reign. He was 88 years old.
In 1990, Japan  published a list of 90,804 Korean slave workers  who were forcibly brought  to Japan during WW11.
EXPLOSION (November 27, 1944)
The large underground gypsum mines at RAF Station, Fauld in Staffordshire, was being used as storage for three and a half thousand tons of  high explosive bombs. Within were 22 miles of railway track. At 11.10am on the morning  of November 27, the bombs exploded en masse claiming 70 lives, including 7 Italian  P.O.W.s who were brought in to help, and injuring another 22. It left a crater 80  feet deep and covered an area of twelve acres on which lay 200 dead cattle. An official  explanation has never been issued as to the cause of this, the greatest explosion  ever in the United Kingdom. A memorial, erected in 1990 lists the names of all seventy  dead, and states that eighteen of the bodies were never recovered.
GLEN MILLER DISAPPEARS WITHOUT A TRACE
On December 15, 1944,  an American Dodge staff car,  driven by Staff Sergeant Edward McCulloch of Oceanside, California, entered the  small grass airfield at RAF Twinwood Farm near London and deposited his two passengers  near a waiting plane piloted by a 25-mission pilot, Flight Officer Johnny Morgan.  His passengers were a Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell (General Goodrich's Executive  Officer) 2nd Lieutenant Don Haynes, the band's executive officer (there only to  see the plane off) and the American band leader, Glenn Miller.  At 13.55 PM, the small UC-64A single engined Norseman plane with its three occupants  took off on a flight to Paris. Nothing was ever heard of the plane  again. In Paris, members of the band waited in their Hotel des Olympiades  for news, only to be told that Glen Miller was missing. (On Christmas  Eve the band was greeted with wild enthusiasm as it played its first concert without  their leader.)
On the same day, December 15, a force of 138 RAF Lancaster bombers was returning  from an aborted raid on Siege (east of Cologne). Carrying  a full bomb load, the Lancaster was a difficult plane to land, and in such circumstances  all bombers had to jettison their load over the Channel in an area designated as  the 'Southern Jettison Area'. While jettisoning their bomb  loads, the crew of a Lancaster from 149 Squadron saw a small plane crash into the  sea below them. Forty-two years later, when the Lancaster crew were traced and contacted  in New Zealand, they swore that the plane they had seen was a Norseman. The mystery  remains to this day. Did the Norseman stray off course into the prohibited area  only to be downed by bombs falling from the Lancaster bombers above? The chances of finding the small plane on the bed of the Channel are a million to  one against.
Glenn Miller gave his last concert at the Queensbury All Services Club in Soho,  London, on December 12, 1944. Later, in 1945, one of the venues for a band concert,  without their leader, was at Nuremberg Stadium. Performed in front of thousands  of cheering GIs on the same field where many Hitler Youth ceremonies took place.  Today, the control tower at Twinwood Farm has been completely refurbished and dedicated  to Major Glen Miller and the American Band of the AEF. For full details of the Glen  Miller Band during their six months stay in Britain, see Chris Way's book "Glen Miller in Britain Then and Now."Chris  Way died n July 2013 and his ashes scattered by John Miller, Glen's nephew, over  the grass in front of the restored tower at Twinwood Farm from where Glen Miller  departed on his last flight.
 
THE FAMOUS LANCASTER BOMBER. First flown on January 9, 1941. As the Lancaster   was vulnerable to attacks from below, some later versions were equipped with   a  mid-under .5 machine gun mounted over a hole in the underside of the   fuselage, the gunner sitting on a small wooden seat. Several 622 squadron  Lancaster's   were equipped in this manner. 
WAR DIARY
General Eisenhower's talents did not greatly impress the British General Montgomery.  At the end of Montgomery's war diary, a special note, written by the famous general,  stated "And so the campaign in Northwest Europe is finished. I  am glad; it has been a tough business ... the Supreme Commander had no firm ideas  as to how to conduct the war and was 'blown about by the wind' all over the place  ... the staff at SHAEF were completely out of their depth all the time. The point  to understand is if we had run the show properly the war could have been finished  by Christmas, 1944. The blame for this must rest with the Americans. To balance  this it is merely necessary to say one thing, i.e. if the Americans had not come  along and lent a hand , we would never have won the war at all."
ROYAL AIR FORCE CASUALTIES
During the first six months of 1944, out of each 1,000 bomber crews who had flown  missions during that period, 712 were reported killed or missing and 175 were wounded  ... an 89 percent casualty rate.
BRITISH AIR RAID CASUALTIES IN 1944
In the first four months 1,493 persons were killed and 2,871 injured in air raids.  In April, for the first time in four years, there were no casualties reported. In  June, Hitler's V1 flying bombs killed 1,935 persons and wounded 5,906. In July the  V2 rockets killed 2,441 and injured 7,107. In the next five months, casualties amounted  to 1,548 deaths and 6,055 wounded. (There were 60,595 British civilian deaths from  air raids and rocket attacks during the war, this included 25,399 women and children.  Some 86,182 were seriously wounded.
46 to losing control of the bowels
28 to urinating in their pants.
US SERVICEMEN: FIT FOR DUTY?
From 1941 to 1945, a total of 17,955,000 Americans were medically examined for  induction into the armed forces. Some 6,420,000 (35.8 percent) were rejected as  unfit because of some physical disability. Altogether, 16,112,566 Americans served  their country in World War II. A total of 38.8 percent (6,332,000) were volunteers.  In all, 405,399 American service men and women gave up their lives in a war that  cost the US $288 Billion Dollars.
The most decorated unit in U.S. military history is the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose motto was "Go for  Broke." It consisted of Japanese-American volunteers. Together they won 4,667  major medals, awards, and citations, including 560 Silver Stars 4,000 Bronze  Stars, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, and one Medal of Honor, plus 54 other  decorations. It also held the distinction of never having one single case of  desertion during the entire war.
A VERY LONG WAR
The last Japanese soldier to surrender was Captain Fumio Nakahira who held out until April, 1980, before being discovered at Mt. Halcon on Mindoro  Island in the Philippines. Before that, there was Onoda Hiroo, discovered in the jungle of Lubang Island on March 11, 1974, twenty-nine years after  the war ended. He has since published a book 'No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War'. Nakamura Teruo was discovered on the island of Morotai on  December 18, 1974, still believing the war was on. Sergeant Yoloi  Shoichi survived in the jungles of Guam until found on January 24, 1972.  He died in September, 1997 at the age of 82.
RAPE IN WAR
The rape of Jewish women by Nazi forces is well documented. After the attack  on Poland in September,1939, mass rape of Jewish women was an everyday occurrence.  In Warsaw, forty women were taken from the ghetto to a party in the officers mess  and forced to drink, strip and dance with German officers after which they were  raped repeatedly before being sent back to the ghetto. In the concentration camps,  Jewish women were raped by their guards. This of course contravened the Nazi race  laws that prohibited sexual relations between 'Aryans' and Jews. At the Nuremberg  War Crimes Trials evidence was presented that hundreds of Russian women were raped.  Many French women, especially those in the resistance, were brutally raped during  the occupation. Not only German soldiers but British and American  fighting men did their fair share of raping.
During the occupation of Japan, Japanese women were subjected to mass rape by  the soldiers of the occupation forces starting on the first day, August 21, 1945.  Over a period of ten days, 1,336 cases of rape were reported. In one instance a  woman was raped by twenty-seven US soldiers. In Hiroshima, occupied by the British  and Commonwealth Forces, many Japanese women were raped. One young woman was raped  by twenty Australian soldiers. On August 21, 1945, Japanese authorities decided  to set up a Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) for the benefit of Allied  occupation troops in an attempt to cut down the instances of rape. At its peak,  around 20,000 prostitutes worked for the RAA. On September 20, 1945, the first brothel  for the 350,000 US troops in Japan was opened. It was called 'Babe Garden'. It was  closed down on March 27, 1946 to stop the spread of VD. Unfortunately these brothels  did little to minimize the incidence of rape during the first year of the occupation.
SOVIET RAPES IN BERLIN: A HUGE, UNKNOWN TOTAL
The official figures for Berlin rapes by Soviet troops does exist but has never  been published. However, Berlin’s former mayor, Ernst Reuter,  said that the figure given him was 90,000. In 1945, Berlin  had a population of some 2,700,000 of which about 2,000,000 were women. Many rapes  of course were never reported and the figure of 90,000 includes only hospitalized  cases and doctors reports. Some 10,000 women in Berlin died as a result of rape,  many by suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4  million estimated victims in East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania. Doctors were besieged  by women seeking information on the best way to commit suicide. A charity institution,  orphanage and maternity hospital, 'Haus Dehlem' was forcibly entered by second line  Russian troops and pregnant women and women who had just given birth were repeatedly  raped. In the Soviet Zone of Germany nearly 90% of females ages  between 10 and 80 were raped in what undoubtedly was the largest case of mass rape  in history. This included women expelled from the eastern provinces. Among  the rape victims were many women who became prominent figures in post-war Germany.  Hannelore Kohl, wife of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was raped when twelve years  old, along with her mother while they tried to escape from Berlin on a train heading  for Dresden. Hannelore Kohl committed suicide in 2001.
Most German children born in Berlin in 1946 were the result of rape. Women and  young girls were forcibly dragged from their homes and raped, the drunken Soviet  Mongolian soldiers queuing up to await their turn. For two whole  weeks these mass rapes of women continued. Some Jewish women, thinking that  their nationality would save them, showed their identity cards to the rapists but none of them could even read. Marshal Zhukov issued orders  that any soldier caught in the act of rape after the two week period  was up, was to be shot on the spot. Many a Russian soldier met his end this  way. Although no US soldier was ever executed for rape in Germany, as one GI wrote: "many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew  how 'our boys' over here conduct themselves." The psychological effects on  many of these rape victims were devastating, future relationships with men became  extremely difficult for the rest of their lives. (Between 1942 and 1945, a total  of 2,420 rapes were reported in England, 3,620 in France and more than 11,040 in  Germany by the occupying troops.) It is estimated that around two  million German women had undergone an illegal abortion in the three years after  the war ended.
TRANSFERRED
By September, 1944, around one million and thirty thousand prisoners from the  Soviet Gulags were transferred to the Red Army. Political prisoners and those convicted  of anti-Soviet activities were not released. Further releases were made in the Spring  of 1945 just weeks before the onslaught on Berlin. Exchanging a Gulag death for  a hero's death at the front was motivation enough for many of these prisoners, five  of whom later became 'Heroes of the Soviet Union'. Fed a daily dose of anti-German  propaganda and films showing the terrible atrocities committed by Nazi troops while  in Russia, they soon became full of a burning hatred for the enemy and longed for  revenge. Once on enemy soil they were confronted with signs saying "Red Army soldier: You are now on German soil, the hour of revenge  has struck." The orgy of rape, looting, murder and drunkenness committed  by these ex-prisoners of the Gulags on innocent German women and children was a  direct result of this indoctrination. (At this time Berliners were  saying that optimists were learning English and the pessimists learning Russian.)
Berliner women's worst nightmares were realised when they were repeatedly raped   in their tens of thousands by the barbarous invading Soviet hordes. Many were   brutally murdered. Our "valiant Soviet allies" were actually at first officially   encouraged to rape, murder and take loot as legitimate Communist wartime plunder.   Until the disgusted Marshal Zhukov finally intervened and stopped the mayhem—as   good Bolsheviks and animalistic Mongolian riffraff—most raped away with bloodthirsty   relish.
SUICIDE ATTACKS
Prior to the proposed invasion of mainland Japan, Operation Olympic on November 1, 1945, the Japanese military  speeded up its preparations to attack the Allied invasion force while still at sea,  coming up with some very desperate ideas for suicide attacks of differing kinds:
Thousands of volunteer pilots were hastily trained for airplane suicide   attacks. Over 500 aircraft of all types were available for these kamikaze missions.
Around 400 Koryu and Kairyu suicide submarines (five and two-man versions   of the Kaiten) would set out on their one-way journey. Also prepared to sacrifice   their lives were 300 volunteers for the Shinyo human torpedoes.
Most bizarre of all were the hundreds of strong swimmers who would swim   out with deadly mines strapped to their backs to explode against the hulls of   the Allied ships.
Just when all was set for the greatest military mass suicide in history, the  atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese  ordered all kamikaze operations to cease. The originator of the  first kamikaze attack, Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, committed suicide by disembowelling  himself.
WAR BRIDES
Around 48,000 European women, with 22,000 children, emigrated to Canada during  and after the Second World War. Today in Canada there are some 300,000 children  or grandchildren of these War Brides. Over one million American GIs were stationed  in Britain in the two years preceding D-Day. Approximately 130,000 were black Americans.  Near 70,000 British girls married their GI boy friends and 47,000 married their  Canadian soldier. About 20,000 children were born to these GIs and just under 1,000  were black children. By 1950, a total of 14,175 German and 758 Japanese war brides  arrived in the USA. In Australia, by 1950, about 650 Japanese girls married their  Aussie boy friends and were admitted to Australia when the admission ban was lifted  in 1952. Many of these brides experienced prejudice, jealousy and resentment by  Australian women who were enraged that their soldiers had chosen foreign girls as  wives. Some 7,000 Australian women married their American GI boy friends and travelled  to the USA as war brides. Between 1946 and 1949 some 20,000 German  women immigrated to the USA to start a new life with their American husbands or  boy friends. Most found that they were anything but welcome. (The first US troops  arrived in Brisbane, Queensland, on Christmas Eve, 1941.)
MEMORIALS
In 1989, in Britain, the UK National Inventory of War Memorials was established.  Its database lists around 45,000 memorials to those who gave their lives during  World Wars 1 and 11. The best known is the Cenotaph in London,  erected in 1919 and rebuilt on the same spot on Armistice Day in 1920. There are  222 memorials marking the site of plane crashes, both RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft.  The War Room at No 10, Rue Franklin-Roosevelt in the town of Reims, France, where  the German surrender was accepted by General Eisenhower is preserved exactly as  it was in 1945.
One of the most unusual memorials was the one which opened in Berlin on May 8,  2002. Called the 'Deserters Memorial', it is dedicated to  the 232 German soldiers, the youngest 18, who were shot for desertion in the closing  stages of the war. Realizing that the war was lost they threw away their arms and  deserted. All were rounded up and faced a military court which sentenced them all  to death. The punishment was legal according to German military law at the time.  After the verdicts the 232 men were taken to the Wehrmacht training ground behind  the Waldbϋhne sports complex in Berlin and shot. In Germany there is a law which forbids the building of memorials to its  fighting troops of World War 11.
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
America's most famous military cemetery, comprising 657 acres, is situated on  a hillside overlooking the Potomac River in Washing DC. In this beautifully landscaped  area the focal point is Arlington House where Robert E Lee, of Confederate Army  fame, lived for thirty years of his life. Requisitioned by the Union Army for a  military cemetery during the American Civil War the cemetery now contains over 240,000  graves. The first burial took place on May 13, 1864, when Private William Christman,  a soldier of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, was laid to rest. In the Memorial Amphitheatre  is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. In front of the tomb are two  sunken crypts, one containing the remains of an Unknown Soldier from World War II,  the other containing the remains of an Unknown Soldier from the Korean War. There  is no Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War as each soldier who fought  and died in that conflict has been identified. Instead a special plaque dedicated  to those who died was unveiled on November 11, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter. Also here, lie the remains of 364 Congressional Medal of Honor  recipients including America's most decorated soldier, Audie L. Murphy.  A  total of  433  US soldiers were awarded the medal for services during  World War II.  Foreigners can be awarded the Medal of Honor provided  they are a member of the US Armed Forces. They are not required to be a US citizen.
KRANJI WAR CEMETERY
Situated near the Naval Base on Singapore Island, 22  kilometres north of Singapore City, the former military camp became a military cemetery  containing the graves of around 6,000 servicemen who died fighting in the Far East.  These include 4,461 British Commonwealth graves, 850 of which are unidentified.  From 1936 to 1941 the site became the largest ammunition dump in Asia. Just before  the capitulation the British blew up the dump to prevent it falling into the hands  of the approaching Japanese forces. When Singapore fell, the Japanese established  a P.O.W. camp on the site and after reoccupation the prisoners developed a small  cemetery in the camp which was later enlarged by the Army Grave Service. At the  rear of the cemetery are twelve large columns on which are inscribed the names of  around 56,000 servicemen and women who have no known grave. These include the names  of those who met their deaths on the Japanese Hell Ships.
WAR CRIMES TRIALS (Europe)
The Nï¿½rnberg International Military Tribunal began on  November 20, 1945. It was conducted in four languages, English. French, Russian  and German. The trials lasted ten months in which it held a total of 403 sessions.  Twenty surviving leaders of the Third Reich were arraigned before the Allied judges  as major war criminals. All pleaded 'Not Guilty'. Ten were hanged on 16th October,  1946, seven were given prison sentences ranging from ten years to life, and three  were acquitted. Two, Herman Gï¿½ring and Robert Ley committed suicide during the trial. It is doubtful that Gï¿½ring  would have taken his own life if the Tribunal had granted him his most cherished  wish, to die like a soldier in front of a firing squad.  Forty Allied officers,  including four Generals, one each from Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union,  witnessed the executions. Also present were two newspapermen from each nationality  as well as the camera crews and lighting technicians. The hangings were conducted  by US Master Sergeant John C. Wood of San Antonio, Texas, a professional hangman  in civil life with 299 executions to his credit. Thirty-three witnesses gave oral  evidence for the prosecution against the defendants and sixty-one witnesses gave  evidence for the defence. Written evidence was given by 143 witnesses for the defence.  A total of 1,809 affidavits from other witnesses were also submitted. Everything  said at the trial was stenographically and electrically recorded. The United Nations War Crimes Commission was established in  London on October 7, 1942, with the support of seventeen other Allied governments.  On August 8, 1945, Britain, America, France and Russia signed the London Agreement  setting up the N.I.M.T. to bring the top leaders of Hitler's Germany to trial.
The evidence against the defendants were, in most cases, documents  of their own making on which their own signatures were proved authentic. Some historians  believe that the hanging of General Jodl was a miscarriage of justice but by signing  Hitler's order to have fifty prisoners of war shot for escaping from Sagan, sealed  his fate.
Senior surviving Nazis got rough justice indeed at the widely-condemned Nï¿½rnberg   Tribunal. These "Victor's Justice" propaganda show trials were unique in history,   complete with fake "Jewish Skin" lampshade exhibits; a German-hating "impartial   American judicial team" made up almost entirely of European Jews; barefaced   lies, perjury and third-hand hearsay testimony. Most damning of all: widespread,   unchallenged torture 'confessions' written in detailed English by non-English   speaking German defendants.
PRISON FOR SEVEN
On July 18, 1947, a DC-3 landed at the Royal Air Force  airfield, at Gatow, near Berlin, formally Kladow Airfield,  in the late afternoon. In the plane were seven high ranking Nazis convicted to terms  of imprisonment at Nuremberg. The seven were Baldur von Schirach, Gross Admiral  Karl Donitz, Konstantin von Neurath, Admiral Erich Raeder, Albert Speer, Walter  Funk and Rudolf Hess. They were then driven in a bus with blacked out windows to  No. 23 Wilhelmstrasse in Spandau, better known as Spandau Prison. Built to hold  600 prisoners it now contained only seven prisoners guarded by 78 persons including  32 armed guards, 18 warders and 28 ancillary staff. Prisoners were given the same  rations as German civilians. Talking to each other was forbidden, except in the  garden. German newspapers were only allowed after May, 1954. Reveille was at 6am  and lights out at 10pm. Albert Speer has calculated that he has walked a distance  of 31,936 kilometres round the garden in his effort to keep fit during the twenty  years he spent in Spandau. After the longest serving prisoner, Rudolf Hess, died  in August 1987, the prison complex was demolished, the thousands of tons of rubble  buried in the shooting range at RAF Gatow. The site was redeveloped as the Britannia  Centre, a community centre for British garrison troops in Berlin. It contained a  NAAFI superstore and a picture theatre named Jerboa Cinema, the name taken from  the Jerboa Cinema that was situated next to the former British NAAFI Club on the  Reichskanzler Platz. (Previously Adolf Hitler Platz, now Theodor Heuss Platz).
WAR CRIMES TRIALS (EAST)
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convened on May 3, 1946,  and adjourned on November 12. 1948. Twenty-eight Japanese military and civilian  leaders were put on trial for war crimes. Conducted by eleven Justices and presided  over by Justice Webb of Australia, eleven of the defendants were found guilty and  sentenced to death by hanging, the executions taking place in Sugamo Prison on December  23. 1948. Among those executed was General Hidaki Tojo, former commander of the  Kuantung Army and later Prime Minister of Japan. Outside the Tokyo trials there  were more than 2,000 other trials involving 5.379 Japanese. 148 Koreans, 173 Formosans  (Class B and C war criminals). These trials were conducted in forty-nine locations.  Over 4,300 individuals were convicted of war crimes of whom 984 were sentenced to  death. The rest to terms of imprisonment ranging from life for 475 and shorter terms  of imprisonment for 2,944. China held thirteen war crimes trials which resulted  in 504 convictions and 149 death sentences.
DEATH SENTENCES
In the US Zone of Germany, 462 major war criminals were sentenced to death in  1945. In the British Zone, 240 received the death penalty and in the French Zone  the number was 104. Of the 806 death sentences imposed by the western allies only  about 400 were actually carried out. In the forty years since 1945, around 5,000  war criminals were hunted down, tried and executed. The search continues to this  day.
CAMOUFLAGE LANGUAGE
In many documents discovered after the war, it is interesting to see how SS unit  commanders reported their operations to their leaders, Himmler and Heydrich. After  the German invasion of the Soviet Union, reports flooded in describing the systematic  mass killing of Jews, partisans and others by SS death squads (Einzatzcommando).  Some 195 documents were found to contain words that have been described as "camouflage language". A few unit commanders, no doubt the  more fanatical Nazi types, used plain language in describing their activities, for  instance, the words shooting, killing, and hanging, left little doubt about what  they were doing. In other reports we find the words: liquidated, cleansed, annihilated,  resettled, deported, collective punishment and that ominous phrases "subjected to  special treatment" and "executed according to martial law". Towns,  reported "free of Jews" were said to mean that the entire Jewish population had  either been killed or transported to concentration camps.
RE-ENACTMENT FOR FILM
One evening in the summer of 1946, some members of the Chancellery  Group, those who were captured in May, 1945 by the Russians in and around Hitler's bunker in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery,  were flown back to Berlin from their prisons in the Soviet Union. In Berlin they were made to re-enact the events of the last day  in the Bunker for a Russian film company. They were in Berlin for some twenty-four  hours before being flown back to Moscow, there to remain in various prisons for  the next ten years. The film 'actors' that day included Hans Baur, Heinz Lange,  Major Guenche, General Mohnke and Sergeant Rochus Misch the SS telephonist. For  the first time, an information panel, with maps and images, has now been erected  on the site of the former bunker to show visitors the exact location. (Many photographs shown in history books today are actually re-enactments  of the actual incident where it would have been too dangerous at the time to record  the scene on film.)
P.O.W. DEATH RATE
A total of 7,310 British prisoners of war died while in German captivity and  12,443 died while in Japanese captivity. Of an estimated 350,000 prisoners captured  by the Japanese in WWII, 35,756 died, a death rate of 10.2%. Of the 235,473 prisoners  interned by Germany and Italy, 9,348 died, a death rate of 4%. At midnight on August 14/15, 1945, the unconditional surrender of Japan  is announced by the American President Truman and the British Prime Minister Atlee. World War II was over. (This war was unnecessarily prolonged by  the short-sighted insistance by the Allies for 'unconditional surrender'.)
KILLED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN
Twelve French volunteers in the German Waffen SS (33rd SS Grenadier Division 'Charlemagne') who had fought on the Eastern Front were in a hospital in Bavaria  when the war ended. They surrendered to French soldiers under the command of General  Philippe Leclerc, the liberator of Paris. Accusing them of being traitors to France,  Leclerc ordered them shot, their bodies left lying on the ground to be discovered  some days later by US troops and buried. Years later their bodies were recovered  and reinterred in the local cemetery. Inscribed on a memorial above the graves are  the words "To The Twelve Brave Sons Of France, Prisoners Of The  Victors, Who Were Executed Without Judgement".
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Just before Christmas, 1946, the ban on fraternization  between German Prisoners of War and British civilians was finally lifted. Invitations  poured into P.O.W. camps in Britain from British families eager to invite the P.O.W.s  into their homes for Christmas, the first real Christmas the prisoners had experienced  in years. The last of German P.O.W.s were repatriated by the end of 1948 but around  24,000 decided to stay in Britain rather than return to their homes now in the communist  zone of East Germany. Many of those who stayed behind ended up marrying British  girls and raising families.
WWII LEGALLY ‘ENDS’ IN DECEMBER 1947
Although the war  officially ended on August 14, 1945, Britain extended this  date to December 31, 1947, as a cut-off date. This extension  was introduced to make allowance for the many casualties who died from wounds received  during the true war period to be classified as war dead.
GERMANIA
In 2002, on an island in the middle of the 115 square kilometer Mueritzsee Lake, the largest in Mecklenburg and sixty miles  from Berlin, amateur historians discovered the only building Hitler ever saw completed  for Germania, the name he would have given Berlin after it was rebuilt. This was a prototype of the  bomb-proof apartments he wanted to construct for the workers building the new capitol  that would rule Europe. Known as the 'White House' or Festwork-T,  it is the only surviving example of the type of architecture that the German Fï¿½hrer  would have dominated the new capitol with after the 'final victory'.
POST-WAR
When the European war ended, the great debate began. What had turned young men  into unthinking slaves of evil? What happened to make them susceptible to the lust  for power, to loose all sense of right and wrong, to commit acts of such unspeakable  bestiality, to fight with such fanatical courage and without question to carry out  the orders of their unscrupulous leaders? After the war, hundreds of non-Nazi priests,  doctors, and psychiatrists were interviewed and not one could report a single instance  of confession to the criminal acts in which they, the perpetrators, participated.  When, on May 23, 1945, SS Fï¿½hrer and Gestapo Police Chief, Heinrich Himmler, gave  himself up to British Military Police at Bremervï¿½rde and then committed suicide  by biting on a phial of cyanide hidden between his teeth, the terrifying bloody  history of Hitler's SS came to an end. But its evil deeds will  for ever stand as a warning to all nations and in particular to the new generations  growing up in Germany. As the terrible events of World War II recede  more and more into the past, the average German person is less and less inclined  to feel a sense of individual guilt for the past. The younger generation, quite  rightly, asks "why should I feel guilty? I was not born then."
DIENSTGRUPPEN
The German word for Service Groups. This relates to the 70,000 German P.O.W.s  and other nationals still in uniform and engaged in post-war operations including  mine clearing and guard duties in Northern Germany in 1947.  Germans at that  time, and even now, were convinced that this para-military force of 81,358 members,  called the Black Reichswehr by the Germans, was really a  reserve force kept  in readiness for a possible war with Russia.
THE INTERNATIONAL TRACING SERVICE
Originally the Tracing Bureau of the British Red Cross and later the Central  Tracing Bureau created by SHAEF in 1944 at Frankfurt-am Main. It later moved to  Bad Arlosen in 1946 where it remains to this day under the management of the International  Red Cross since 1955. Comprising 26,000 metres of shelf space it contains over fifty  million reference cards for over 17.5 million persons who were held in Nazi prisons  and concentration camps. The cards also contain details of forced labourers and  displaced persons. In 2007, the Bureau received over 61,000 requests from seventy  countries for information on long lost family members.
It was here in the octagonal shaped downstairs room of the villa at 31a Uelzener   Strasse, Luneburg, that Himmler committed suicide while being searched. This   interrogation centre was set up by the British Second Army HQ Defence Company   and it was here also that Mrs Margaret Joyce, wife of William Joyce (Lord Haw   Haw) was interrogated by MI5 and held for six days after her arrest.