Santa Claus arrives in Guadalcanal on a requisitioned Nissan sedan as his sleigh - December 1942
LIFE Magazine Archives - Ralph Morse Photographer
Ha ha anything is possible. Merry Christmas captainwalker if u celebrate it.
@general-5-stars thanks Merry Christmas to you also
1942 Santa arriving by tank instead of outdated sleigh. Sgt. Hiram Prouty playing Santa for British children. Dec 5, 1942. Perham Downs, England. M.3. Tank of 1st Tank Group. Sgt. Prouty, member of 175th Inf.
From the US Army Center for Military History
March 5, 1943: first flight of the Gloster Meteor, the Allies’ only operational jet plane during WW2, from RAF Cranwell.
@kaleu said in On this day during W.W. 2:
March 5, 1943: first flight of the Gloster Meteor, the Allies’ only operational jet plane during WW2, from RAF Cranwell.
While the Meteor was in much greater use during WW2, the P-80 Shooting Star had: “two pre-production models … see very limited service in Italy just before the end of World War II”
Wiki P-80 Shooting Star
-Midnight_Reaper
@midnight_reaper I had never heard that. Thanks
@midnight_reaper Thanks, I was not aware of that.
Supermarine Spitfire Mark Vs of No 417 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force flying over the Tunisian desert - April 1943
Original Color Picture
IWM - Royal Air Force official photographer
@captainwalker beautiful.
17 May 1944
Churchill tank crews of HQ Troop, 51st (Leeds Rifles) Royal Tank Regiment, 25th Tank Brigade, share out rations near their camouflaged vehicles before going into action in support of the 1st Canadian Division, central Italy. (
No. 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit
Johnson (Sgt)
Colourised by Richard James Molloy
@captainwalker that pic seems to peaceful to be set in war . Lovely , thanks Capt Walker.
D-Day +1
A Sherman Firefly of the 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division comes ashore from HMS LST-406 (Landing Ship Tank), Gold area, Normandy. June 7 1944.
77 years ago tonight, the USS Indianapolis CA-35 Sailors and Marines stood watch, played card games, wrote letters, and went to bed one last time aboard their ship
Shortly after midnight on July 30th, 1945, two torpedoes from Japan’s I-58 submarine slammed into Indy’s starboard side and sank her in 12 minutes
1,195 men went into the water.
Nobody received their SOS calls
Five days later, only 316 were still alive.
Explosions, drowning, shark attacks, dehydration, and psychiatric breaks/hallucinations took the rest
Today, we have only two USS Indianapolis Survivors still living; Harold Bray (95) & Cleatus Lebow (98)
Text by Kim Roller
Picture - USS Indianapolis CA-35 at sea painted in MS32 sometime in 1944
From the TimeLIFE Archives
@captainwalker yea that was brutal. the badass from pearl harbor went down too if i remember right.
Uggh … i have tears in my eyes.
80 Years Ago US Marines with the 1st Marine Division under the command of USMC Major General Alexander Vandegrift landed on Guadalcanal during Operation Watchtower.
The goal was to capture the Japanese Airfield on Guadalcanal which was under construction. The Marines came ashore between Koli Point and Lunga Point, advancing they encountered little resistance and secured the airfield by 4PM / 1600hrs on August 8th, 1942.
Japanese troops and construction workers at the airfield had been panicked by the warship bombardment & aerial bombing and had abandoned the airfield fleeing about 3 miles west to the Matanikau River & Point Cruz area. They left behind food, supplies, intact construction equipment, vehicles, and 13 dead.
Picture: US Marines on Guadalcanal - August 8, 1942
Source: US Navy Photo# 80-G-20683
2 September 1945, Tokyo Bay, the Japanese formally surrender, ending WW2. Nearly 300 US and Allied ships fill Tokyo Bay — a powerful demonstration of Allied might. The surrender ceremony takes place onboard the US Battleship USS Missouri. President Truman addressed the American people listening to the surrender ceremony on the radio:
“My fellow Americans, and the Supreme Allied Commander, General MacArthur, in Tokyo Bay:
The thoughts and hopes of all America–indeed of all the civilized world–are centered tonight on the battleship Missouri. There on that small piece of American soil anchored in Tokyo Harbor the Japanese have just officially laid down their arms. They have signed terms of unconditional surrender.
Four years ago, the thoughts and fears of the whole civilized world were centered on another piece of American soil–Pearl Harbor. The mighty threat to civilization which began there is now laid at rest. It was a long road to Tokyo–and a bloody one.
We shall not forget Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese militarists will not forget the U.S.S. Missouri.”
December 17, 1939: Germany’s Admiral Graf Spee is scuttled by her crew outside Montevideo harbor. This famous German commerce raider had been so succesful in the preceding months that the British and the French sent more than 20 ships to track her down. That culminated in the Battle of the River Plate, in which Admiral Graf Spee sustained critical damage. They found refuge in neutral but Allied-friendly Uruguay, but with no hope of getting the ship repaired and the prospect of the crew being interned, Captain Hans Langsdorff made the decision to scuttle her.
@kaleu thanks . Is One of those stories many of us learned as a child.
@kaleu The Admiral Graf Spee was such a great looking ship.
In theory fast enough to dodge battleships and powerful enough to out range cruisers.
