Best World War II documentary?

@CWO:

@ABWorsham:

Lets remember, had the Germans not invaded Greece then Rommel’s adventure in Africa is much different. His role would have been to save Tripoli, instead of counter-attacking and driving to Egypt.

I’m not sure Greece was the cause.  As I recall, when Hitler originally sent Rommel to Africa he basically gave him orders to simply dig in and hold the line.  If that was indeed Hitler’s intention, then he made a serious mistake in his choice of generals because Rommel was definitely not a dig-in-and-hold-the-line kind of commander.  Rommel was even prepared to interpret his orders in creative ways which technically adhered to their letter but not to their spirit: for purposes of paperwork, for example, he described first major offensive in North Africa as simply a "reconnaissance in force."  He ended up routing the British and driving them practically back to Egypt – and with those kinds of results, of course, Hitler was happy to overlook the fact that Rommel hadn’t done what Hitler had wanted him to do.

All true.

Had the 6th Australian, 2nd New Zealand and British 1st Armored been in North Africa instead of Greece, Rommel may have been forced to ‘obey orders’ with his 5th Light Division.

@221B:

I had to vote other as I think a good proximity fuse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze )could have made a tremendous difference in the naval battles the Japanese lost.  It certainly made a difference for the Americans.

There is no doubt that Japanese Anti Aircraft were the poorest of the major nations of WW2. Only Rabaul had any success in air defense, and this was due to the massive amount of Allied bombing missions on that target and the practice the Japanese gunners gained. Rabaul would claim 500 aircraft, mostly singing engine bombers.

The Japanese would use several warship superstructures that were sunk to create " flak towers".

The allies who cleared the sky’s of the south pacific of Japanese planes and bombed at will anything desired dreadful hated missions to bomb Rabaul.

That’s a remarkable story.

I suppose the British wanted to avoid even the slightest risk of compromising Irish neutrality - so if the Irish put someone in a camp and the British acknowledge their status as a neutral and non-belligerent country, then it follows that they would honor the laws and regulations of that country and return the escapee. But I don’t think they would have followed the same reasoning if Mr Wolfe would have been a British subject.

Read “world war 2 behind closed doors” by laurence rees

There was a secret part in the treaty between the french, british and poles which the brits and the french promised military assistance against a German attack not a Soviet attack and remember they did not help in the war between the poles in the soviets in late 1910’s and early 1920’s but instead suggested the curzon line (which the Molotov-Ribbentrop line basicly followed)

Also the soviets at Tehran were more interested in soviet post war borders than they were in actually winning the war and remember in 1943 this was not a certainty. They wanted to keep there pre 1941 gains.

This is just a brief overview of some othe parts of the book I suggest you read it. It is very good.

The brits and the french could have attacked the siegfried line before the germans finished it and probably would have been succesful and because they did not co-operate with the Belgium people (I don’t know the correct word) and the dutch because the later two did not want to appear co-operating with the allies because at that time they were neutral. The Germans had a brilliant strategy in attacking (the aaa territory North West Europe) and then following nit up with the tank drive through the ardennes they cut of the Elite French and British troops from the rest of the army. They shouldn’t have allowed Dunkirk and should have forced the British and French into the sea and this would come back to haunt them.

@Fishmoto37:

All of the above made important contributions to the war effort. Which one do you think contibuted the most. Do you think that there is one fighter that the U.S. could not have done without?

The voting is now closed and the P51 is the winner by 3 votes. Although there was very little commentary as to why.

I think this was a very key consideration for the UK, Germany, Russia and Japan:

@KurtGodel7:

However, one reason for Hitler’s impatience in invading the Soviet Union was the British food blockade of Germany; and the resulting starvation in German-held lands. Delaying the invasion of the Soviet Union by two years would have meant two extra years of famine conditions; especially in occupied territories and population groups assigned low or mid-level priorities for scarce, precious food calories.

Only the US and some parts of the British empire had abundant food.  The UK, Germany, (and later Japan) were squeezed by naval (or submarine) blockades.  Russia was squeezed by the vast territories taken by the Germans.  Of course I’ll grant that in the early part of the war, Germany did quite well by taking the food and supplies found in France, Belgium, Ukraine, etc.

Grizzly, you make a good point.  The Germans were never going to be able to invade the UK; but they did try to starve them.  An excess of wheat in Australia and Canada does no good for the UK if it cannot be delivered.  I guess we disagree on whether or not British hunger, lack of heating oil, etc. would have been sufficient to make them either sue for peace with Germany…If the British were hungry enough (and I think without the US merchant marine), I could see them saying screw the French, lets have a ceasefire and let the USSR and Germany fight it out.

Regarding the USSR, I once read an estimate that 7/8 of the entire Germany war effort was fought on the eastern front.  This estimate includes the forces in Norway, the battles in Africa and the Balkans, Crete, the U-boat effort, the battles in Italy, the defense of France after D-day, the V-1 and V2 and other technological weapons, etc.  The defense of France required minimal forces in the early part of the war, especially early in the war when it was obvious the UK was in no position to invade.  I don’t think this small difference would have been enough to turn the tide in the East despite the small margin of victory by the USSR during 1941 and 1942.  I even doubt Hitler would have reduced the forces occupying France at this time had the UK capitulated.

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.

November 06, 2009 
By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
Hugh Curthey was tired of working long hours for low pay in the gladiolus fields just south of Grants Pass in the spring of 1941 when he learned of a high-paying job overseas.

“My brother and I were working in those bulbs for a dollar and a half a day,” recalled the 93-year-old Medford resident. “That’s when we heard about this construction work on Wake Island.”

At that point, he couldn’t have told you where Wake Island was on the globe. What he did know was that he would be making at least $500 a month — good money in those days — as a construction worker for the Morrison-Knudsen Co. to help build a U.S. Navy base.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into but we sure found out soon enough,” he said during a recent visit with stepson and daughter-in-law Royce and Joyce Webber of Ruch.

“I still think about it every day,” he added. “I thank the good Lord I made it through.”

He and his brother, Robert “Bob” Curthey, were among some 1,200 civilians taken prisoner when Wake Island was captured by the Japanese on Dec. 23, 1941. Following a 16-day siege in which a 450-man Marine Corps garrison aided by civilians fought to repel the overwhelming Japanese invasion, they were held prisoner until the war ended nearly four years later. Both survived.

“It was rough on people like me because I’ve always like to eat,” said Curthey, a retired maintenance worker for the city of Grants Pass.

Meager meals were the least of his worries during an ordeal that included years of forced labor. More than 200 Americans with him died either during the battle or while in captivity.

Born May 3, 1916, in Kenosha, Wis., Curthey arrived with his family in southwestern Oregon a few years before the Great Depression gripped the nation. He attended first grade in Riddle, then went to schools in Grants Pass, a region where gladiolus were a popular cash crop in the late 1930s into the early 1950s.

Accompanied by brothers Bob and Charles, Curthey arrived on Wake Island in May 1941, although Charles returned to Grants Pass before the war erupted. They were among numerous residents from the region who had jumped at the chance for good jobs overseas.

For seven months, they helped build a naval base on the Pacific coral atoll located between Honolulu and Guam. But their balmy blue-sky world exploded nearly simultaneously with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Maj. James P.S. Devereux, the officer in charge of the Marines, told those on the island to hunker down and prepare for an assault. In addition to the Marines, there were 68 Navy personnel on the island.

During the next two weeks, the island was bombed eight times by Japanese aircraft. Many of the structures were leveled.

“There wasn’t enough rifles to go around so we didn’t have any,” Curthey said. “During the siege, Bob and I worked throughout the night changing gun positions and carrying ammunition and filling sandbags. During the day we stayed down in our dugouts that we had to dig. We didn’t have any protection. But we held out 16 days.”

He tells of a civilian who stood up on the edge of one dugout when a Japanese dive bomber swooped down. The man died instantly.

The defense was crushed by 9 a.m. Dec. 23 with 109 Americans — 62 military, 47 civilians — killed compared to an estimated 900 Japanese soldiers and sailors dead. Using their shore batteries, the Wake Island defenders sank at least two Japanese warships.

Following the surrender, the Americans were held under guard in their barracks. But one man continued to sneak out at night to dig up booze that had been buried before the Japanese invasion, Curthey said.

“He was a big man with a bull neck,” he said. “They told him if he got drunk one more time, off comes the head. He went out and got drunk again. They laid him on a block and off went his head.”

When the prison ship Nita Maru arrived to take the prisoners off the island, Curthey, by then a powerhouse operator, was supposed to stay with 98 other prisoners of war to teach the Japanese how to operate the powerhouse and other facilities.

“I told my brother I wasn’t going to stay so I went with the other POWs getting on the Nita Maru,” he said, noting that Bob was a truck driver on the island. “If I had stayed, I would have been history.”

Indeed, the 98 people left behind were executed on Oct. 7, 1943. They included David F. Chambers of Grants Pass and Wesley W. Stringer of Lakeview.

“I knew both of them,” he said quietly.

The Curthey brothers were placed in the stifling-hot hold of the ship with most of the other prisoners.

“We stayed down in that ship for 12 days — never saw the light of day,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room for us all to sleep so some people took their belts off and tied themselves to those big timbers down in the ship so they could stand there and sleep. The sweat just puddled beneath us.”

They were eventually taken to Shanghai, where they were marched a half dozen miles to the first of two POW camps where they would be held. They were given three scant meals a day.

“They confiscated all the food from the Chinese farmers,” he said. “It was a cup of white rice with a piece of meat in it once in a while. That and a cup of soup. And if we did anything wrong, they’d cut us down to two meals a day. I got a little thin.”

Each group also had a loaf of bread to divide once a week. Normally weighing about 185 pounds, Curthey dropped 50 pounds on the POW diet.

When hunger gnawed at his gut, he would pretend he was chewing gum and crack jokes to keep his mind off food.

“I’ve always had the ability to laugh at myself,” he said. “We (he and Bob) always figured we were gonna make it.”

Knowing his survival depended on it, he ate everything he was given.

“One guy when we first got there said he wasn’t going to eat their garbage,” he said. "Well, after about two weeks he decided he would eat it. But he couldn’t hold it down. He died.

“I’ve always said rice is like a drug to me — I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “Every so often you’d get burned rice. Tasted like toast.”

But they worked hard for what little food they were given.

“When I was a prisoner, I got down to about 135 pounds and carried 220-pound bean sacks,” he said. “The last time I had my back X-rayed, the doc asked me what I did for work. I told him about the bean sacks. He said, ‘That’s the answer. You have about five or six vertebras that are crushed. You will live in pain the rest of your life.’ Well, he ain’t been far off.”

As POWs in Japanese-occupied China, they served as slave labor, doing everything from hauling beans to moving dirt to building a rifle range, he recalled.

“And twice a day we had to stand at rigid attention and they’d come along and count us off,” he said. "One time, a group next to us weren’t ready for inspection on time. The Japanese sergeant came along and banged them all on the head with the clipboard.

“Well, the clipboard broke, so he beat them on the head with the pieces. All 36 men had blood dripping off their foreheads.”

When the war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, the POWs were placed on a ship and sent back to the states. Curthey returned to Grants Pass but not to the gladiolus fields.

“Never again, not for a dollar and a half a day,” he said. “I was ready for something else.”