Posts made by Raunchy The Pirate

An interview in which a Soviet commander admitted how close Moscow came to defeat by Germany during the Second World War has been broadcast in Russia for the first time.

Published: 11:58AM BST 05 May 2010

The Soviet Union nearly lost the war in 1941 and suffered from poor planning, according to Marshal Georgy Zhukov in the frank television interview that has been banned since it was recorded in 1966.

Zhukov, the most decorated general in the history of both Russia and the Soviet Union, admitted that Soviet generals were not confident that they could hold the German forces at the Mozhaisk defence line outside Moscow.

Did the commanders have confidence we would hold that line of defence and be able to halt the enemy? I have to say frankly that we did not have complete certainty.

“It would have been possible to contain the initial units of the opponent but if he quickly sent in his main group, he would have been difficult to stop,” he told the interviewer, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov.

Zhukov also revealed details of his exchanges with Joseph Stalin, the wartime leader, in the interview broadcast on state-run Channel One.

He recalled that a flu-struck Stalin summoned him to Moscow in October 1941 to salvage what until then had been a stuttering defence on the Western front outside Moscow.

After arriving at the front, Zhukov found that the defences in place were “absolutely insufficient”.

“It was an extremely dangerous situation. In essence, all the approaches to Moscow were open,” he said. “Our troops on the Mozhaisk defence line could not have stopped the enemy if he moved on Moscow.”

"I telephoned Stalin. I said the most urgent thing is to occupy the Mozhaisk defence line as in parts of the Western front in essence there are no (Soviet) troops.

Shortly afterwards, Stalin phoned Zhukov back to inform him he had been made commander of the Western Front.

The relationship between the two men would end in acrimony when Stalin became suspicious of Zhukov’s popularity after the war, giving him obscure posts in Odessa and the Urals.

Zhukov had been given the honour of leading the Red Army victory parade in 1945, riding into Red Square on a white stallion, and some historians believe Stalin feared he was being upstaged by the charismatic general.

After Stalin’s death, Zhukov served as defence minister but remained a controversial figure and the Soviet authorities ordered the tape of his interview with Simonov to be destroyed. However one archive copy survived.

Ultimately, Russia’s notorious weather played a major part in the defeat of Nazi Germany, but the Wehrmacht “overestimated themselves and underestimated Soviet troops,” said Zhukov.

In giving the reasons for the Soviet victory, Zhukov made no mention of Stalin, who was taken unawares by the Nazi invasion of Russia.

The broadcast of the banned interview came ahead of a huge parade on May 9 to mark the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany and as Russia appears to be cautiously eroding several taboos surrounding its war victory.

Notably, Russia recently posted online documents about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Soviet forces in 1940.

Custer acquired a solid reputation during the Civil War. He fought in the first major engagement, the First Battle of Bull Run. His association with several important officers helped his career, as did his performance as an aggressive commander. Before war’s end, Custer was promoted to the temporary rank (brevet) of major general. (At war’s end, this was reduced to the permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel). At the conclusion of the Appomattox Campaign, in which he and his troops played a decisive role, Custer was on hand at General Robert E. Lee’s surrender.

Custer was at Gettysburg also.

Microprose and Silent Service 2

I think it was out around 1982

Other movies that I haven’t seen listed yet:

King Rat

Catch-22

Run Silent, Run Deep

Stalag 17

Hell in the Pacific

King Rat

Von Ryan’s Express

Lawerence Of Arabia

My 2 cents; or my favorite 12:

Bio pics: Patton and No Man is an Island

Coast watchers: Father Goose

Carrier warfare:  Midway

Asia: The Bridge Over the River Kwai

Truth in story: Tora Tora Tora and Longest Day

Escapes: The Great Escape and Von Ryans Express

Caper: Kelly’s Heroes

All around fun: Where Eagles Dare and (go figure my 12th) Dirty Dozen

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.”

War creates a thousand heroes a day and almost no one ever hears about them. Vernon Buss  of Portland is a hero of the unsung variety, but he never cared about recognition or notice for his actions that day on Samar.

But Irving Saunders  did – and long ago, Buss realized that Saunders was “a stubborn man” and it was pointless to deter him.

At last, the stubbornness paid off. All Buss had to do was show up Tuesday morning at a state office building and accept the thanks of a grateful nation . . . and of a grateful Saunders.

It would not be far wrong to say that Saunders, 87, has thought about Buss, 84, almost daily since Jan. 24, 1945. He gets reminders when he looks in the mirror, when he celebrates a birthday, when he speaks of his wife, Pearl,  his children and grandchildren.

He should have died that day, at 22, but Buss saved his life. For decades, Saunders, then an aircraft ground crewman, never even knew the name of the fellow Marine who had pulled his burning body from the crashed F4-U Corsair  on the speck of an island in the Philippines.

“I wasn’t supposed to live,” Saunders said, “but the Marines had developed this new way to treat burns, and as soon as I could, I asked to go back to my unit, so I could find my rescuer.”

When Cpl. Vernon Buss, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic, saw the Corsair explode, he raced to the burning aircraft searching for survivors. He scooped up the unconscious Saunders, carried him to an ambulance and returned to the crash site to rescue others.

Nearly a year later, when his tour ended, Buss returned to his hometown of Portland, worked seven years in a rendering plant then joined the Fire Bureau, where he spent 31 years, retired as battalion chief and even had a fire boat named after him. He and Madge  have been married 63 years; they had four children and are great-grandparents.

“I wondered what had happened to him,” Buss said of Saunders. “But there were other things to do.”

Saunders finished his service – never finding his rescuer – and went back home to Southern California. His back, arms and legs carry the scars from third-degree burns he suffered in the aircraft fire. The back brace he wears daily is another reminder.

Saunders went to veterans’ reunions with the No. 1 aim of finding his rescuer. In 1996, he went to an event wearing a T-shirt silkscreened with an image of an F4-U. A woman approached him and complimented the T-shirt; she said her husband would love to see it.

A moment later, the husband appeared and said his name was Vernon Buss. He and Saunders engaged in the veterans’ eternal guessing game: Where did you serve?

In the Pacific – check. Through Guadalcanal  – check. In the Philippines – check. . . On the island of Samar  . . . Jan. 24, 1945 . . .

Saunders had found him. He gave Buss the T-shirt.

They stayed in touch. Saunders carved a plaque from solid basswood with the Marine Corps’ emblem and presented it to Bass. But that wasn’t thanks enough.

So Saunders got stubborn. Three times, he petitioned the Marine Corps to give Buss a medal. But few witnesses were alive to corroborate events. Finally, he contacted a staff member in the office of U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer  because Buss lived in that House district.

After much back and forth, with Saunders pushing hard, Blumenauer’s office worked out a plan for Rep. Darrell Issa,  R-Calif., who represents Saunders, to read a commendation into the Congressional Record on July 29:

“With total disregard for his own safety, Corporal Buss rushed to the side of Staff Sergeant Irving Saunders and carried him away from the burning aircraft, the burning pools of gasoline and the random detonations of .50 caliber ammunition as it ‘cooked off’ from the Corsair’s burning ammunition supply.”

The Marine Corps in Portland and Blumenauer’s staff arranged for the ceremony in Blumenauer’s district office to present Buss with a framed copy of the Congressional Record statement.

The day before the ceremony, Saunders said he wouldn’t make it. He is 87, after all. Then, “My daughter said, ‘Dad, this is what you’ve worked for! You have to be there! I’ve already bought the plane tickets.’ So, here I am.”

Buss never wanted the attention – Madge Buss said, “Vernon is a very, very modest man” – but he didn’t deter Saunders from his quest.

"I didn’t say, ‘Go to it, pal,’ but I didn’t say, ‘Let it rest,’ " Buss said. “It was obviously very important to him.”

Saunders’s son-in-law, Derek Barton, who accompanied Saunders to Portland, said Buss “literally saved Irv twice: One, in the wreckage; two, it kept him going. He had another will to live, to continue to find this man and to recognize him.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., two Marines in dress uniforms arrived. They invited Buss and Saunders to stand before them for the reading of the Congressional Record commendation.

The veterans stood side by side. Saunders put his arm around Buss’s waist.

When it was over, Buss said, “OK, pal.” Saunders said, “OK, pal.”

After the ceremony and handshakes, Saunders plopped down on a soft couch. Buss’s daughter, Jan, sat with him.

“It was so nice of you to persevere,” she said.

“I could not give up,” Saunders replied.

“Well, now you can rest.”

“Yeah,” he said, “now I can rest.”

By Anne Saker, The Oregonian
October 20, 2009, 7:51PM

August 23, 2009 
By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
His large hands, which once gripped wrenches to dismantle and repair engines on patrol torpedo boats during World War II, are losing their battle to arthritis.

But Navy veteran Ollie J. Talley, 88, of Talent, can still maneuver his stiff and swollen fingers enough to gently open the envelope containing an invitation to attend a memorial Sept. 14 in Arlington National Cemetery at the nation’s Capitol.

Related Stories
Friendly-fire survivor hailed from OklahomaTwo accounts of the incident
Two powerful accounts of the friendly fire incident involving the three PT boats are now in print and online.

“Enemy in the Mirror,” a 136-page, self-published book by Jo Frkovich, daughter-in-law of Navy corpsman John Frkovich, who was aboard PT 346, was published earlier this year. Her story can be read online at www.mailtribune.com/enemyinthemirror.

“Tragedy at Sea,” by Dan Williams, the youngest son of Lt. Robert Williams, who commanded PT 347, is available at www.danwilliamsgraphics.com.

“I got this invite to attend the memorial for my skipper,” he says as he displays the letter. “Our skipper, he was just like a brother to me. He was a prince of a guy.”

The memorial at Arlington will honor Lt. James R. Burk, one of 14 American PT boat crewmen killed by friendly fire on April 29, 1944, in the South Pacific.

Talley is the last surviving member of PT 346, one of three PT boats sunk by a squadron of Marine Corps fighters and bomber planes that mistook the U.S. Navy boats for Japanese gunboats.

When the smoke cleared late that day, of the 50 aboard the boats, 14 were dead and 17 wounded, including Talley.

Two Marine pilots also died, the result of defensive gunfire from the PT boat crews.

Burk was fatally wounded while holding up an 8-foot American flag in an attempt to save his crew by alerting the pilots that they were attacking an American vessel. As he lay dying on the deck, his last order was for Navy corpsman John Frkovich to take his life jacket. The medic reluctantly pulled on the Mae West and lived to help save other wounded sailors that day.

“I’d like to go to the ceremony for the skipper but I can’t,” Talley says. “My hands don’t open and close like they should anymore. And I can’t stand up without hanging onto something. I’ve lost my equilibrium. I don’t know why.”

“It might be because you are 88 years old,” offers Dottie, his wife of nearly 65 years, causing them both to chuckle.

The invitation coming in the autumn of their lives has brought back memories of a time when they were young lovers caught up in a world at war. Like countless other young couples of that era, they would know firsthand separation and sadness.

The crew of PT 346, which Burk had dubbed the “Betty Bee” in honor of his wife, suffered the most with nine killed and nine wounded. Only two sailors on board were physically uninjured in what the U.S. Department of Defense lists as the worst friendly-fire incident involving PT boats.

Talley has a box of paperwork containing Uncle Sam’s investigation of the incident. The reports conclude the catastrophe was caused by pilot error due to miscommunications and misidentification in the turmoil of war.

The old sailor reared in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma puts it another way.

“The Marines sank my boat — that’s what happened,” he says. “But I don’t hold any grudges against nobody. We was all on the same side.”

Talley joined the Navy in 1942 and later was sent to the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn, where PT 346 was being completed. Like others of its line, the craft was 80 feet long and powered by three V-12 Packard gasoline engines. It held 3,000 gallons of high octane aviation fuel, which the three engines could gobble at the rate of 300 gallons an hour when the craft hit speeds that could exceed 40 knots. Its firepower included torpedoes and twin .50-caliber machine guns.

The crew broke in the boat as it traveled down the Eastern seaboard, heading to the Panama Canal. En route, they stopped at New Orleans, where they adopted a feral Irish terrier they named Chopper.

“That was a real buddy of ours, that dog was,” Talley says. "Any stranger tried to stick a foot on that PT boat, he wouldn’t have it.

“When we went through the canal, the natives there came around with a pig and wanted to trade,” he adds. “They wanted to eat that dog. We didn’t trade.”

By summer 1943, his boat, which had been carried piggyback by a Dutch freighter across the vast Pacific Ocean, began patrolling among the array of islands dotting the South Pacific.

“We was just like family,” he says. “You get to living with these guys on an 80-foot boat and you get to know each one real well.”

April 29, 1944
The harrowing incident began when PT 347 became stuck on a reef off Japanese-held Rabaul during a nighttime patrol. PT 350 soon arrived to try to pull the boat off the reef.

At 7 a.m., two high-flying Marine Corps Corsair fighter planes attacked, mistaking the PT boats for Japanese gunboats. The PT 350 crew fired back, believing they were being attacked by enemy aircraft. One Corsair was shot down, killing the pilot.

Talley’s PT 346 powered in to help.

“When we arrived (about 12:30 p.m.) we saw 350 and they was all shot up,” Talley says, noting that PT 347 remained on the reef. “You could see the (Japanese soldiers) on the beach from there. We were ordered to blow up 347 if we couldn’t free the boat.”

PT 346 backed up to the stranded craft so the crew could tie a heavy rope around it.

About 2 p.m., the men spotted a squadron of planes on the horizon.

“We recognized them,” Talley says of the arrival of 22 Marine Corps fighters and bombers. “We knew they were Corsairs, Hellcats and Dauntlesses. We thought it was our air cover. So we went back to trying to get the boat off the reef.”

After all, the PT 346 crew had contacted its headquarters about the earlier attack, asking for aerial protection from the Southwest Pacific Command headed by Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The problem, Talley explains, is that the squadron was from the adjacent South Pacific Command, whose top military boss was Adm. Chester Nimitz. The general and admiral had no use for each other, resulting in limited communication between the two commands.

“Today, we have Republicans and Democrats against each other,” Talley says. “Back then, we had that in MacArthur and Nimitz. They had a problem with each other.”

The pilots, looking for Japanese gunboats, believed they had found their prey. The squadron included four Corsair fighters, six Avenger dive-bombers, four Hellcat fighters and eight Dauntless dive-bombers.

“The first bomb went right under my engine room and blew my engines and batteries all out of whack,” Talley recalls. “When I climbed up out of there, I saw the skipper had been mowed down.”

The boat, made of plywood and mahogany, was sinking when the last bomber came around, he says. Their radio was knocked out.

“We had no guns left,” he says. “I’m still on the boat, trying to get this cork life raft off when he comes in. He dropped his flaps and put a 1,000-pound bomb right in the middle of our boat. When it blew, it knocked me right out of my shoes.”

Nightmare in the water
Chopper, who had been wounded in the face by shrapnel, came swimming up to Talley, who shared his life preserver with him. But their nightmare was just beginning.

“That’s when the planes started strafing us,” Talley says. "It seems like every plane that came was lining up with me. I’m sure the other guys must have had the same feeling.

“I’d see the smoke go out of the guns up there, then the bullets would start hitting the water ahead of me,” he says.

Each time, Talley would dive under water to the point where the .50-caliber bullets’ velocity would be spent. One bullet hit his pants, but didn’t puncture the cloth. Miraculously, Chopper was not hit by a bullet.

The ordeal went on for at least an hour and a half, possibly two hours, he says. The bodies of eight members of PT 346, including an Army officer who came along as an observer, sank below the waves as Talley fought to survive.

“Up until then, I was never afraid of being shot — I was always afraid of sharks,” Talley says. “But I never thought of sharks during that time I was in the water.”

Baptism by bullets
Talley says he was not a religious man before that day, but he became converted during the baptism of bullets.

"I remember I said, ‘Lord, if it would only rain they wouldn’t be able to see us,’ " he says. “Well, it rained and they went away. I wasn’t a believer until that day.”

At 5:30 p.m., a Navy seaplane looking for a second Hellcat pilot who was shot down came flying in low and discovered the victims of the friendly fire.

Talley was among the crew members initially picked up late that day and taken to a hospital on Green Island. Although he had a shrapnel wound behind his left ear and his left leg had been blown forward at the knee during the explosion, causing his knee to swell up like a water balloon, he refused aid, insisting the doctors help those in worse shape.

Other survivors were not rescued until after 10 p.m., when two PT boats arrived.

‘I don’t hold any grudges’
After Talley recovered, he took a leave to his parents’ home in California with Chopper. His crewmates had decided he should adopt the dog.

“I hate to tell you what happened to him, after him being a survivor of what happened to us,” Talley says. “About a month after I left him, he was chasing a rabbit in a grape vineyard and some kid shot him with a .22 (caliber) rifle. My dad rushed him to the veterinarian but he passed away.”

Talley was discharged Sept. 6, 1945, as a motor machinist mate first class.

Looking back on the most horrific day of his life, Talley says he has no animosity toward the Marine pilots. He recalls being visited in the hospital by the pilot who had dropped the 1,000-pound bomb on PT 346.

"He said, ‘If you ever need anything a’tall, here’s my name and my folks’ address in Kansas,’ " Talley says. "I had that about a week and I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I tore it up.

“We was all out there for the same purpose,” Talley says. “It was a mistake. I don’t hold any grudges.”

George Tweed is buried at Eagle Point National Cemetery about 15 miles from my house and this time of the year the local press helps remind of his story. 2 links to his story.

http://www.guampedia.com/category/124-world-war-ii/entry/371-george-tweed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ray_Tweed

By Jason Cumming
msnbc.com
updated 3:48 a.m. PT, Fri., June 5, 2009
SLAPTON SANDS, England - Lured across the English Channel by an unexpected frenzy of radio chatter, the Nazi predators sliced through the waves toward an unknown enemy.
It was shortly after midnight on April 28, 1944. Within a matter of 2-1/2 hours, an ambush by a German E-boat flotilla had brought misery to hundreds of American families.
A secret dress rehearsal for D-Day had been interrupted with deadly consequences.
Nicknamed “Long Slow Targets” by their crews, the U.S. landing craft proved to be no match for the 50-mph German torpedo boats. The hit-and-run attack left two American vessels ablaze and sinking. A third had been struck in the stern and was badly damaged.
As hundreds of American servicemen floundered amid the burning oil and cold water off England’s southern coast, futile cries of “help” and “mom” echoed across the darkness. At least 749 U.S. sailors and soldiers would be dead by dawn.
Code-named Exercise Tiger, the ill-fated D-Day dry run was at the time America’s costliest incident of the war (only Pearl Harbor was worse). The attack claimed more than three times as many lives as the amphibious landing at Utah Beach in France, the assault they had been practicing for at Slapton Sands in picturesque Devon county.
But now, 65 years after the disaster was hushed-up by military chiefs, historians believe lessons learned from the little-known tragedy helped to ensure the success of the D-Day landings less than six weeks later.
“These people were training for a military operation in the midst of a war,” said Dr. Harry Bennett, a World War II expert based at Britain’s University of Plymouth. “Without Exercise Tiger, the liberation of Normandy, France and Europe might have been a more protracted and bloody process.”
Haunted by carnage
For the servicemen who made it back to shore, such sentiments don’t make the horrors they witnessed any easier to bear.
Many survivors say it isn’t memories of Utah or Omaha beaches that haunt them decades later. It’s the carnage of the pre-invasion practice gone wrong that live on in their nightmares.
Steve Sadlon, who was a radio operator aboard the first landing craft struck by the German E-boats that night, recalls being awakened by the “scraping” sound of a torpedo that failed to detonate. Moments later, an explosion ripped through LST 507, which was fully loaded with trucks, military equipment and soldiers. (LST is an acronym for Landing Ship, Tank.)
It was an inferno," said Sadlon, speaking from his home in Ilion in upstate New York. "The fire was circling the ship. It was terrible.
“Guys were burning to death and screaming. Even to this day I remember it. Every time I go to bed, it pops into my head. I can’t forget it.”
Sadlon, who was aged 20 at the time, retrieved his pistol and a floatation belt before leaping into the frigid English Channel.
“Guys were grabbing hold of us and we had to fight them off,” he recalled. “Guys were screaming, ‘Help, help, help’ and then you wouldn’t hear their voices anymore.”
Tracers light the sky
Paul Gerolstein, then a gunner’s mate 2nd class, recalls a fireball rising “60 or 70 feet in the air” after Sadlon’s LST was struck by the second torpedo.
“Our radar gave us the German positions and we started to return fire,” said Gerolstein, an 88-year-old retired police lieutenant who now lives in Port Charlotte, Fla. "I vividly remember the German tracers were light green while our tracers were red.
"The convoy was given orders to scatter and the battle was over before we knew it.
“But my captain, John Doyle, decided to stay. ‘We came here to fight the Germans and we will stay here and fight,’ he ordered. We went back and threw cargo nets over the side and picked up 70 or 80 survivors.”
Gerolstein recalls working with a “strong as a bull” colleague named Gerhard Jensen to pull seven or eight wounded servicemen to safety.

Sadlon ended up spending about four hours in the frigid English Channel before he was finally hauled aboard an American landing craft. Unconscious and suffering from hypothermia, he was initially mistaken for dead.
But, like many Exercise Tiger survivors, he would participate in the D-Day landings just 40 days later.
“In comparison to the E-boat attack, Utah Beach was a walk in the park,” Sadlon said.
D-Day nearly scrapped
The deadly ambush left Allied commanders rattled. Ten U.S. officers with detailed knowledge of the looming Normandy invasion were missing and the possibility that any of them been taken prisoner on the German E-boats was a major concern. Scrapping “Operation Overlord,” the name given to the D-Day landings, was discussed at the highest levels.
But the emergency ended when all ten bodies were eventually recovered. The German crews had no idea they had stumbled upon a secret test run for the Normandy invasion.
The reverberations of the disaster, though, were to last for decades. Determined to ensure the sneak attack would not jeopardize the planned D-Day assaults and concerned about the impact on morale, historians say the U.S. military moved to keep the disaster cloaked in secrecy.
Doctors treating injured soldiers and sailors at English hospitals were told to act as if they were veterinarians treating animals. Injuries and ailments only. No questions were to be asked about what had occurred. Medical staff were also told not to keep any records. 
Officials informed victims’ families simply that they were “missing in action” after maneuvers at sea. The servicemen were threatened with court-martial if they ever discussed what had occurred. Many took the “ever” very literally.
Nathan Resnick, who was aboard one of the other landing craft in the attacked convoy, said: “We were told not to say anything. I was married for 40-something years and never told my wife a word.”
Frank Derby, a gunner’s mate 3rd class who now lives in Fallston, Md., added: “Our officers made it very clear that we’d be court-martialed if we breathed a word of it. That scared the hell out of all of us.”
After the war ended, the vast majority of the men who returned to the U.S. kept their mouths shut.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government also kept mum. In 1954, the U.S. Army unveiled a granite obelisk at Slapton Sands recognizing the sacrifices made by 3,000 local residents who a decade earlier had “generously left their homes and their lands” for several months so the area could be transformed into an almost-real battlefield.
Because the 3-1/4 mile stretch of coast closely resembled Utah Beach, the U.S. military had taken over 30,000 acres of English soil for a series of mock landings including Exercise Tiger. The live-fire rehearsals were intended to toughen up raw servicemen before they stormed the beaches of occupied France.
But the Army’s marker made no mention of the huge loss of American life that occurred on April 28, 1944.
It would be 30 more years before Ken Small, a local guesthouse owner who became troubled by the story of Exercise Tiger after finding bullets, shrapnel and buttons on the beach, would right what he perceived as a wrong.
Small, who died in 2004, fought for more than a decade to recover a submerged Sherman tank that had been found about a mile offshore. It now serves as a memorial to the American servicemen who were killed.
“Exercise Tiger was a bit of an embarrassment but that is no excuse to not recognize the hundreds of men who died,”  said Small’s son Dean, who is director of the non-profit group behind the Slapton Sands Memorial Tank. “It’s important that people understand all aspects of war. It’s not all glory and planting flags at the top of hills.”
Lessons learned
Dr. Bennett cited the need for more co-ordination between the U.S. and British navies was the key lesson learned during Exercise Tiger. A typo in order papers meant ships from each country were using different radio frequencies on the night of the deadly attack. Communication would become a top priority before D-Day.
Dr. Bennett said the Exercise Tiger disaster also “underscored” the importance of adequate escorts for naval convoys and of quelling the threat from German E-boats.
“After D-Day, the Allied forces specifically went after them to neutralize that threat by taking them out of the equation,” he added.
The three-mile long American convoy was also only assigned one escort vessel. A second British ship that was due to accompany them — a World War I-era destroyer — had suffered minor damage to its hull hours earlier and was kept in port.
“It was a disastrous attack. The Germans were in the right place at the right time and the Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Dr. Bennett, the author of “Destination Normandy: Three American Regiments on D-Day.”
“It was a horrendous situation, but whenever you’re training for war there’s always going to be casualties and accidents.”
Steve Mutton, 38, a Chicago-born local historian who moved to England as a teenager, said that Exercise Tiger was “all about doing everything exactly the same way as it would be done on D-Day to see what mistakes would come out of it.”
He said the attack on the convoy revealed the lack of training U.S. troops had received. For instance, many of those who died in the English Channel failed to use their floatation devices properly.
“Because they were called life belts, many men put them around their waists instead of their chests and with the heavy kit they were carrying they toppled over head-first in the water and drowned,” Mutton added.
Command errors?
Lessons may have been learned, but survivor Resnick, 85, who now lives in Van Nuys, Calif., remains convinced the victims were badly let down by American and British commanders. The disaster, he insists, could have been avoided if the convoy had been assigned adequate support from escort vessels.
“It was a tragic night,” he said. "High Command really goofed. We were basically all alone out there. There’s no excuse. We should’ve had quite a few escorts on a big operation like that. There were plenty of escort vessels around because they were getting ready for D-Day.
"High Command had reports of E-boat activity. That should’ve been a red flag. They just didn’t pay attention to it.
"So many young men — 18, 19, 20 — perished. They deserved better.
“Their families should’ve been told the whole truth. It’s really not right.”
Eisenhower criticized
While historians dismiss claims of a cover-up by pointing out that some details of the Exercise Tiger deaths were released in August 1944 and highlighting that many documents relating to it were declassified long ago, some survivors have more questions than answers about what happened that night.
Sadlon, who was a 3rd class petty officer at the time, only learned of the death toll when fellow veterans started to defy the gag order 40 years on, allowing the puzzle to be pieced together.
“Nothing was said about all of those guys who lost their lives,” said Sadlon, 86.
“With E-boats and submarines out there, why would you send 9 LSTs into the English Channel with just one escort? If (Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D.) Eisenhower was alive, I’d really lay into him.”
Laurie Bolton, whose 19-year-old uncle Sgt. Louis Archer Bolton was killed during Exercise Tiger, believes the military’s decision to hush up the attack resulted in victims and their families being treated with a lack of respect.
Her family was initially only told that he was “missing in action.” Her uncle’s body was never recovered.

Holding out vain hope
Amid prayers that her uncle may still be alive, Bolton’s family, including his teenage widow, Wilma, never held a proper memorial service.
“We never really knew what happened to my uncle,” said Laurie Bolton. "Because there was no body, his mother held out hope that he’d been captured by the Germans and suffered amnesia.
“It was many years after the war was over before she accepted it.”
Bolton, 56, from Kingsburg, Calif., now organizes regular visits for survivors and victims’ families to the Sherman tank memorial in England. The U.S. government also provided a plaque at the site in 1987.
“We have no grave to visit but the memorial is close to where my uncle took his last breath,” Bolton said. "When I’m there, I sometimes just sit on the beach and imagine him pulling on his gear and getting settled and the ship going out — and suddenly this huge explosion.
"I don’t believe they received adequate recognition. It was a military blunder and the military doesn’t want to talk about its blunders.
“It brings comfort to some of the veterans that important lessons were learned during Exercise Tiger that saved lives on D-Day.”

Was anyone else aware of the most Southerly German grave?

today is the day

The Doolittle Raid, 18 April 1942, was the first air raid by the United States to strike a Japanese home island (Honshū) during World War II. It demonstrated that Japan itself was vulnerable to Allied air attack and provided an expedient means for U.S. retaliation for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941. The raid was planned and led by Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle. Doolittle would later recount in his autobiography that the raid was intended to cause the Japanese to doubt their leadership and to raise American morale:

The Japanese had been told they were invulnerable. An attack on the Japanese homeland would cause confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders.

There was a second, equally important, psychological reason for this attack…Americans badly needed a morale boost.

Sixteen B-25B Mitchell bombers were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet deep within enemy waters. The plan called for them to hit military targets in Japan, and land in China although one B-25 landed in Soviet territory and the crew was interned in the Soviet Union for more than a year. All 16 aircraft were lost and 11 crewmen were either killed or captured. The crews of 14 aircraft, in their entirety returned safely to the United States or to Allied control.

B-25 aircraft of the Doolittle Raid
In order of launching, the 16 aircraft were:

AAF serial # Nickname Sqdn Target Pilot Disposition
40-2344  34th BS Tokyo Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle crashed N Chuchow, China
40-2292  37th BS Tokyo Lt. Travis Hoover crashed-landed Ningpo, China
40-2270 Whiskey Pete 95th BS Tokyo Lt. Robert M. Gray crashed SE Chuchow, China
40-2282  95th BS Tokyo Lt. Everett W. Holstrom crashed SE Shangjao, China
40-2283  95th BS Tokyo Capt. David M. Jones crashed SW Chuchow, China
40-2298 The Green Hornet 95th BS Tokyo Lt. Dean E. Hallmark ditched at sea Wenchu, China
40-2261 The Ruptured Duck 95th BS Tokyo Lt. Ted W. Lawson ditched at sea Shangchow, China
40-2242  95th BS Tokyo Capt. Edward J. York interned Primorsky Krai, Siberia
40-2303 Whirling Dervish 34th BS Tokyo Lt. Harold F. Watson crashed S Nanchang, China
40-2250  89th RS Tokyo Lt. Richard O. Joyce crashed NE Chuchow, China
40-2249 Hari Kari-er 89th RS Yokohama Capt. C. Ross Greening crashed NE Chuchow, China
40-2278 Fickle Finger of Fate 37th BS Yokohama Lt. William M. Bower crashed NE Chuchow, China
40-2247 The Avenger 37th BS Yokosuka Lt. Edgar E. McElroy crashed N Nanchang, China
40-2297  89th RS Nagoya Maj. John A. Hilger crashed SE Shangjao, China
40-2267 TNT 89th RS Kobe Lt. Donald G. Smith ditched at sea Shangchow, China
40-2268 Bat Out of Hell 34th BS Nagoya Lt. William G. Farrow crashed S Ningpo, China

Germany was actively involved in the Southern Hemisphere: and here is another interesting tidbit involving Kerguelen Island:

In the past, a number of expeditions briefly visited the islands, including that of Captain James Cook in 1776. In 1874–75, British, German and US expeditions visited Kerguelen to observe the transit of Venus.[2]

The German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis called at Kerguelen during December 1940. During their stay the crew performed maintenance and replenished their water supplies. This ship’s first fatality of the war occurred when a sailor fell while painting the funnel. He is buried in what is sometimes referred to as “the most southerly German grave” of the Second World War.

Kerguelen has been continually occupied since 1950 by scientific research teams, with a population of fifty to one hundred frequently present.[1] There is also a French satellite tracking station.

U.S. WWII shipwreck found off Australia’s coast
Freighter struck a German mine a year before the U.S. entered the war
updated 9:07 a.m. PT, Tues., April 7, 2009
MELBOURNE, Australia - The rusting wreck of the first American vessel sunk during World War II has been found off Australia’s southeastern coast, ocean researchers said Thursday.

The MV City of Rayville, a freighter carrying a cargo of lead, wool and copper from Australia to New York, sank in the Bass Strait after striking a German mine on Nov. 8, 1940, a year before the United States entered the war.

One seaman drowned while trying to recover personal items from the sinking vessel but the 37 other crew survived.
The approximate location of the wreck — about 8.5 miles from Cape Otway in the strait that separates mainland Australia from the island state of Tasmania — had been known since 2002 but it was too deep to be precisely located.

Researchers at Deakin University found the vessel 230 feet underwater by using state-of-the-art sonar equipment during a research project to map the seabed off the state of Victoria.

“It was very exciting to see the City of Rayville for the first time,” research leader Daniel Ierodiaconou said in a statement.

The merchant vessel, owned by the International Mercantile Marine Company in New York, was under charter to the United States Maritime Commission during its journey to Australia.

The freighter was found upright on its keel, with a slight list, and has become an artificial reef for marine life, researchers said.

Maritime archaeologist Cassandra Philippou of Heritage Victoria, which oversees historic sites in Victoria state, said that a hatch cover near the stern was missing, consistent with reports that covers were blown off by the explosion.

Heritage Victoria was not involved in the research but provided the vessel’s approximate coordinates to the Deakin team and said the discovery will help develop a plan for maintaining the wreck site.

The Rayville was the second ship to be sunk by one of 100 German mines laid in Bass Strait. The British steamer SS Cambridge was destroyed nearby a day earlier.

British code crackers reunite, with pride unbroken

Mike Hillyard, one of the volunteers who rebuilt a replica of the Turing Bombe machine that played a crucial part in cracking the Nazi Enigma Code, stands by the machine at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, England, Tuesday, March 24, 2009. The original machine was destroyed after the war but volunteers rebuilt the replica that received a special Engineering Heritage Award on Tuesday to mark its place in history. (AP Photo/Akira Suemori)

By Gregory Katz, Associated Press Writer
BLETCHLEY PARK, England — During World War II, the best brains in Britain cracked Germany’s encrypted secrets but never broke their own code of silence.
Now gray-haired and using walking sticks and at least one wheelchair, the legendary code breakers returned for a reunion Tuesday at Bletchley Park, where they labored in the grim, blacked-out rooms and played a key role in defeating the Nazis.

The code breakers who worked here in anonymity helped alter history, frustrating Adolf Hitler’s ambitions by giving Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wartime Cabinet crucial advance knowledge of Germany’s invasion plans, defenses, and U-boat movements.

Age has not dimmed the code breakers’ fierce pride. They don’t boast – the British don’t do that – but they know they saved lives.

“Do you know what Churchill called us?” said Jean Valentine, 84, her blue eyes flashing. “He called us ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.’”

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Germany | London | Britain | Atlantic | Nazi | Adolf Hitler | Winston Churchill | Allied | Battle | Peggy | D-Day | U-boat | Alan Turing | Enigma | Jean Valentine | Bletchley Park | Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Tuesday’s event was to honor a rebuilt replica of the Turing Bombe, the machine invented by mathematician Alan Turing that was an outsized forerunner of the modern computer. That invention deciphered the Germans’ top-secret messages that were encoded by the Nazis’ typewriter-like Enigma machines.

“It was like getting a newspaper of German material every day,” said Andrew Hodges, author of a biography about Turing. “The war would have been very different without it.”

The real heroes were the hundreds of mathematicians, cryptographers, crossword puzzle aficionados, chess masters and other experts who spent their days and nights operating the machines at Bletchley Park, about 40 miles northwest of London.

They knew they would be targeted by waves of German bombers if word of their location leaked. That never happened, although three bombs did land nearby. It is believed the target was a nearby train station, not Bletchley Park itself.

Their work provided crucial information in the Battle of the Atlantic, the desert campaign against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the preparations for D-Day.

For decades after the war, they were prohibited from talking about their top-secret work. But those restrictions began being lifted in the 1970s, allowing them to tell their friends and family what they had really done during the war.

Finally, the geese could truly cackle – but traditional British reserve kept them from saying too much.

“We really didn’t know what we were doing other than breaking German codes,” said Valentine, a teenager during the war. “You weren’t supposed to ask questions. You weren’t supposed to know what was in the messages. No one knew anything about what anyone else was doing. It was strictly compartmentalized.”

The sense of accomplishment came, she said, when a supervisor would say “Job up.” That meant they had managed to decode another message for the military.

“That gave us enormous satisfaction,” Valentine said.

The pleasure was fleeting, however, because there was always another message waiting to be decrypted. The job was never finished – until the Nazi regime collapsed.

Ruth Bourne, 83, said the lifting of secrecy rules has allowed many of the code breakers to finally learn how important the operation truly was at a time when Britain’s very existence was threatened.

“We’ve researched and found out an enormous amount about how important this was,” she said. “Now I feel much more excited about it than I ever did when I was working on it.”

The secret activities at Bletchley Park provided the setting for the 2001 romantic thriller “Enigma,” which starred Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, as well as other movies and spy novels.

The focus Tuesday was on fact, not fiction, and on the real lives shaped within these walls. For many, the reunion and the rebuilt replica of the Turing Bombe brought back a flood of memories.

All the Turing Bombe machines were destroyed after the war on Churchill’s orders, because of security concerns, but the replica has been painstakingly rebuilt, a process that took 13 years. It was briefly switched on Tuesday, turning back the years.

“It’s a pleasure to see the machine because that is my wife’s legacy,” said retired Brig. Patrick Erskine-Tulloch, 90, remembering his wife, Peggy, who died six years ago. “She was an instructor and taught dozens of ladies how to use that machine. It was my wife’s big thing in life, even though she always played it down.”

He credits two people for the success of the code-breaking operation: Churchill, for his determination, and Turing, the early computer whiz.

Erskine-Tulloch endorses the widely held view that the success of the Bletchley Park code breakers saved an untold number of lives by hastening the Allied victory.

“The great thing is that the Germans never realized we’d broken their code,” he said. “Otherwise they would have done something about it. They thought it was unbreakable.”

---

Associated Press writer Dean Carson contributed to this report.

A year since the last post

A year since the last post