WW2HANGAR.NET

As France prepares to mark the 70th anniversary next week of Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms against the Nazis, one village is trying to forget the darker side of the wartime resistance.

After furious protests, Coussay-les-Bois, in the rolling green farmland of Poitou, has decided it is too early to allow a German man to put up a memorial to his father and 16 other Wehrmacht prisoners who were executed there in September 1944.

The quarrel testifies to lingering bitterness over the Nazi occupation in a part of France that suffered multiple atrocities, and to a reluctance to touch the heroic image of the young insurgents who fought them.

“If they put a plaque there, it will be smashed within a day,” said Jean Herault, who was a 16-year-old fighter in the bloody summer of 1944. Mr Herault, a retired blacksmith, recalled the day in June that year when the Germans took 120 villagers to roadside ditches and prepared to shoot them in reprisal for an attack from the Maquis underground movement.

They were spared after the intervention of a priest, but Mr Herault was forced to watch later that evening as three of his young comrades were executed. One was 17.

They are commemorated at a memorial to the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) but no-one wants to be reminded of the night of September 9 when the German prisoners were machine-gunned against the school wall.

Officially, the massacre never happened. It figures in no histories, only in local memory. It came to light because of the dogged effort by Rudolph Greuel, 67, to find out what happened to his father, a sergeant-major with a Wehrmacht construction battalion. Mr Greuel, a former editor of the Kolnische Rundschau newspaper, unearthed the truth with the help of a German survivor and a French journalist.

Andreas Greuel was an unusually old 47 when he fled the coastal defences at St Malo, riding bicycles and horses ahead of the advancing Allies. A French SAS unit parachuted in from Britain captured his group as it crossed Poitou, still behind German lines.

The Maquis at Coussay put the men to work in the fields for a few days before tying them up and taking them to the village to be shot. Local women persuaded “Lieutenant Pierre”, the maquisard in charge, to spare a few of them. The 17 bodies were dumped in unmarked graves and in 1961 were reburied in a German cemetery at Mont Saint Michel. In 2003 the school wall which bore the impacts from the firing squad was demolished…

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Vandals daubed Nazi graffiti on British war graves in northern France, prompting a strong condemnation from President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday in a letter to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Police said they found swastikas and other graffiti including “SS” and an obscene drawing in pink paint on a dozen graves of British soldiers at the northern cemetery of Loos-en-Gohelle, the site of a major World War I battle.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission sent a special team to clean the graves.

Sarkozy expressed “indignation and consternation” in a letter to the queen, branding the desecrations “all the more revolting” since they came a week before he visits London for a commemoration of French resistance during World War II.

“I condemn with the greatest firmness this horrible act and ask you to pass on my feelings of sympathy and solidarity, and those of the French people, to the families concerned and to all of the British people,” Sarkozy wrote.

Numerous desecrations of Jewish, Muslim and German graves have been reported in France in recent years.

However officials said the attack on the British graves did not seem to have been politically motivated.

“I think it is a marginal act, a bit of idiocy,” said the mayor of Loos, Jean-Francois Caron. “There are a few inscriptions about all kinds of different things.”…

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British code-breaking institution Bletchley Park has teamed up with technology firm HP in a bid to digitize millions of Second World War documents to make them available online.

HP has donated document-scanning equipment and software to Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes to accomplish the task.

During the Second World War, a number of mathematicians and cryptography experts worked at Bletchley Park to break the code used by Germany’s Enigma machine. The efforts believed to have saved the country from further devastation.

Currently the majority of information is available only in paper format that is hard to view and handle.

Moreover, digitizing the documents will ensure the preservation of the fragile hard copies.

Speaking on the move, Bletchley Park Trust’s director Simon Greenish said, “This will help preserve and considerably increase access to the historic fragile materials.”
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An Australian trekker said he has discovered the site of a significant World War II battle in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, complete with the remains of Japanese soldiers right where they fell almost 70 years ago.

Former army Capt. Brian Freeman, an expert on the Kokoda Trail – a 60-mile trek through rugged mountainous country and rainforest of the island – said Monday he was led to the Eora Creek battle site where he found the remains of the soldiers.

The site about half a mile from the village of Eora Creek was believed to be the location of the last major battle that was pivotal in Australia’s campaign against the Japanese in Papau New Guinea.

Although the site was known to local villages, jungles reclaimed it after the battle of Eora Creek. Although locals hunted on the plateau surrounding the site, they avoided the 600-square-meter battle ground because of a belief that spirits of the dead were still present in the “lost battlefield.”…

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On a grey Thursday morning in May, rain-laden clouds were lying low over Buckow, situated on the edges of the Oder river valley, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Berlin.

When I arrived there, Erwin Kowalke was just donning rubber boots and a green parka, telling me to hurry because rain would make digging a tedious job. The 68-year-old was hastily packing a spade, a yardstick and a metal detector onto his pickup truck.

Five crosses and the caption “Work for Peace” in seven languages were emblazoned on the door of the vehicle – the logo and motto of the “Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge,” the German humanitarian organization where Kowalke works and which is responsible for finding and indentifying missing German soldiers.

On the evening before, Kowalke had gotten a call from a team of ammunitions experts in charge of clearing a route for a Russian gas pipeline to be built in the region.

“They’ve found bones,” he said while we were heading towards Halbe, a town southeast of Berlin. “They say it could be a soldier because there are also pieces of a uniform.”

Later on the journey, he added: “You know, a Russian Field Marshall from the 18th century once said that a war wasn’t over until the last fallen soldiers had been properly buried. I believe there’s much truth in this.”…

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The site, in Buckinghamshire, is being given £250,000 to pay for urgently-needed work including the resurfacing of pot-holed roads and car parks.

There will also be new roofs for the buildings where codebreakers cracked the German Enigma codes during the war, which now form a museum. Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw announced the funding on a visit to Bletchley Park on Thursday.

He said: ”The work carried out at Bletchley Park had a huge impact on the course of the war, and the museum does a brilliant job in bringing this alive for people of all ages.

”But having doubled its visitor numbers over the last three years, it urgently needs funds to keep it in good condition.”

Simon Greenish, chief executive officer of the Bletchley Park Trust, said the funding showed that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport endorsed the site as ”a place of national importance that deserves Government support”…

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Interestingly enough, Google Earth is a great tool to explore places around the globe you may not be able to get to otherwise. But it does not ends just there, it takes you back in time. Google Earth has now made available historical aerial images taken during the Second World War depicting the extent of the devastation in several European Cities caused by bombing raids during World War II.

The Google Earth mapping software has been uploaded with the wartime images from 35 European cities and towns such as Berlin, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden, showing the effect of the extensive bombing campaigns on the old continent. These images clearly display the destruction of allied bombing raids, then offers current satellite photos for comparison.

In announcing the feature, Ed Parsons, Google’s Geospatial Technologist, said, “Many of us have heard stories, read books and watched films which show the many impacts of WWII across the world. Now we are offering you another way to understand this period in time — by exploring a new set of historical aerial images, taken over European cities during World War II. We hope that this World War II imagery will enable all of us to understand our shared history in a new way and to learn more about the impact of the war on the development of our cities.”

If you wish to see the most extraordinary difference, you can see the historic photos of Warsaw from 1935 and 145 to the present day. The firs images exhibits the heavy devastation caused to the Polish capital during the war, along with the city’s infamous thriving Jewish ghetto entirely intact — the largest in Nazi-occupied Europe. The pictures near the end of the war depict the heavy damage to the Polish capital, which had to be extensively rebuilt…

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The campaign follows the Belgian government’s decision to close 23 barracks across the country by 2011, including the so-called ‘Heinz’ barracks at Bastogne where US General Anthony McAuliffe had his headquarters during famous Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

The announcement by defence minister Pieter de Crem has caused a storm of protest among US and British war veterans as well as many other people living in Belgium.
A war veteran’s group has written to Howard Gutman, new-appointed American ambassador to Belgium, appealing to him to intervene and help halt the closure.

The barracks is the home of the Belgian 1st Field Artillery Regiment, currently deployed in Afghanistan, and also houses a small museum dedicated to the sacrifice made by US and British troops.

The Battle of the Bulge has special significance for allied war veterans as it is seen as key turning point in WW2.

From 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, a snow-covered Bastogne was encircled by German troops and appeared set to capitulate. Within the small town set deep in the Ardennes forest close to the border with Luxembourg were thousands of US soldiers, including the 101st Airborne Division, commanded by McAuliffe, whose HQ was in a cellar of the barracks now earmarked for closure.

It was from here on December 22, 1944 that the German Commander Heinrich Freiherr von Luttwitz sent McAuliffe a note demanding the Americans surrender, to which McAuliffe famously sent a terse reply which read, “NUTS!”

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The Maunsell Sea Forts in the estuaries of rivers Thames and Mersey were built to help defend the United Kingdom during the second World War. They were designed by Guy Maunsell in 1942 to house anti-aircraft guns and search lights, to shoot down German bombers on air raids. Maunsell designed two kinds of sea fort one for the Army and the other one for the Navy.

Guy Maunsell also went on to design the concrete mulberry harbours later on in the War for the D Day Landings. According to historical reports, these forts helped the British Army and Navy shoot down 22 enemy aircraft and about 30 flying bombs. The fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway…

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The “Mighty Mo,” the World War II battleship best known for hosting the formal surrender of Japan in 1945, is heading to the shipyard for repairs.

The USS Missouri, now a decommissioned vessel called the Battleship Missouri Memorial, will leave its historic spot at Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor in October. The move will come shortly after the vessel on Wednesday hosts a ceremony marking the 64th anniversary of Japan’s surrender. U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, and Ret. Lt. Gen. Wallace “Chip” Gregson, newly sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Defense, are scheduled to speak at the event.

At least 20 World War II veterans are expected to attend, including 89-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor Edward F. Borucki of Southampton, Mass. “It’s a sentimental journey,” Borucki said, who lost 33 shipmates when a Japanese torpedo and bombs hit the USS Helena.

The 65-year-old ship is in good shape, but it still needs to go to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard for repairs because rust is protruding from peeling paint in areas and the teak wood deck is warped and bent in others. The warship’s exterior is due to be sanded down and repainted in a $15 million overhaul paid for by memorial reserve funds and a Department of Defense grant.

“Rust never sleeps as they say,” said Michael Carr, the memorial’s president. “It’s a big job. It has to be done.”

Most of the work will be done after the 887-foot ship is put into a closed dock and the water around it is drained. This will allow workers to paint the entire hull, even parts that are normally submerged. Some of the repairs have already begun pierside, however. Tourists visiting the ship now can see scaffolding encircling the ship’s mast.

Memorial officials have started warning Hawaii tour operators they’ll be shut down for three months starting mid-October. The historic ship is due to return to Pier Foxtrot 5 in early January and resume welcoming visitors shortly after. More than 400,000 visitors tour the vessel each year…

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Prior to the beginning of Word War II, the community of Kranj, Slovenia began construction of an underground tunnel system that could be used to shelter and protect city residents. The tunnels, which had been a forgotten part of World War II history, have recently been cleaned and are now available for guided tours.

Construction of the entire Kranj tunnel system was conducted by 130 hired workers who used reinforced concrete to build the two meter-wide tunnels. The workers completed construction by the end of 1944, however there was not enough material or time to install a protective concrete coating. The tunnel network includes a 1,300 meter-long bunker that was frequently used by citizens in the last several months of World War II, when there was increased danger from allied bombings being conducted from Italy.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the dark, moist tunnels were used to grow champignons. After stopping mushroom cultivation, the growers left all the dirtiness in the tunnels. The Speleological Society of Kranj started cleaning the tunnels in 2003 with help from numerous volunteers. Today, stalactites and stalagmites grow from the ceiling and ground, while animals such as cave crickets, bats and the European cave spider can still be found living there. The Tourism Board of Kranj is now responsible for the contents and exhibitions in the tunnels.

These tours offer a rare look at the extreme measures taken by European residents to protect their families and friends during the ravages of the Second World War. Travelers considering trips to Slovenian tourist farms should consider a side trip to Kranj to see this fascinating artifact from World War II.

Poles and Germans set aside old rancor Friday and united in grief as they reburied the bones of 2,116 people believed to be German civilians killed in the final, vicious months of World War II. Wooden coffins — 119 of them, each topped with white carnations and containing the remains of more than a dozen people — were laid out side-by-side in a vast grave at a German war cemetery in Stare Czarnowo, a Polish village near the border with Germany.

Religious leaders blessed the remains and mourners tossed red roses onto the coffins as the service drew to a close.

“We have gathered here to properly bury and pay respect to the World War II victims,” Bishop Marian Kruszylowicz, a Roman Catholic leader from the nearby city of Szczecin, said during a 90-minute ceremony held in German and Polish. “We owe them that.”

About 300 people attended, most of them Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II when Europe’s borders were redrawn. German Ambassador Michael H. Gerdts and city officials from Malbork, where the remains were found, also attended. On Sept. 1, German Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to attend ceremonies in Poland marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the war, which began with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Forensic experts and anthropologists believe the victims are most probably German civilians who died in early 1945 in Malbork, at the time the German city of Marienburg. However, no documents, clothes or personal belongings were found with them except for a pair of children’s glasses.

“What is most painful about these victims is that there is nothing to give them any identity,” said Sibylle Greher, a member of a group that represents Germans expelled from Eastern Europe. “And that suggests that something really terrible must have happened to them. It shows the hatred at the end of the war in that region.”..

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The former sentinel was created as a vital part of Britain’s defence against the Nazis but is now available as a designer four-bedroom home.

It was used by a farmer as a potato store after the war until it was snapped up by a developer. The property – aptly named The Bunker – is situated at St Levan in Cornwall and was positioned to give the armed forces a bird’s-eye view of Land’s End. Developer Liz Strutton, 38, bought it for £145,000 with and converted it into an underground home which has spectacular views from its grassy roof.

Liz said she and her husband Mike had spent the same again refurbishing the property. It has now been put on the market for £350,000. She said: “It’s an amazing place. It’s so secluded that it’s the sort of place you could live your life as a recluse.

“When we first looked around, it really was just an empty concrete shell. There was nothing in it from the war, apart from a box of old fuses. “There were no guns lying around or anything. A farmer had been using it as a potato store and it was completely dry.

“We just fell in love with the place. We thought we might never see one again and if we did not grab it, we would regret it…

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The Beefeater was friendly but firm. ‘Out of bounds,’ he said. When we persisted, his smile turned to a frown. ‘Don’t you understand English, my friends?’ He raised his voice.

‘Out of bounds!’ It was a great shame because we were keen to explore one of the darker and least known chapters of the Tower of London’s history.

The East Casements Rifle Range – an alleyway tucked behind the Constable Tower – is where a captured German spy was executed during the Second World War. I had come to the Tower with German-born Joachim von Halasz, a specialist guide offering fascinating tours of Hitler’s London. He has spent years researching the subject and has uncovered stories of treachery, espionage and derring-do.

He told me about Josef Jakobs, a German spy who was captured after having parachuted into England. ‘After his trial, he was brought to the Tower for execution by firing squad,’ said Joachim. ‘The Army chose the East Casements Rifle Range because it was hidden from public view by high walls. But they had a problem when they came to kill Jakobs. He had sprained his ankle and couldn’t stand up. They allowed him to sit down on a chair and pinned a white sheet of paper to his chest to mark the target.’

Jakobs was – and will almost certainly remain – the last person to be executed in the Tower of London…

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