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Two mass shootings of U.S. World War II infantrymen in Belgium marked this date in 1944. It was the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s surprise last offensive in the Ardennes. Hitler, in an inspired albeit ultimately unsuccessful gambit, intended here to burst through the thin-spread Allied line under cover of air power-negating foul weather, and still his western front enemies in time to fortify his east before the Red Army could destroy the Reich. Needing to inflict a demoralizing lightning defeat, Hitler authorized rougher treatment of POWs than was usual on the western front, resulting...

89 Tom Fordy Mon, June 19, 2023 at 8:02 AM CDT Steve McQueen in The Great Escape Steve McQueen in The Great Escape - Alamy In the opening minutes of The Great Escape, “the Kommandant” (Hannes Messemer) of the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp warns Captain Ramsey (James Donald) against trying to escape. Ramsey’s rabble of captured Allied airmen are prolific, well-known escapers – but the Kommandant wants a quiet life. Ramsey, however, is having none of it. As the senior British POW, he tells the Kommandant straight: “It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape.”...

Poland lodged claim for $1.3 trillion in compensation, while Greece seeks over $300B for damages during warSenior Polish officials Tuesday said they plan to expand a campaign to seek massive World War II reparations from Germany, turning to Greece and other European countries as potential allies. Poland last year formally demanded compensation of $1.3 trillion — an amount close to the size of its annual gross domestic product — while Greece is seeking more than $300 billion for damage incurred by occupying Nazi Germans during World War II. Germany says damage claims were settled in the aftermath of the war,...

A batch of Nazi war criminals highlighted by four condemned at the Einsatzgruppen trial hanged at Germany’s Landsberg Prison on this date in 1951. Formed initially to decapitate Polish intelligentsia when Germany invaded that country in 1939, these notorious paramilitaries were deployed by Reinhard Heydrich behind the advancing German line of battle to pacify occupied territory. “Pacify” in the event meant slaying Communists, partisans, and of course, the Reich’s innumerable racial inferiors. Einsatzgruppen authored many mass executions like the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev, each local atrocity a self-conscious contribution to the wholesale genocide. All told these...

Archaeologists have discovered an underground bunker in northeast China where Japanese scientists performed horrific biological experiments on human subjects during World War II, including subjecting their victims to dehydration, frostbite, and anthrax bombs. The New York Post reported on Thursday that the derelict bunker was unearthed near the city of Anda in Heilongjiang province. Although the facility had been known about for nearly eight decades, its existence and precise location wasn't confirmed until a week ago, according to the South China Morning Post. A partially U-shaped structure that measures roughly 108 feet long by 67 feet wide, the covert "horror...

A Chinese salvage ship has been caught looting British World War II shipwrecks near the Malaysian coast. The vessel, a dredger named Chuan Hong 68, was seen lurking near the shipwrecks of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and cruiser HMS Repulse, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Imperial Japanese forces destroyed both ships in December 1941, resulting in the loss of 842 British sailors — a significant setback for the Royal Navy in the Far East. The sites of the shipwrecks are officially designated war graves, according to a statement from the Royal Navy National Museum. Chuan...

By November 1944, almost in a cruel and desperate afterthought to what seemed a lost cause, balloons launched from Japan and carrying explosive and incendiary bombs drifted east on the jet stream to the United States. Once again, the goal was to start forest fires and wreak devastation. On December 6 after a "mysterious explosion" in Wyoming, officials found balloon parts and bomb casing fragments from what had been a 33 pound high explosive bomb. During the next several months, Japan launched over 9,000 balloon bombs resulting in over 342 incidents registered throughout western United States and Canada. Oregon alone...

One of the best kept secrets of the war involved the Japanese balloon bomb offensive. Prompted by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the Japanese developed the balloon bombs as a means of direct reprisal against the U.S. mainland. The balloons, made of paper or rubberized silk, carried anti-personnel and incendiary bombs. The first operational launches took place on Nov. 3, 1944, and two days later a U.S. Navy patrol boat spotted a balloon floating on the water off the coast of California. Japan launched some 9,000 balloons during a five-month period, to be carried by high altitude...

In its diplomatic note sent to the Federal Republic of Germany on the compensation for damage caused by Germany as a result of its aggression and occupation in 1939-1945, the Republic of Poland demands: Compensation for material and non-material losses amounting to 6 trillion 220 billion 609 million Polish zlotys; Compensating victims of German aggression and occupation, as well as their families, for the losses and harm suffered; Taking systemic measures by the Federal Republic of Germany to return cultural property seized from Poland and currently located on German territory; Return of assets and liabilities of Polish state banks and...

On this date in 1942, three captured American airmen who had bombed Japan in the Doolittle Raid were shot in Tokyo. The Doolittle Raid — named for its commander, Jimmy Doolittle — was America’s April 1942 retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a few months before. The mission: bomb the Japanese homeland. Later in the war, American advances in the Pacific would enable the Yankee to do this regularly. In 1942, it was all but a suicide mission. The plan involved launching 16 B-25s from an aircraft carrier — an unprecedented feat in itself — to fly light...

When the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia were preoccupied with Hitler, Japanese imperial forces swept down and occupied the lands to the north of Australia and threatened Australia too. But the fighting spirit of diggers on the Kokoda track and American military might backed by formidable industrial power drove the invaders back. But now totalitarian cancer is threatening Australia from within. A new breed of libertarian probusiness politicians like Adam La Rosa are fighting back. Ordinary people running for parliament. There is hope.

In the final row of graves in an obscure cemetery in southern Spain, is a tomb dedicated to William Martin - a British officer killed during the Second World War. Except that Martin wasn't real. He was invented by British spies as part of a daring and successful plot to fool Hitler about the invasion of Sicily, using the corpse of an unknown man dressed up like an officer and carrying a case full of fake documents. Now, ahead of the release of new film Operation Mincemeat which documents the mission, calls are growing to exhume the grave so the...

As night began to fall on 31 August, 1939, a small, hand-picked team of SS troops crept into the then German city of Gleiwitz. Disguised as Polish saboteurs, their mission was to launch an attack on the city's main radio station to give Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler a justification for invading Poland. It was part of what was codenamed Operation Himmler - the false flag attacks carried out by the Fuhrer's military intelligence service the Abwehr, along with the feared SS and the Gestapo to give the impression of Polish aggression towards Germany. Entering through the back door, they locked...

Minutes after midnight this date in 1944, four senior Wehrmacht officers who had come within an ace of murdering Adolf Hitler less than 12 hours earlier were summarily shot in Berlin — the first of thousands executed for the most famous assassination attempt on the Fuhrer. One of those rare moments where historical epochs (arguably) turn on the minutest exigencies of chance, the so-called July 20 plot had seen Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg insinuate a bomb into Hitler’s conference room in modern-day eastern Poland, then fly back to Berlin to mount a coup d’etat. Blam Stauffenberg had every...

On this date in 1945, Japanese forces occupying Indonesia cut off Dr. Achmad Mochtar’s head for a medical experiment gone horribly awry. Officially, Dr. Mochtar had been responsible for a supposed vaccine whose administration killed hundreds of Indonesian forced laborers. Latter-day research, however, indicates that it was the Japanese military who administered the vaccine (Indonesian link), an experimental tetanus-cholera-typhoid-dysentery combination shot, getting a trial run before it was administered to Japan’s own soldiers. When this drug proved lethal to most of its recipients, Mochtar and his staff at the Eijkman Institute were arrested in 1944 and subjected to harrowing torture....

I was waiting to see of anyone would mention this and as of now no one has. 80 years ago today Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack. It started one of the bloodiest and catastrophic episodes of W.W. II. The scope, scale, casualties , and atrocities almost dwarf anything that happened anywhere else in the ETO. Without the sacrifices the Russians made on the Eastern Front the invasion of Europe would not have been successful. Estimated deaths on the Eastern Front are not totally known but an estimated 20 million died

TOKYO (AP) — Until recently, the location of executed wartime Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's remains was one of World War II's biggest mysteries in the nation he once led. Now, a Japanese university professor has revealed declassified U.S. military documents that appear to hold the answer. The documents show the cremated ashes of Tojo, one of the masterminds of the Pearl Harbor attack, were scattered from a U.S. Army aircraft over the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, south of Tokyo. It was a tension-filled, highly secretive mission, with American officials apparently...

TOKYO (AP) — Until recently, the location of executed wartime Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s remains was one of World War II’s biggest mysteries in the nation he once led. Now, a Japanese university professor has revealed declassified U.S. military documents that appear to hold the answer.. The documents show the cremated ashes of Tojo, one of the masterminds of the Pearl Harbor attack, were scattered from a U.S. Army aircraft over the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, south of Tokyo. It was a tension-filled, highly secretive mission, with American officials apparently...

On June 9, 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division hanged 99 habitants of the French town Tulle as revenge upon the French Resistance. On June 7, the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) guerrillas launched a pre-planned attack on German and milice positions in Tulle. By the 8th, the FTP had liberated the town* … temporarily. Come the evening of the 8th, the 2nd SS Panzer Division — which had been stationed in southern France but was rumbling north to fortify the German position in the wake of the Allied landing at Normandy — arrived at Tulle and re-occupied the city....

General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London January 2, 1944 to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and to direct the last five months of planning for D-Day; the most difficult and complicated military operation ever attempted. Eisenhower’s study of leadership skills required he ignore opportunities for fear and doubt, which inevitably arise as strain and tension wear away endurance. He persevered to present confidence and optimism to those around him. For that reason, he brought with him a confident, battle tested team that had led successful landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, despite experiencing German counterattacks nearly...