This week in the War, 14–20 June 1943: The Tuskegee Airmen

Posted on June 15, 2015 by secondbysecond

Tuskegee Airmen in the Mediterranean theatre, WWII [Public domain]

Tuskegee Airmen in the Mediterranean theatre, WWII [Public domain]

This week in the war, on 18 June 1943, six American P-40 Warhawks, piloted by some of the soon-to-be-famous Tuskegee Airmen, were attacked by German Focke-Wulfs over the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria—which had recently fallen into Allied hands.

The ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ was the name given to the African-American pilots who flew fighter planes or bombers during World War II. They trained at the Tuskegee Army Airfield near Tuskegee, Alabama, and were all graduates of Tuskegee University.

Tuskegee Airmen receive Congressional gold medals from US President George W. Bush, Washington DC, 2007 [Public domain]

Tuskegee Airmen receive Congressional gold medals from US President George W. Bush, Washington DC, 2007 [Public domain]

The 18 June 1943 encounter was the Tuskegee Airman’s first taste of combat. They fought off the attack by the dozen or so enemy fighters and both sides returned to their bases without suffering any losses.

The Tuskegee Airmen would serve in Italy and central Europe and many received DFCs for their bravery. They shot down a large number of enemy planes including, near the end of the war, some of the Luftwaffe’s most up-to-date jet fighters.

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This week in the War, 7–13 June 1943: Pantelleria

Posted on June 11, 2015 by secondbysecond

Men of The Duke of Wellington Regiment on Pantelleria, June 1943 [Public domain]

Men of The Duke of Wellington Regiment on Pantelleria, June 1943 [Public domain]

This week in the war, on 11 June 1943, the garrison of the Italian island of Pantelleria surrendered when troops of the British 1st Division landed. The tiny island of Lampedusa surrendered the following day.

Pantelleria is 100km southwest of Sicily, which the Allies had already marked down as the target to be invaded next. (See Operation Mincemeat.) The occupation of Pantelleria (Operation Corkscrew) was an essential step in assuring the success of the Sicily Invasion (Operation Husky).

Round-the-clock bombing of Pantelleria had begun in May and had continued until early June.

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This week in the War, 31 May–6 June 1943: Death of Leslie Howard

Posted on June 3, 2015 by secondbysecond

British actor Leslie Howard [Public domain]

British actor Leslie Howard [Public domain]

This week in the war, on 1 June 1943, British actor Leslie Howard died when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.

Howard was a star of both stage and screen and famous for playing the title role in the film The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) and for playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939). He was actively engaged in anti-German propaganda.

Leslie Howard was on board a KLM/BOAC civilian airliner, flying between Britain and Lisbon, in neutral Portugal, when the plane was attacked by a German fighter.

Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in 'Gone with the Wind' [Public domain]

Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in ‘Gone with the Wind’ [Public domain]

Theories explaining the attack include: (i) the Germans believed that Howard was working for British intelligence and so the Luftwaffe was ordered to intercept his plane, (ii) the Germans believed that Winston Churchill was on board the flight.

The latter theory was supported by Churchill himself who claimed that German agents, who were watching passengers board the plane, had noticed ‘a thickset man smoking a cigar’ [Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War, Abridged One-Volume Edition (Cassell & Company, 1959), page 671].

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This week in the War, 24–30 May 1943: Jean Moulin calls a meeting

Posted on May 29, 2015 by secondbysecond

Jean Moulin/Cross of Lorraine background [Attr: I, Gmandicourt, GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons]

Jean Moulin/Cross of Lorraine background [Attr: I, Gmandicourt, GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons]

This week in the war, on 27 May 1943, French Resistance leader Jean Moulin called a meeting on rue du Four in Paris. Representatives of eight different resistance groups were in attendance.

Jean Moulin was the personal envoy of Charles de Gaulle, with orders to unify the various resistance movements under the umbrella of the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR). The gathering of 27 May was the first meeting of the CNR and Moulin’s efforts produced major changes in the organization of resistance to the Nazis.

Within the month, Jean Moulin was arrested in Lyon where he was brutally tortured by Gestapo head, Klaus Barbie (‘The Butcher of Lyon’).

Moulin was killed—some say beaten to death—en route to Germany.

His tomb can be seen at the Pantheon, in Paris, among other tombs of France’s honoured dead.

 

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In the news: Memorial Day 2015

Posted on May 25, 2015 by secondbysecond

Military Working Dog Quaid T183 [Photographer: Markus Rauchenberger, Public domain]

Military Working Dog Quaid T183 [Photographer: Markus Rauchenberger, Public domain]

We honour our troops and veterans on Memorial Day, Monday 25 May 2015. In the photograph, US Army Staff Sergeant Agnieszka Sosnowska of the 131st Military Working Dog Detachment praises her military working dog, Quaid T183, who has just completed explosive detection training.

The use of dogs in warfare goes back to ancient times. The US K-9 Corps was created on 13 March 1942.

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This week in the War, 17–23 May 1943: ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania

Posted on May 19, 2015 by secondbysecond

The ENIAC, at the University of Pennsylvania [Public domain]

The ENIAC, at the University of Pennsylvania [Public domain]

This week in the war saw the beginnings of one of the landmarks of the computer age: on 17 May 1943, the US Army contracted the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering to build the ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.

The ENIAC was not the world’s first computer—or even the world’s first programmable computer. That honour goes to the Z3, built in Berlin by Konrad Zuse, the man who is widely regarded as the ‘inventor of the computer.’ (The Z3 was destined to be destroyed in the bombing.) Also, before the end of 1943, the Colossus was up and running in Bletchley Park, UK.

Regardless of whether the task was code-breaking (like at Bletchley) or artillery calculations (as was the case with the Z3 and to some extent with ENIAC), all three computers shared a common feature: to program the machine, thousands of individual plugs and switches had to be inserted or clicked by hand. (No stored programs in those days! No disks or magnetic tape or even punched cards.)

University of Pennsylvania engineers, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, take credit for the design of ENIAC and its almost 18,000 vacuum tubes. When a tube burnt out—which typically occurred a few times a day—then the machine had to shut down until the tube had been identified and replaced.

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This week in the War, 10–16 May 1943: The Dam Busters

Posted on May 15, 2015 by secondbysecond

The Dam Busters-----by Paul Brickhill (Evans Brothers, London, 1958) [Photograph by Edith-Mary Smith]

The Dam Busters—–by Paul Brickhill (Evans Brothers, London, 1958) [Photograph by Edith-Mary Smith]

It is over fifty years since Australian-born writer, Paul Brickhill, wrote his bestselling account of the bombing raid on the dams that provided water and hydro-electric power to industries in the Ruhr valley. The book led to a movie and to a popular and easy-to-whistle tune.

This week in the war, on the night of 16 May 1943 and the early hours of the following day, Lancaster bombers from the RAF’s recently formed 617 Squadron attacked the Möhne, Edersee and Sorpe dams in Germany. The ‘boffin’ providing the technical expertise was Vickers engineer, Barnes Wallis, and the squadron was commanded by Wing Commander Guy Gibson.

Wallis had come up with the idea of breaching the dams, and the idea of doing it by sinking a bomb (in fact a depth charge) in the water alongside the dam wall—which would then crack from the shockwave when the bomb exploded. But how could one deliver a bomb so precisely—particularly when the approaches to the dams were defended by antiaircraft guns and by torpedo nets, positioned in the water?

Wallis’s solution was to design an oil-drum-shaped bomb that would spin as it descended. Each Lancaster would fly low and level and drop its bomb from an exact height, which would be measured by having a pair of searchlights—one in the plane’s nose, one in the tail—cross in an appropriate spot. After release, the bomb would bounce a couple of times on the surface of the water before thumping into the dam wall and sinking. The explosion would be triggered by water pressure.

The Möhne and Edersee were breached. The Sorpe was slightly damaged. Well over a thousand people died, some being civilians, others being prisoners in German P-o-W camps in the valleys below the dams. Fifty-three were from the aircrews of the Lancasters that had taken part.

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Vignette: The 70th Anniversary of VE Day

Posted on May 8, 2015 by secondbysecond

British girls in London on VE Day, 1945 [Public domain]

British girls in London on VE Day, 1945 [Public domain]

Seventy years ago today the most costly war in human history came to an end in Europe.

Every year since 1945, people the world over have celebrated the 8th of May—Victory in Europe Day—and have honoured the ones who lived through those times and who, in so many cases, gave their lives. Seventy years later, on this year’s 8th of May, the memories remain alive in those who were there and in their descendants.

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This week in the War, 3–9 May 1943: The fall of Tunis

Posted on May 4, 2015 by secondbysecond

British Churchill tank and other vehicles parade through Tunis, 8 May 1943 [Public domain, IWM]

British Churchill tank and other vehicles parade through Tunis, 8 May 1943 [Public domain, IWM]

This week in the war, 0n 7 May 1943, tanks of the British 7th Armoured Division (newly detached from the British Eighth Army to join the American First Army) entered Tunis.

On the same day as the fall of the Tunisian capital, American and Free French troops of the US Second Corps took the city of Bizerta further north.

The Allied conquest of Tunisia was almost complete, regardless of Hitler’s assurance to Mussolini in Salzburg that Tunis would be defended. The Duce’s dream of riding his white horse triumphantly into Cairo would never come to pass. Within a week, the German and Italian forces in Tunisia had surrendered: over a quarter of a million men.

On 13 May 1943, the army-group commander for the North Africa theatre, General Harold Alexander, sent the following message (subsequently recorded in his memoirs) to Winston Churchill: “Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.”

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This week in the War, 26 April–2 May 1943: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker”

Posted on May 2, 2015 by secondbysecond

Flight-lieutenant Charles Christopher Cholmondeley, RAF/MI5, 1943 [Public domain]

Flight-lieutenant Charles Christopher Cholmondeley, RAF/MI5, 1943 [Public domain]

Lieutenant-commander Ewan Montagu, British Naval Intelligence, 1943 [Public domain]

Lieutenant-commander Ewan Montagu, British Naval Intelligence, 1943 [Public domain]

This week in the war, in the early hours of the morning of 30 April 1943, British submarine HMS Seraph surfaced off the coast of Spain. A canister was brought on deck and opened to reveal a dead body dressed in the uniform of a major in the Royal Marines. A briefcase was then attached to the body by a chain and the body was fitted with a life jacket and slipped overboard so that it would float ashore with the morning tide.

The event signaled the start of Operation Mincemeat, an elaborate deception designed to fool the Germans into thinking that the Allies would not invade Sicily (which was the obvious target after North Africa) but were interested instead in landing in Greece and Sardinia. Identification on the body indicated that the deceased was a Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, and receipts and bills plus love letters and a photo of his fiancée Pam found in the major’s pockets backed up the story of a man who, in fact, did not exist.

Operation Mincemeat-----by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury, 2010) [Photograph by Edith-Mary Smith]

Operation Mincemeat—–by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury, 2010) [Photograph by Edith-Mary Smith]

The idea for Operation Mincemeat was due to an eccentric RAF intelligence officer named Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chumly’)—doomed never to fly on account of his poor eyesight—and a brilliant barrister named Ewen Montagu who was serving in Naval Intelligence, in fact in the same unit as Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. After the war, Montagu described the events in his book The Man Who Never Was which, in 1956, was turned into a movie. More recently, Ben Macintyre has provided a well-researched and highly readable account in his book Operation Mincemeat (Bloomsbury, 2010).

After the body of the fictitious major was washed up on the beach, the briefcase was opened and the bogus plans were examined by Spanish authorities and the details reported to Berlin. The major was subsequently buried with due military honours.

The Germans, including Hitler, were convinced that the plans were genuine and began to strengthen their forces in Sardinia and Greece. The British realized that the trick had worked and a cryptic telegram was dispatched to Churchill (who was in the USA): “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”

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