Seldom heard stories and pictures of WWII

[Historian]

Pigeon guided US bombs...we tested them.  

[Historian]

Another photo.  We also experiment with bat bombs.  Bats that carried small amounts of napalm.   We burned down our lab when some bats escaped and it was determined we shouldn't bother with it.

[Historian]

Ye ole bat bomb!

[Historian]

The bat house where they lived in New Mexico.

[pipedreams]

Cameron Highlanders, a Scottish infantry regiment of the British Army, and Indian troops march past the Great Pyramid in the

North African Desert, on December 9, 1940.

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These Arab recruits line up in a barracks square in the British Mandate of Palestine, on December 28, 1940, for their first drill under a British solider. Some 6,000 Palestinian Arabs signed up with the British Army during the course of World War II.

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Artillery Signalers at dawn in an outpost in Palestine on December 16. 1940.

The men dress warmly to keep out the chill of the desert.

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A group of German Gebirgsjägers (mountain troops) in action in Narvik, Norway, in 1940.

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Members of a British Royal Air Force bombing squadron hold thumbs up on April 22, 1940, as they return to home base

from an attack on German warships off Bergen, Norway.

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The Royal Irish Fusiliers of the British expeditionary forces come to the aid of French farmers whose horses have been commandeered by the French Army. A tank is hitched to a plow to help with the spring tilling of the soil on March 27, 1940.

[pipedreams]

Polish flying ace Jan Zumbach, left, of the 303 Kosciuszko Polish Fighter Squadron poses with his Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vb EN951 RF-D. Zumbach was stationed with the RAF at this time, and the plane bears his distinctive Donald Duck symbol. With him are Wing Commander Stefan Witorzenc (center) and Flight Lieutenant Zygmunt Bienkowski (right). 1943.

 

 

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A Polish pilot is interviewed by an intelligence officer after a sortie for reconnaissance information. 1940.

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A group of pilots of the No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron RAF after a fighter sortie.

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German soldiers, taken prisoner by the Polish army during the Nazi invasion, are shown while they were held captive in Warsaw, on October 2, 1939.

[Historian]

During the war the French Foreign Legion was divided, much like France was, and about half fought for The Resistance and the other half for the Germans...in a sad moment the Legion fought itself in Syria.

[Historian]

During the war one woman served in the legion.  She wrote a book called, "Today, be brave."  No other woman was credited, ever, with service in the Legion.

[pipedreams]

Evidence of the fierce fighting on the Moscow sector of the front is provided in this photo showing what the Germans claim to be some of the 650,000 Russian prisoners which they captured at Bryansk and Vyasma. They are here seen waiting to be transported to a prisoner of war camp somewhere in Russia, on November 2, 1941.

[Historian]

I have been reading and studying WWII for almost 40 years.  There will always be something new to learn. 

[pipedreams]

Sleeping with the enemy: Collaborator girls of the German-occupied Europe,

1940-1944

 

There are thousands upon thousands of joyful pictures of the liberation of France in 1944. But among the cheering images, there are also shocking ones. These show the fate of women accused of “collaboration horizontale”. It is impossible to forget Robert Capa’s fallen-Madonna image of a shaven-headed young woman, cradling her baby, implicitly the result of a relationship with a German soldier.

 

[pipedreams]

Amongst the prisoners taken at Walcheren was Dutch woman along with her husband, a German soldier,

whom she refused to leave. November 1944.

After the war, some accused of collaborating with the Germans were lynched or otherwise punished without trial. Men who had fought with the Germans in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS were used to clear minefields and suffered losses accordingly. Others were sentenced by courts for treason. Dutch women who had sexual relations with German soldiers were publicly humiliated. Some were proven to have been wrongly arrested and were cleared of charges, sometimes after being held in custody for a long period of time.

 

[Historian]

Ok, for those who did not get the pigeon bomb thing:  They trained the pigeon to peck at a target that looked like a Japanese war ship.

Peck long enough you got a bit of corn for your effort.

The pecking kept the bomb on target as it fell through the sky.  The pigeon...directed it to the target.

[Historian]

Apparently, things have not changed much over the years.

[pipedreams]

Soviet frontline propaganda banner directed towards Finns, 1942.

This is a Soviet propaganda banner on the frontline in Uhtua, Northern Karelia. It reads: “Finland is out of bread, but the war is not over yet”. The long-distance photo was taken on June when the Finnish-Soviet front had stabilized for the most part into trench warfare.

[pipedreams]

When people scrapped metals to help the war effort, 1942

 

Most Americans viewed the scrap drives as their patriotic duty to contribute their time and their products. Historians, however, debate how necessary scrap drives were and whether or not they helped the United States defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan.

While not all scrap materials proved useful, many did and provided a small but significant source of the material. Most importantly, these drives galvanized the Home Front and created a sense of patriotic unity.

[pipedreams]

Nazi rally in Buenos Aires, 1938

Before the war Argentina hosted a strong, very-well-organized pro-Nazi element that was controlled by the German ambassador. In the spring of 1938, some 20,000 Nazi supporters attended a “Day of Unity” rally held at the Luna Park stadium in Buenos Aires to celebrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich.

 

• Due to the hundreds of thousands of German immigrants who lived in the country, Argentina maintained close ties with Germany and remained neutral for much of World War II. In the years after the end of the war, Argentine President Juan Peron secretly ordered diplomats and intelligence officers to establish escape routes, so-called “ratlines”, through ports in Spain and Italy to smuggle thousands of former SS officers and Nazi party members out of Europe. Some of them lived in Argentina under their real names, but others clandestinely obtained new identities. Some well-known Nazis that emigrated to Argentina are Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Aribert Heim, Erich Priebke, Eduard Roschmann and “Bubi” Ludolf von Alvensleben.

• As with numerous other fascist-leaning South American leaders, Juan Peron had been drawn to the ideologies of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler while serving as a military attaché in Italy during the early years of World War II. The Argentine president also sought to recruit those Nazis with particular military and technical expertise that he believed could help his country, much like the United States and the Soviet Union who both poached scientists from the Third Reich to assist them in the Cold War.