Stephan Westmann describing his experience in the Great War to the BBC

July 09, 2021, 7:15pm / 20

Pentagon shutting down 159-year-old newspaper, Stars and Stripes

The Pentagon has ordered the shut down of the military’s independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, despite objections by Congress, per the AP.

In February, the Defense Department proposed cutting the $15.5 million in funding to the newspaper. But the House has since passed legislation that includes the funding through the 2021 fiscal year. 

A Pentagon memo, which was first quoted in an opinion piece in USA Today, orders the newspaper’s publisher to produce a plan by Sept. 15 to “dissolve the Stars and Stripes.”

/ September 04, 2020, 2:48pm / 21

demons:

History books sometime call it The Longest Day, while some simply refer to it by a general operation term ’D-Day’ but Operation Overlord was the turning of the tide for the European war in the West.

Overlord might be the greatest battle, with all things considered, in the history of the modern world. Everyone knew it was coming. According to a joke of the time, the sheer concrete evidence of the impending invasion weighed so heavily on the British Isles that it should have sunk into the sea, if only they had not been held up by masses of barrage balloons.

In hundreds of hedge-bordered English fields, by late spring, were parks of camouflaged tanks, trucks, bulldozers, ducks, jeeps and self-propelled guns. Dozens of airfields were jammed to the fences with planes lined up beside the runways–more than 10,000 aircraft in all. Dozens of ports large and small were jammed with shipping–well over 5000 ships and landing crafts, including six battleships, twenty-two cruisers, and hundreds of destroyers, gunboats, corvettes and other fire-support crafts of what would become known as the Matchbox Fleet. More than 1 million troops especially trained for Overlord, half of them American and a half a mix of British or Canadian, organized in thirty-seven divisions for the amphibious assault.

It was an unprecedented concentration of power, and those who witnessed it happening believed it to be a manifestation of what would be by far the most complicated plan ever made for a single operation of war. And it was.

The invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 proved to be a complete tactical surprise. Rommel, the Allies soon learned after gaining control of the beaches, had not even been in France during the beginning of the twenty-four hours he had said would be decisive for the war. On the assumption that the predicted weather would make a cross-Channel operation impossible, he had returned to Germany on 4 June for his wife’s birthday and to confer with Hitler. He did not arrive back to his HQ until six o'clock that evening of D-Day.

Some 156,000 Allied troops had established themselves on nearly eighty square miles of Normandy soil at a casualty cost of around 11,000; and Allies dominance (or rather, supremacy) of the skies, immediate shipping capacity, and prepared build up made it unlikely that the Germans could push back the Overlord forces.

The feel of the war had changed. It was the Allies who were continually making gains, in both Europe and the Pacific, and the Axis who were suffering catastrophic losses.

June 06, 2019, 9:40am / 363

The Holocaust’s Death Rate Has Been Underestimated, Study Finds

The Nazi Holocaust killed almost 1.5 million Jews in just three months in 1942, according to a study of archival German railroad records. That’s an even higher death rate than previously suspected for the largest murder campaign of World War II.

Some 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the war. Operation Reinhard, the deadliest murder campaign in the racist genocide of these people, killed roughly 1.7 million Jews from 1942 to 1943, largely in three large death camps in western Poland.

/ January 02, 2019, 8:11pm / 50

US Army correspondent showing off portraits of Hitler and Goering while lugging around a puppy, #goals

Source / March 03, 2018 / 600

US, British, Canadian, and French servicemen in front of the World War I monument, Creully/June 1944

Source / March 03, 2018 / 784

GI with a SMG M3

Source / March 03, 2018 / 238