Friday, March 24, 1944. Pvt Theodore J. Miller, The Great Escape and the Ardeatine Massacre.

Nineteen year old Marine Corps Pvt. Theodore J. Miller who had become a famous face following being photographed being loaded back onto a landing craft after Eniewetok was killed on Ebon Atoll.

 

Today In Wyoming's History: March 24: 1944   76 Allied officers escaped Stalag Luft 3, which was later the topic of Paul Brickall's book "The Great Escape."

Seventy-six Royal Air Force POWs escaped from a single tunnel from Stalag Luft III in Silesia.  Seventy-three would be recaptured, almost all fairly rapidly.  Fifty of them were subsequently murdered after being recaptured.  

The Gestapo undertook an investigation of the escape and Commandant von Lindeiner-Wildau, who had started off as an assistant to Göring, was removed and threatened with court-martial.  He escaped prosecution by feigning mental illness.  He ended up in command of an infantry unit and was wounded in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.  He had, as commandant, followed the Geneva accords and did have the respect of the prisoners.  He died in 1963 at age 82.

An effort to bring the guilty to justice following the war was undertaken.  The man who selected the men to be killed, SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, did not survive the war as he was ironically executed as one of the members of the July 20 plot.  Trials were held in 1947 and 1948, at which time the British government called off any future war crime prosecutions.

Stalag Luft III was a big camp and continued on after the event.  It's the camp featured in the recent series Masters of the Air, and it's the camp where a coworker's father had been a prisoner.  The murders of the POWs had a huge chilling effect on escapes, and attempts were much reduced after that.

The escape was massive, although it did not really tie up German resources in any significant way.  It also had the effect of provoking what had long been feared, although only temporarily, which was a Gestapo insertion into the POW system.  Air POWs were held by the Luftwaffe as a point of privilege. 

The event had an outsized lasting impact on the British. The movie based on Brickall's book (which is an excellent book) has become, oddly, a Christmas routine in the United Kingdom. 

The three men who successfully escaped were:

• Per Bergsland, Norwegian pilot of No. 332 Squadron RAF, the 44th escapee.  He remained a pilot after the war, eventually becoming a commercial pilot and an airline executive.
• Jens Müller, Norwegian pilot of No. 331 Squadron RAF, the 43d escapee.  He also remained a pilot and became an airline executive.  His escape took him to Sweden with Bergsland.
• Bram van der Stok, Dutch pilot of No. 41 Squadron RAF, the 18th escapee.  The most decorated pilot in Dutch history, he escaped through the Netherlands down the escape line through Spain and reentered combat before the end of the war.

It's of note that not one of the escapees who managed to get away were British.

It's also worth noting that the famous film fictionalized some elements for the audience.  Luft Stalag III was a massive camp and prior to the escape the Germans had separated American POWs, who had been mixed with the British, from the British.  There were no Americans in the escape at all.

Likewise, while the film correctly shows three men making good their escapes, two onto Sweden and one onto Spain, it condenses the timeline for the event and makes the Dutch pilot an Australian, and one of the Norwegian pilots a Pole.

In Italy, the Germans carried out the reprisal Ardeatine Massacre and killed 335 people in retaliation for a partisan attack in Rome the day prior.

The Germans surrounded the Jewish Greek town of Ioannina, which had been home to Greek Jews for 2,000 years, and marked the houses in the town by the religion of the home's occupants.

200 inmates of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland were shot.

Mieczysław Wolski and Janusz Wysocki were shot for assisting Jews in Poland.

In Rome, Ivanoe Bonomi resigned as president of the Comitato Centrale di Liberazione Nazionale due to internal problems the organization had amongst its internal factions.  He would return to politics shortly, however.

The Germans prevailed in the Third Narva Offensive.

RAF Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade survived a fall of 18,000 feet without a parachute, his descent from his Lancaster arrested by pine trees and soft snow.  Alkemade had knowingly jumped out of his stricken aircraft without a parachute as his plane was on fire, and the parachute with it.

Fighting continued on Bougainville.

And also in the Admiralities.

R. Lee Ermey, who started his adult career in 1961 as a Marine, and who was medically discharged in 1972, was born in Emporia, Kansas.  He broke into movies while studying in the Philippines on the GI bill, with the role of the drill sergeant in The Boys In Company C, a film which was so close in plot to Full Metal Jacket, save for the fate of the DI, that the second film resulted in a lawsuit.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, March 23, 1944. Defeat at Cassino.

1940s, 1944, Bougainville, German SS, Italian partisans, Italy, Monte Cassino, National Guard, Operation Strangle, Partisans, Personalities, Rome, Vermont National Guard, World War Two

Saturday, March 4, 1944. The resisting defeated.

The USCGC Makinaw was commissioned on this date in 1944. She'd serve as an ice breaker until 2006.

The German military, evil cause notwithstanding, was proving itself to be as amazing in defeat as it had been in victory.  Never as well-equipped or modern as its propaganda would have it, it was nonetheless a potent fighting force, both in defeat as well as victory.  On this day, the Second Narva Offensive resulted in a German victory.

Outnumbered, the Germans took thousands of casualties, but not as many as the Red Army. Both armies had a disregard for life.  The Germans were, frankly quite surprisingly, aided by the presence of able Estonian recruits who had only recently entered service.

The latter was a portent of what was to come. As 1944 marched on, the German frontiers contracted, and as they did, the bloodletting, in part due to increased German resistance, meant that 1945, not 1944, was to be the bloodiest year of the war.

The Red Army launched a new series of offensive actions in Ukraine.  Stalwart German resistance notwithstanding, and the frankly primitive state of much of the Red Army, the tide had irrevocably turned.

From Sarah Sundin's blog:

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1944: 80 Years Ago—Mar. 4, 1944: Maj. Gen. Alexander Patch assumes command of US Seventh Army in Algiers, to prepare for landings in southern France.

Germany's battlefield performance on the Baltic coast and in Italy notwithstanding, the direction the war was headed in was obvious and the Allies were preparing not only for Operation Overlord, but Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France.  Patch was placed in command of that operation.

Patch had already seen combat command in the war in the Pacific, and more specifically Guadalcanal, making him one of a handful of U.S. generals who served against the Germans and Japanese. His health in the Pacific had been very poor, and he suffered from pneumonia while serving there.

Patch was born into an Army family and had originally wanted to be a cavalryman, but foresaw its obsolesce so he instead chose the infantry when he graduated from West Point in 1913  He saw action in the Punitive Expedition and in World War One.  He never recovered from his respiratory ailments and died on November 21, 1945, just after the end of the war.  He was 55.

Other things were also occurring in Algiers.

French industrialist, and fascist, Piere Firmin Pucheu went on trial in Algiers in spite of conditions that probably should have led to his safe presence in Algeria, Vichy role notwithstanding.  He had been the Vichy minister of the interior.  He was the first person tried under the French Committee of National Liberation's September 1943 edict charging all Vichy ministers with treason, something that was frankly political and extralegal.  He would be found guilty and executed on March 20, 1944, going to his death after shaking hands with his own firing squad and giving the order to fire himself.

Pucheau is an uncomfortable example as to how some examples of Allied justice were not just. Pucheau was largely not admirable. He was a fascist, and he had a hatred of Jews.  His execution, however, can be viewed for his being on the losing side of the war.

The 8th Air Force targeted Berlin, but only 29 bombers made it through due to weather.

Fighting was going on at Los Negros, where Troy McGill performed an act of heroism that would result in his receiving a posthumous Medal of Honor.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy at Los Negros Island, Admiralty Group, on 4 March 1944. In the early morning hours Sgt. McGill, with a squad of eight men, occupied a revetment which bore the brunt of a furious attack by approximately 200 drink-crazed enemy troops. Although covered by crossfire from machine guns on the right and left flank he could receive no support from the remainder of our troops stationed at his rear. All members of the squad were killed or wounded except Sgt. McGill and another man, whom he ordered to return to the next revetment. Courageously resolved to hold his position at all costs, he fired his weapon until it ceased to function. Then, with the enemy only five yards away, he charged from his foxhole in the face of certain death and clubbed the enemy with his rifle in hand-to-hand combat until he was killed. At dawn 105 enemy dead were found around his position. Sgt. McGill's intrepid stand was an inspiration to his comrades and a decisive factor in the defeat of a fanatical enemy.

Chinese and American troops who have just received first aid treatment are seen in a 2½ ton truck for transfer to the rear.  March 4, 1944.  Note the tanker's helmet and the M1917 helmets

The U-472 was sunk in the Barents Sea.  She never sank a single ship.

China and Afghanistan entered into a pointless treaty of friendship.

Mobster Louie Lepke, birth name Louis Buchalter and also known as Louis Lepke or Lepke Buchalter, was executed.

Louis Capone met the same fate on this day, for the same reason.

The Phillies attempted to introduce a blue jay logo.

Saturday, February 28, 1944. Foreigners in the Wehrmacht.

In what was becoming a late war rarity, German and Estonian's in German service decisively defeated the Red Army's first Narva Offensive.  The Estonian's were mostly recent volunteer conscripts, brought into service after Estonian leaders urged an end to an Estonian boycott of German conscription in hopes of defending Estonia from being retaken by the USSR.

The German 14th Army renewed attacks against the US VI Corps at Anzio.

Ukrainian's in German service carried out the Huta Pieniacka Massacre of ethnic Poles, killing between 500 and 1,200 people.   The actions were carried out principally by police units of the 4th SS Volunteer Galician Regiment and the14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), which were under German command at the time.

The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division continues to have fans in Ukraine today, who deny its association with atrocities.  Many of its surviving members, who surrendered to the Western Allies late in the war, were allowed to immigrate to the United States and Canada in 1947, in part due to the intervention of Polish General Anders who knew some of its commanders due to their pre-war Polish Army service.  In spite of claims to the contrary, the early arrival of the Cold War clouded their association with atrocities, which were accordingly not well known at the time, as Anders intervention demonstrates.  The unit was sufficiently well thought of that a memorial to Ukrainians bearing their unit symbol was put to them in St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery, Oakville, Ontario.

Aviator Hanna Reitsch visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden to receive a second Iron Cross.  She suggested kamikaze like volunteers there to fly piloted variants of the V-1.  Hitler rejected the idea as a waste of resources.

Reitsch survived the war and went on to a long post-war life. She never disavowed her association with Hitler, but did heavily alter her pre-war racial views.

Tuesday, February 15, 1944. Destroying Monte Cassino.

B-17 over Monte Cassino.

A large scale air raid on the 400 year old Monte Cassino involving B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s reduced the abbey to rubble, but highly defensible rubble.  Not a single German defender was injured in the raid.

It was an example of the gross overestimation of the effectiveness of air power in this context, and a human tragedy as well.

The Soviets commence the first Narva Offensive.

The Japanese cruiser Agono was badly damaged north of Truk by the USS Skate.  It would sink two days later.

Catalina landing at Argentina, Newfoundland, after anti-submarine patrol.