Battle of Britain 1940

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The Battle of Britain (German: Luftschlacht um England or Luftschlacht um Großbritannien, literally "Air battle for England" or "Air battle for Great Britain") is the name given to the World War II air campaign waged by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940. The objective of the campaign was to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force (RAF), especially Fighter Command. The name derives from a famous speech delivered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the House of Commons: "...the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

The Battle of Britain was the first major campaign to be fought entirely by air forces, and was also the largest and most sustained aerial bombing campaign to that date. From July 1940 coastal shipping convoys and shipping centres, such as Portsmouth, were the main targets; one month later the Luftwaffe shifted its attacks to RAF airfields and infrastructure. As the battle progressed the Luftwaffe also targeted aircraft factories and ground infrastructure. Eventually the Luftwaffe resorted to attacking areas of political significance and using terror bombing tactics.

The failure of Germany to achieve its objectives of destroying Britain's air defences, or forcing Britain to negotiate an armistice or an outright surrender, is considered its first major defeat and one of the crucial turning points in the war.If Germany had gained air superiority over England, Adolf Hitler might have launched Operation Sea Lion, an amphibious and airborne invasion of Britain.

Images & texts:wikipedia.com

When I first moved to San Francisco in the early 70's, Grace Cathedral hosted a Battle of Britain service sponsored by the British Legion. It was a grand and solemn affair with bagpipes and military bands, followed by an elaborate tea downstairs. I sang in the choir for this service for several years. I can't remember when they stopped commemorating the event-- possibly in the late 1980's.

50th Anniversary PARIS Liberated! August 25, 1944

The Liberation of Paris (also known as Battle for Paris) took place during World War II from 19 August 1944 until the surrender of the occupying German garrison on 25 August 1944, and is accounted as the last battle in the Campaign for Normandy and the transitional conclusion of the Allied invasion breakout in Operation Overlord into a broad-fronted general offensive. The capital region of France had been administered by Nazi Germany since the Second Compiègne armistice in June 1940 when Germany occupied the north and west of France and when the Vichy regime was created in city of Vichy in central France.

The liberation started with an uprising by the French Resistance against the German Paris garrison. On 24 August, the French Forces of the Interior (Forces françaises de l'intérieur, FFI) received backup from the Free French Army of Liberation and from the United States' 4th Infantry Division.

This battle marked the end of Operation Overlord, the liberation of France by the Allies, the restoration of the French Republic and the exile of the Vichy government to Sigmaringen in Germany.

Despite repeated orders from Adolf Hitler that the French capital "must not fall into the enemy's hand except lying in complete debris" to be accomplished by bombing it and blowing up its bridges, German General Dietrich von Choltitz, the commander of the Paris garrison and military governor of Paris, surrendered on 25 August at the Hôtel Meurice, the newly established headquarters of General Leclerc. Von Choltitz was kept prisoner until April 1947. In his memoir ... Brennt Paris? ("Is Paris Burning?"), first published in 1950, von Choltitz describes himself as the saviour of Paris.

There is a controversy about von Choltitz's actual role during the battle, since he is regarded in very different ways in France and Germany. In Germany, he is regarded as a humanist and a hero who saved Paris from urban warfare and destruction. In 1964, Dietrich von Choltitz explained in an interview taped from his Baden Baden home, why he had refused to obey Hitler: "If for the first time I had disobeyed, it was because I knew that Hitler was insane" ("Si pour la première fois j'ai désobéi, c'est parce que je savais qu'Hitler était fou")".

According to a 2004 interview his son Timo gave to the French public channel France 2, von Choltitz disobeyed Hitler and personally allowed the Allies to take the city back safely and rapidly, preventing the French Resistance from engaging in urban warfare that would have destroyed parts of Paris. He knew the war was lost and decided alone to save the capital.

The liberation of Paris was one of the few miracles of World War II. It is startling to think how close Paris was to total destruction!

Image & text:wikipedia.com

Anne Frank Betrayed ~ August 4, 1944

1944 – The Holocaust: a tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse where they find Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family.

Image & Text:wikipedia.com

When I visited Amsterdam with Jonathan Klein after the first Chanticleer European tour in early August 1981, we visited the Frank warehouse, which had successfully given refuge to the Frank family for many months. Being there was an extremely powerful experience. (See my post on June 12, 2009.)

JOHN CARINCROSS & the BATTLE of KURSK

John Cairncross may have been one of the unsung heroes of World War II.

He was born in Scotland, and educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages.

After graduating, he worked in the Foreign Office. In 1937 he joined the Communist party. In 1942 he worked on ciphers at Bletchley Park and MI6. During this time, he passed documents through secret channels to the Soviet Union. While at Bletchley Park, he supplied the Soviets with advance intelligence from ULTRA about what became the critical Battle of Kursk. The information he supplied enabled the Soviets to keep their ciphers one step ahead of British Intelligence, and also helped win the war against Hitler on the Eastern Front.

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As is commonly known today, the British (originally with the preliminary work of the Poles) had unlocked the mysteries of the German Enigma Code, by which the German high command communicated with military officers in the field. For example, Churchill had a heads up that Coventry would be bombed. But he made the strategic decision NOT to warn Coventry, lest it would give away the secret. He wanted to keep it in reserve for ultimate defense.

Now most people in the West have never heard of the Battle of Kursk. In fact it was the largest tank battle in history. Furthermore, most people think that the German offensive in the East was completely stopped at Stalingrad. But the Battle of Kursk was fought more than six months after the German defeat at Stalingrad.

Because of the work at Bletchley Park, the British knew precisely where-- over an 800 mile salient-- the Germans planned to attack the Russians in July 1943. Again, Churchill made the strategic decision NOT to warn the Russians. And many military historians assert that it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. But I offer a parallel scenario. What if Hitler had known exactly where and when the Allies planned to land on D-Day. Do you think that would have made any difference? You’re damn right it would have.

So I contend that the so-called “treachery” of John Carincross in warning the Russians exactly where and when the German attack would be launched may have been one of the critical turning points in World War II. Had the Germans won that battle, they undoubtedly would have taken Moscow and perhaps have overthrown Stalin. The Germans then may very well have won the war. Personally, I am extremely grateful to John Carincross!

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The Battle of Kursk refers to German and Soviet operations on the Eastern Front of World War II in the vicinity of the city of Kursk in July and August 1943. It remains both the largest series of armored clashes, including the Battle of Prokhorovka, and the costliest single day of aerial warfare to date. It was the last strategic offensive the Germans were able to mount in the east. The resulting decisive Soviet victory gave the Red Army the strategic initiative for the rest of the war.

The Germans hoped to shorten their lines by eliminating the Kursk salient (also known as the Kursk bulge), created in the aftermath of their defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. They envisioned pincers breaking through its northern and southern flanks to achieve yet another great encirclement of Red Army forces. However, the Soviets had excellent intelligence of Hitler's intentions. This and repeated German delays to wait for new weapons, mainly Tiger and Panther tanks, gave the Red Army time to construct elaborate, layered defenses and position large reserve forces for a strategic counterattack.

"Although often thought of as a tank battle, Kursk as a whole arguably demonstrated the triumph of artillery, infantry and engineers over armour. The Soviet plan was to soak up the German assault in a colossal web of defensive positions, and only then launch their armoured counter-attack. It was also an important air battle, in which the balance now shifted in the favour of the Soviets."

—John Keegan

Once the German forces had exhausted themselves against the in-depth defenses, the Soviets responded with their own counteroffensives, which allowed the Red Army to retake Orel and Belgorod on 5 August, and Kharkov on 23 August, and push back the Germans across a broad front.

Though the Red Army had had success in winter, this was the first successful strategic Soviet summer offensive of the war. The model strategic operation earned a place in war college curricula. The Battle of Kursk was the first battle in which a Blitzkrieg offensive had been defeated before it could break through enemy defenses and into its strategic depths.

The battlefield in Kursk was filled with many hundreds of burnt tanks and crashed aircraft, and so many dead soldiers. The difference was that while the Russians suffered heavy losses but could continue as planned and shift from defense to a large counter attack in a wide front, the German army in the East just lost the core of its remaining force.

After the battle of Kursk, the war in the eastern front was a long Russian advance, in which the Russian army returned to all the territory it lost to the Germans, conquered all of Eastern Europe, and reached all the way to Germany and to Berlin and won the war. The Germans could no longer attack or stop the Russian advance, and were just pushed back in a long retreat.

In the summer of 1941 the German army attacked Russia and was stopped only near Moscow.

In the summer of 1942 the German army attacked in South Russia and reached the Volga river at Stalingrad before it was stopped, and lost the strategic initiative to the recovering Russian army.

In the summer of 1943, in the battle of Kursk, the much weaker German army broke its fist and lost its best remaining units in its attempt to regain the initiative in one last major attack, for which the Russians were fully prepared (thanks primarily to John Carincross, I contend).

AS A SPY

Cairncross admitted to spying in 1951 after MI5 found incriminating papers in his possession. Some believe that the information he supplied about the Western atomic weapons programs kick-started the Soviet nuclear program. He was never prosecuted, however, which later led to charges that the government engaged in a conspiracy to cover up his role. Indeed, the identity of the infamous "fifth man" in the Cambridge Five remained a mystery until 1990, when KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky fingered Cairncross.

Between 1941 and 1945, Cairncross supplied the Soviets with 5,832 documents, according to Russian archives.

Cairncross denied passing any information harmful to Britain, including atomic secrets. He also denied that he was the "Fifth Man" in the Cambridge spy ring. In his autobiography, he claimed his motivation was to assist the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany.

LATER LIFE

After his confession, Cairncross moved to Rome, where he worked for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. He worked as economic papers translator for Research Office of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Banca d'Italia and IMI. In the BNL, a young economist engaged with international scenarios analysis (Iraq - Iran War, oil's strategic routes in Middle East and Far East) revealed a strong and unusual interest by Cairncross about the Bank's role for that area. He retired to the south of France. John Cairncross died in 1995, aged 82.

CARINCROSS IN FICTION

Cairncross appears as a character in the Franco-Belgian comic India Dreams by Mary Charles and Jean-François Charles. He was also depicted in part 3 of the 2003 BBC TV series Cambridge Spies, where he appears reluctant to continue passing Bletchley Park data to the Russians for fear that the Red Army was heavily penetrated by German intelligence; Anthony Blunt, is depicted in the drama as pressuring him with threats to continue.

Much of the text:Wikipedia.com

Photo: spymuseum.com/images/photo-cairncross-john01.jpg

ANNE FRANK ~ June 12, 1929 ~ early March 1945

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main – early March 1945 in Bergen Belsen) was a Jewish girl who was born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, and who lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the occupation of the Netherlands, which began in 1940. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, within days of the death of her sister, Margot Frank.

Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944. It has been translated into many languages, has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films. Anne Frank has been acknowledged for the quality of her writing, and has become one of the most renowned and most discussed victims of the Holocaust.

In 1981 after the first European tour with Chanticleer, I spent a few days in Amsterdam with Jonathan Klein. Among other things, we had the opportunity to visit the Frank hiding place. It was an extremely powerful experience...one I'll never forget.

Photo & text courtesy of Wikipedia.com

74th Anniversary of the Katyn Massacre

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, left, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin commemorate the 22,000 Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet troops in the 1940 Katyn massacre. Photo:Nilosky/Pool

Seven decades ago, Soviet secret police executed thousands of Polish military officers in a forest in western Russia. On April 7, Russian and Polish leaders will meet to officially commemorate the massacre's anniversary together for the first time.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, are due to attend a memorial ceremony in the village of Katyn honoring the more than 20,000 officers, policemen, and intellectuals who were killed on Soviet leader Josef Stalin's orders during World War II.

The two men will also pay tribute to Soviet victims of the Stalinist terror.

Marek Lasota, a Polish historian with the Institute of National Remembrance in Krakow, says Putin's attendance at the ceremony, and the Kremlin’s decision to extend an official invitation to Tusk, are signs that Russia's attitudes toward what has become known as the "Katyn Forest massacre" are changing.

"I would like to believe that if Prime Minister Putin is really going to take part in the...ceremonies, then it means that the Russian side is not avoiding responsibility for the historical heritage that it's taken, that in this way it wants to emphasize and articulate its emotions and feelings about this crime," Lasota said.

In what was seen as a political watershed, Putin extended an official invitation to Tusk in February to attend the 70th anniversary commemorations of the massacre. In the past, visits by Polish leaders to Katyn to honor the dead were unofficial, semi-private affairs.

According to media reports, Tusk saw the invitation as an important step in improving relations between Poland and Russia, and said Putin's decision to honor the Katyn victims was symbolically "very important."

Suppression And Denial

The Katyn massacre has long been one of the key sore points in the troubled Russian-Polish relationship. For nearly 50 years, the Soviet Union claimed that it was Nazi troops who had committed the murders and suppressed historical evidence to the contrary. The pro-Kremlin communist regime in Poland at the time dutifully toed the Moscow line.

Andrzej Skapski, who lost a parent in the massacre, says the families of the victims were treated like outcasts by Poland's communist-era rulers. "The mothers, a generation of mothers, were denied the right of existence," Skapski says. "They couldn't find a job, and if they found one and somebody found out that they were the widows of officers or Katyn victims, they were fired. Young people, the sons and daughters, were in fact cut off from higher education."

Soldiers exhume the bodies of victims of the Katyn massacre in 1943.

In 1989, when communism fell in Poland and across Eastern Europe, Moscow came under pressure to acknowledge the truth. In 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that it was in fact the NKVD, the precursor to the Soviet KGB, which carried out the killings.

Russian historian Natalia Lebedeva says resolving the Katyn issue will go a long way toward improving relations between Moscow and Warsaw.

"It is one of the obstacles to improving relations not only between the governments but the people as well," Lebedeva says. The Poles "are deeply hurt that we don't share their pain, that we are hiding the truth. As soon as they feel that their pain is close to us too, that we share their pain, and we want to know the truth about it, people in Poland will welcome it very much."

In the 1990s, Russian President Boris Yeltsin released previously classified documents to the Polish authorities, including an order dated March 5, 1940, from NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, signed by Stalin, to execute the Polish POWs.

During former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski's visit to Russia in September 2004, the Kremlin said they would to turn over all their information on the Katyn massacre to Warsaw as soon as it was declassified.

Months later, in March 2005, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office concluded a decade-long investigation of the massacre. Prosecutors announced that they had been able to confirm the deaths of fewer than 2,000 Polish citizens; that the killings did not constitute genocide; and that since the perpetrators were dead, there was no reason to pursue the matter further.

The vast majority of the files gathered during the investigation were deemed to contain state secrets and were thus classified. Russian courts have refused to declassify them, making it impossible for relatives to access information that would help them find the remains of those still missing.

On March 5, the Russian human rights group Memorial called on President Dmitry Medvedev to reopen the investigation into what it called a "war crime and a crime against humanity."

Changing Attitudes

Despite the continuing state secrecy, the April 7 commemorations are also taking place as society seems to be embracing a new willingness to talk about the tragedy.

On April 2, the Oscar-nominated 2007 film "Katyn," by Polish director Andrzej Wajda -- whose father was a Katyn massacre victim -- premiered on Russia's "Kultura" television channel.

The official Russian government newspaper "Rossiiskaya gazeta," which in the past had published articles casting doubt on Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, opined that the screening "shows our society's serious progress on the path toward restoring historic truth about the tragedy of World War II."

Historian Lebedeva says it's in Russia's interest for the truth about Katyn to be fully aired. "When people tell me that I work in the interests of another country, I say that we are the ones interested in the truth about Katyn before anyone else, because this crime was committed in our land," she says. "Unless we uncover the whole truth about the actions of Stalinism, then sooner or later we will end up in the same situation."

Polish President Lech Kaczynski did not receive an invitation to the April 7 ceremonies, leading to speculation that Russia was punishing him for his outspoken criticism of Moscow. Kaczynski says he plans to lead a separate ceremony in Katyn forest on April 10, joining Polish veterans organizations and victims' relatives.

Text:Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, 'Katyń crime'), was a mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war (primarily military officers), intellectuals, policemen, and other public servants by the Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. Dated March 5, 1940, this official document was then approved (signed) by the entire Soviet Politburo including Joseph Stalin and Beria. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the most commonly cited number being 21,768. The victims were murdered in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkov prisons and elsewhere. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials." Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets were able to round up much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship.

The "Katyn massacre" refers to the massacre at Katyn Forest, near the villages of Katyn and Gnezdovo (ca. 19 km west of Smolensk, Russia), of Polish military officers in the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp. This was the largest of the simultaneous executions of prisoners of war from geographically distant Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps, and the executions of political prisoners from West Belarus and West Ukraine, shot on Stalin's orders at Katyn Forest, at the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk, at a Smolensk slaughterhouse, and at prisons in Kalinin (Tver), Kharkov, Moscow, and other Soviet cities. The Belorussian and Ukrainian Katyn Lists are NKVD lists of names of Polish prisoners to be murdered at various locations in Belarus and Western Ukraine. The modern Polish investigation of the Katyn Massacre covered not only the massacre at Katyn forest, but also the other mass murders mentioned above. There are Polish organisations such as the Katyn Committee and the Federation of Katyn Families, which again are inclusive of victims of the various mass murders at various locations.

Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943. The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny the massacres until 1990, when it finally acknowledged the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up. An investigation by the Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian Federation has confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, yet does not classify this action as a war crime or an act of genocide. This acknowledgement would have made necessary the prosecution of surviving perpetrators, which is what the Polish government had requested. The Russian government also does not classify the dead as victims of Stalinist repression, which bars formal posthumous rehabilitation.

Text:wikipedia.com

Three days after this commemoration would occur a most unimaginable tragedy.

The Red Army Liberates Auschwitz-Birkenau ~ January 27, 1945

1945 – World War II: The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

Auschwitz (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was a network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town the camps were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe." From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there, a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of other nationalities.Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported medical experiments.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free").

Image & text:wikipeida.com

The metal Arbeit macht frei motto was stolen about a year ago from the gate at Auschwitz. It was recovered a few months later, after having been cut into three pieces. It is now being or has already been restored.

The irony is that many German Jews decided not to leave Germany in the 30's because they felt that Nazi rhetoric was just a ploy to gain political power, and not a genuine strategy for action. After all, Germany and German culture was the land of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and especially Mozart!