Hitler's Rant, My Father

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Observations on what happened on or around 70 years ago today (sorry, it rambles a bit):

This month precisely 70 years ago, April, 1945, Berlin had been breached by the Russians and two weeks from now there would be Victory in Europe Day.

According to the mission chart of my father’s plane, which I have no reason to believe he was not on, his B-24, with no name, on April 16 bombed a place called Landshut. The mission lasted 8 hours and 34 minutes. His bomb group (467th) was based in Rackheath, Norfolk.

His mission chart indicates that his plane was the lead aircraft on the raid, using some new radar technology called H2X.

All this, if my father were alive today (he died in 2008, aged 86) would not have remembered. He did remember that his plane had been selected as the lead plane for a number of missions, but, 60-odd years later, he couldn’t remember any details.

This month, April 2015, is a historic milestone and possibly the last of its kind; it will mark the last round-numbered anniversary of the end of WWII that will see any actual fighting men still alive.

If you had somehow joined an armed force at age 17 – the lowest age I can think of, at least on the Allies’ side – and participated in any form of combat in the ETO (European Theater of Operation) in 1945, and had still been 17 in April, you would now have to be 87 years old. (My math is horrible – correct me if I’m wrong.)

That means that if you somehow survive to the next round number, the 80th anniversary, you will be 97 years old.

There will be precious few that will reach that age. Thus, at conventions everywhere for armed forces reunions, very few actual combat veterans will be taking part.

So pretty soon, there will be no one left alive to be able to say, “I was there.” There will be no one to grill on fine details, no one writing their memoirs; the chapter of WWII for actual participants will be over. From now on, there will only be their descendants and historians who will have heard the stories “from the horses’ mouths,” so to speak.

It’s an incredibly important anniversary month in human history.

I remember that when I was younger (so much younger than today!) one would occasionally run across news items mentioning that So-and-so, who actually was alive during the Civil War had died, and how the numbers of survivors was dwindling.

Then, it became WWI’s “last veteran surviving” – I don’t think anyone who saw actual combat in 1918 could possibly be alive today, as they would have to be around 115 years old – and now it’s WWII.

I might be blind, but I see very few media commemorations of the 70th anniversary. National Geographic magazine inexplicably ran an issue focusing on Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln?

70 years ago on this very day, Hitler was alive, as were most of his cronies. In fact, just four days ago on April 22, it was the 70th anniversary of the day Hitler actually delivered his rant that was depicted in the movie “Downfall,” which has become a mini-industry on YouTube (Google “Hitler rant parody”).

In four days, on April 30, it will be the 70th anniversary of the day Hitler committed suicide in the bunker. If he were somehow alive today, he would have to be 125 years old.

I myself was not yet to be born for another 12 years. Incredibly, I can say that I am only physically separated from the existence one of the most destructive despots ever to have lived by 12 years . . . scary.

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If you assume that a soldier who served in WWII would have been at least 17 years old to be inducted into the military (many Germans were, BTW, even younger than that and many did see combat), he would have been born in 1928. There is a reasonable expectation that a significant number of individuals who were born in 1928 will live to be 100 years old, a handful maybe even 105. Therefore, the last surviving veteran of WWII will probably die in the early to mid 2030s.

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What I cannot figure out was why that late in 1945 we were still bombing Germany?

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I appear to have been born in the same year as you.

I live in Australia where a large number of people fled to after the war. Their story does not always match the canonical version of the war we usually hear.

Perhaps because most of them were refugees fleeing Communism? Mixed with a fair bit of being pro-German despite coming from many different nationalities?

Latvians, Hungarians, Austrians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs to name a few.

Their stories of early and mid-war Europe are completely different to what you would expect. It was mostly a happy place.

One chap I know was a Hungarian studying architecture. He had the choices of Universities including neutrals such as Stockholm. He chose instead Berlin because of its excellence and stayed till the invasion of Hungary when he fought against the Russians.

Others were involved in their local anti-Russian movements supporting the Germans / Waffen SS in resistance to the Russian invasion.

They considered themselves part of a pan-European movement and the invasion of the Soviets was the biggest disaster that could have happened.

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They hadn’t surrendered yet.

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I think it was more, we had all those planes, bombs, and pilots over there and we just wanted to use them.

Or maybe it was just a chance to send a signal to the Soviets.

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And two days before the rant was Hitler’s 55th birthday. I’ve always imagined there wasn’t much of a celebration even amongst the inner circle. The Allies certainly weren’t partying.
On a more serious note, we have this discussion about the fading of living history every time a major anniversary of a major event comes up. The last veteran of the Battle of Waterloo is fully gone and forgotten, and soon enough the last veteran of the Battle for Riyadh (to be held in 2027) will also be lost to antiquity.

Ref: Omar Khayyam - Wikipedia

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Late addition …

And his 967th birthday is about 4 weeks from today. Anniversaries are everywhere. Or should that be everywhen?

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Growing up there was a well-respected teacher in my high school who taught the higher level math classes. Very revered and respected. I only had him for one class then he retired.

He was in World War 1 and survived a gas attack that affected his lungs.

Your right the WW 1 guys are all gone now. I doubt any left, and the WW 2 generation is leaving fast. History passing before our eyes.

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My uncle died a few weeks ago. He was the last one in the family who served in WWII. Shot down, POW camp, death march in the winter of 1945, etc.

Living to your 90s after all that is pretty amazing.

It’s pretty easy afterwards to rethink the late war bombings, but there was a lot of uncertainty at the time. Whether there would be holdouts in the mountains, about underground resistance movements, secret weapons, etc. In addition, the clarity of the ending of the war was crucial so that there wouldn’t be a return of the “stab in the back” mentality again. The Germans needed to not just be defeated, but so utterly smashed that they wouldn’t continue to resist in any way. So you keep bombing until it’s over, over.

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Germany had hundreds of thousands if not millions under arms right up to the day it surrendered, so maybe going all out until it did surrender was just the best way to fight the war.

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Or maybe, you know, it was because the US was still at war with Germany. 13,000 US troops were killed in action in Europe between the end of March 1945 and VE day. By comparison, that’s about as many casualties as during D-Day and the Normandy campaign.

A stronger signal to the Soviets could have been to stop bombing Germany while 80,000 Soviet troops were killed in the battle of Berlin alone.

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True, but like the Tuskeegee Airmen and Pearl Harbor survivors, there are so few and most are so frail that it’s… well, it’s not as significant as when a goodly number of them can meet in the same place for remembrance and fellowship.

ETA: That didn’t come out quite right. Of course it’s very significant, to them and all of us, that even a single man who saw WWII combat is still alive. The very last of them passing will transition us into zamani. But a few scattered and non-traveling elders is not the same as those that can make it to the parades and conventions in large numbers.

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1938 saw the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. There is amazing newsreel footage from the event with veterans of the Union and Confederate armies:

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[quote=“Donnerwetter, post:14, topic:718563”]

1938 saw the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. There is amazing newsreel footage from the event with veterans of the Union and Confederate armies:

[/QUOTE]

Incredible. That shot of the proud old Confederate soldier around the 4:15 mark…

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In addition to what everybody else already said …

By that time we knew we were in a competition with the Soviets for domination of the post-WWII world. Every inch of Germany we didn’t control was another inch our current ally & soon to be enemy would control. The interests of the Germans hardly entered into it at all.

In fact it would have been an interesting dilemma if, after D-Day but before all of Germany was overrun, so late ‘44, there had been a putsch followed by the replacement German government suing for peace. We’d then have had to reach a negotiated settlement with the Soviets over who occupied how much of post-war Germany. And when negotiations stalemated there might have been a mad dash of forces towards the other sides’ front lines. That could have gotten out of hand very quickly.

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also Britain and France might have wanted to because of how they had experienced.

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The biggest post-war (meaning, post-WWII) commemorations of any recent years came in June 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day. There were major festivities, big retrospective newspaper articles, re-enactments on the shores of Normandy, even one of the last remaining Liberty Ships steamed from San Francisco through the Panama Canal to be there.

I predicted at the time that this was going to be the last really big Post-World-War-II party. I felt that with this, everyone would pretty much then put WWII to bed.

I was right. The following year, there were only much smaller celebrations, retrospectives, etc., for the fall of Germany and then the surrender of Japan.

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And several times as many US soldiers than were killed in Iraq.

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Yeah,

I think a somewhat major failing about contemporary society, and something I hear a lot of when I watch WWII documentaries, is, “You wouldn’t understand if you were not there.”

Like Hiroshima – to which I’ve been three times – really, there’s a huge controversy – now.

But even then, no one seems to know now how desperate everyone was back then to stop the killing. They all just wanted it to stop, even the Japanese! But no one knew how.

The bomb had never been used blah blah blah. My point is not whether or not the bomb should have been used – my point is back then, everyone’s reality was only THEIR corner of the war, not a global viewpoint. If your Johnny was in a Marines battalion stationed on Pavuvu, chances are that you wouldn’t even know he was stationed on Pavuvu, let alone where he was in The Pacific.

It wasn’t this CNN video-from-the-scene-moments-ago thing that it is now, or even was 20 years ago.

I wouldn’t imagine many folk today are privy as to what’s being discussed in the Oval Office this morning in the daily briefing – well, back then, you only knew anything as far as your local newspaper went. They didn’t even have television.

All you would have known as a civilian was YOUR corner of the war. Even the participants, even at the highest levels, only knew a certain amount about what was going on. Was Pearl Harbor expected by FDR? Maybe, yes, in a sense, in the sense that he may have known that the Japanese were going to attack but he didn’t know where.

People are cynical enough to think that he would have allowed almost 3,000 American lives to have been taken so that we could “enter the war honorably,” but that just wasn’t the case.

Carpet bombing was de rigeur – it was a totally new concept. No one had any real idea about whether it would work. Even Curtis LeMay was surprised at the Tokyo firestorm; I read somewhere that after that, they totally ran out of incendiary bombs for about two months.

So it was all new, all the time. And I would imagine there was a large number of people, civilians, military, higher-ups, lower-downs, who just wanted it all to stop, and didn’t particularly care how that would be accomplished.

But I don’t know. I wasn’t there.