WWII Normandy Landings. Omaha Beach; June 6th, 1944.
The men in this photo (in Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division) landed at the Easy Red sector of the beach. Most of Company E drifted away from where they were suppose to land, and because of the mistake they came under heavy fire when they landed. By the end of the day they had lost about 2/3 of their strength.
I’ve always loved this picture. It’s so hard to imagine what was going through these GIs’ minds as they pushed forward against German fire. The distance between the cliffs and the Higgins boat really shows the enormity of what was accomplished that day.
Germans returning after the Battle of Berlin gaze up at the new order of things, Berlin; ca. July 1945
The text says: “Да здравствует победа англо-советско-американского боевого союза над немецко-фашистскими захватчиками”
Translation : “Long live the victory of the Anglo-Soviet-American battle union over the German-Fascist conquerors.”
World War I soldier, a double amputee, plays billiards with prosthetic legs; ca.1915
The uniform and the playing of Billiards (which was invented by British officers) makes me suspect that these men are Commonwealth forces, likely Brits.
On October 1, 1995, Robert Overacker rode a jet ski over Niagara falls to raise awareness about the homeless. He was killed when his parachute failed to open.
“Robert Overacker, a 39-year-old man from Camarillo, California, went over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls at approximately 12:35 p.m. October 1st on a single jet ski.
Entering the Niagara River near the Canadian Niagara Power Plant, he started skiing toward the Falls. At the brink, he attempted to discharge a rocket propelled parachute that was on his back. It failed to discharge. His brother and a friend witnessed the stunt.
At first it seemed that he had survived the plunge, but the rapids have a strange way of flailing a corpses’ arms around, often giving the appearance of a person swimming. Robert Overacker was later retrieved from the water, taken to Niagara General Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
His body was recovered by Maid of the Mist staff. Overacker, married with no children, became the fifteenth person since 1901 to intentionally go over the Falls in or on a device.” (Source)
Last known photo of the Bismarck while still afloat; May 27th, 1941.
KM Bismarck was the name ship of the largest warship class Germany produced in World War Two (although her sister Tirpitz was slightly larger once completed). He faced two enemy capital ships in battle with only a heavy cruiser for support. He destroyed HMS Hood in that battle (the pride of the Royal Navy for a couple decades) and damaged the battleship Prince of Wales as well. You can read a detailed account of the battle here.
He was a fast ship (about 30 knots at maximum speed, but with a sustained speed of about 20 knots for long range cruising) and powerful enough to threaten any convoys encountered. Unless the convoy was escorted by an old battleship, Bismarck would have forced the convoy to scatter so that some of its ships would escape. (The minimum sustained speed a merchant ship needed to make to be allowed in a fast convoy was 10 knots, otherwise it was restricted to the slow convoys of 8 knots, though in practice the convoys averaged speeds of 0.5-1.0 knots slower than this.) Simulating battles of Bismarck vs another solitary battleship in defending a convoy is a favorite of wargame enthusiasts and much detailed information in comparing the ships is available.
Bismarck’s rudder was jammed by a torpedo launched by a biplane from an aircraft carrier (the critical hit of several scored). This jam was not repairable at sea (going so far as to blow off the rudder with explosives was considered) and doomed the ship. Bismarck again faced two capital ships, and King George V and Rodney scored hundreds of hits while taking none in return, leaving Bismarck in thoroughly ruined condition. Some like to play guessing games as to whether Bismarck sank due to enemy shell fire or due to scuttling by his crew, but this is an artificial argument over semantics.
There has been some detailed analysis (and much under-informed debate) of why HMS Hood exploded after a handful of hits, but Bismarck didn’t after hundreds. The short answer is that battleship caliber shells designed before and soon after World War One were incapable of penetrating heavy armor and then exploding inside their targets. This meant that capital ships of that era (Hood, Rodney, Kirishima, and others) were designed and built to take heavy exploding shells on their outer surfaces. Technology had improved by the time the battleship holiday had finished so that the shells designed and used in World War Two were capable (at least under some conditions see immunity zone) of piercing heavy armor and detonating inside. This produces hugely more damage and could send fragments into critical areas of the ship (the magazines and engine spaces). For this reason, ships designed after the battleship holiday also included thinner armor inside the ship, to keep these fragments from reaching the critical areas. This meant that a new battleship fighting an older one had a large hidden advantage (the new ship could survive hits that would much more easily cripple or kill the old one).
These are only some of the reasons Bismarck is a significant ship. There are other aspects: the underdog fighting the entire enemy navy, the “lucky hits” on Hood and torpedo on Bismarck, the potential “what ifs” (Bismarck is not hit in the rudder (actually dual rudders) and makes port in occupied France or faces a single BB in attacking a convoy), as well as the relatively few members of her crew to survive (though Hood only had three survivors).
Momčilo Gavrić, the youngest soldier of WWI. Kingdom of Serbia; ca. 1916.
Momčilo Gavrić was the youngest soldier in the First World War.
In the beginning of August 1914, Austro-Hungarian soldiers killed his father, mother, grandmother, his three sisters, and four of his brothers. His house was also set on fire. Momčilo survived because he was not at home when it happened – his father had sent him to his uncle earlier.
Left without family and without a home, Momčilo went to find the 6th Artillery Division of the Serbian army, which was near Gučevo at the time. Major Stevan Tucović, brother of Dimitrije Tucović, accepted Gavrić into his unit after hearing about what had happened, and assigned Miloš Mišović, a soldier in the unit, to be Gavrić’s caretaker.The same evening, he took revenge by showing his unit the location of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers, and participated in the bombardment, as told by his son Branislav Gavrić in an interview.
At the age of 10, he was promoted to the rank of kaplar (Corporal) by the commander of his unit.
When his unit was sent to Thessaloniki, Major Tucović sent him to Sorovits where he hastily went through the equivalent of four grades of elementary education.
In Kajmakčalan, vojvoda Mišić was stunned when he saw a uniformed eleven year-old boy in the trenches. Major Tucović explained the situation to him; that Gavrić had been with them since the Battle of Cer, and that he had both been taught discipline and been wounded during his time in the unit. Mišić promoted Gavrić topodnarednik (Lance Sergeant). The order was sent out to all units of the Serbian army.
From Wikipedia.
Post-war photo:
Mithraism:
Often times in history we confront extremely challenging and provoking question, none more so than whether Mithraism was the most metal religion…
The Mithraic mysteries are a fascinating little cult because it was extremely prevalent, yet we know almost nothing about it. There are a handful of literary mentions of it, but the lionshare of information on it comes from its iconography, which places Classical archaeologists in the same place most archaeologists are all the time in reconstructing religious belief from imagery. Because of this, its importance has been exaggerated somewhat in the modern world, and it is not uncommon to see it appropriated by assorted kooks and new agey people today. There is also a persistent story going around that it is the basis for Christianity and Jesus is a redressed Mithras: what the justification for this claim is I will never know. Within the Roman Empire it was of profound importance within the army and within the networks of freedmen and others who made up the Imperial household bureaucracy. That being said, it was never given official sanction, and no Mithraic site has ever been found within the confines of a military camp.
Its origins are a little vague: it was once widely accepted that it was an Eastern import from the Persian Empire, a rather reasonable conclusion given that Mithras was an Iranian deity of great antiquity. However, more research on the Persians has shown that the Mithraic cult was really quite unlike anything that actually existed within Persia itself, rather, the Eastern elements were borrowed to make the imagery more exotic and antique-seeming. Interestingly, Mithraic sanctuaries closer to Persia show a greater prevalence of imagery that was ‘accurate” to Iranian belief, so it seems that those with familiarity with Iran purposefully shifted the imagery to be more authentic.
Even without witches and Jesuses, however, it is a fascinating example of the sort of religious diversity within the Early Imperial period of the Roman Empire.
Hitler’s Endgame.
Many Germans (even non-Nazis) accepted the idea of gaining Lebensraum as a historical inevitability. As early as the late 19th century, German writers such as Ernst Haeckel combined Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest with romantic nationalism to create a deterministic ideology which argued that in order for the German people to thrive, they had to acquire more resources in a Darwinian struggle against other peoples.
The concept of Lebensraum was originally defined by Friedrich Ratzel who conceptualized it as a biological concept defined as the geographical area required to support a species according to its metabolism, and that human societies had to expand their Lebensraum through agrarian colonization or perish. These beliefs would be implemented by the Nazi government, who argued that war and conquest were necessary to gain new resources to sustain their race in a Darwinian understanding of international politics. German expansion was thus seen as inevitable by the Nazis because they perceived of history and politics as a deterministic struggle for resources between races.
The German experience in the occupied Russian Empire during WWI saw the establishment of a sort of colonial state called ‘Ober Ost’ which was informed in part by theories such as Ratzel’s. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius’ book War Land on the Eastern Front argues that Germans involved in the occupation saw the east as barbaric and primordial, and they began to formulate notions that the native population should be removed. In 1917 the German High Command and Foreign Office even approved of a plan to establish colonies of German settler-soldiers in the occupied East.
Liulevicius states that this experience had an important role in shaping the Nazi perception of the east: “Ober Ost’s categories and practices were taken up again and radicalized [by the Nazis]: the gaze toward the East, cleansing violence, planning, subdivision and ‘intensification of control,’ forced labor. Chief among them was the lesson of Raum.” The Nazi dictatorship, inspired by Ober Ost, began to prepare its youth for a push towards the East: in schools, history and geography courses taught pupils that the historic German “Drive Towards the East” was a biological phenomenon and to look at land through the mystical doctrine of “Blut und Boden”, and Hitler Youth members were taught military skills and songs with lyrics such as “we will give [the East] a German face with sword and plow! To the East blows the wind!” The Nazi idea of widespread colonization of Eastern Europe was consequently inherited from theories and practices begun in Wilhelmine Germany.
Nazi Germany’s goal of exterminating Eastern Europe’s population and replacing it with German colonists had real economic goals. Although it might sound absurd to modern readers, early 20th century Germany faced serious land shortage. Germany was more densely populated and had a higher proportion of rural inhabitants than either France or the United Kingdom and lacked extraterritorial colonies where its excess population might emigrate to. Although it was a large country, the actual amount of arable land available for cultivation per farmer was comparable with countries such as Ireland, Romania or Poland, which was compounded by the fact that most of it was held by large estates; in 1933, 75% of Germany’s farms cultivated only 19% of its arable land. The majority of German farmers (88% of them, some 12 million people who made up 18% of Germany’s total population) consequently lived in poverty on economically unsustainable farms.
According to Adolf Hitler, the establishment of an international colonial empire was an unattractive solution because it meant spreading precious German blood over too great of an area; what Germany needed was a contiguous colonial empire carved out of Eastern and Central Europe. Arable land would have to be taken by conquest and its inhabitants driven out. Plans from the Reich-Fuhrer SS dictated that 85% of Poles, 75% of Byelorussians, 65% of Ukranians and 50% of Czechs would have to be deported from German-occupied territory to Western Siberia at the end of the war to make room for German colonists, with the remaining population being forcibly ‘Germanized’. These deportations may well have been a euphemism for a planned genocide, where the displaced Slavs might have been worked to death in Siberia.
Hitler viewed German expansion eastwards and the displacement of that region’s Slavs as a similar process to the expansion of European colonial states in the Americas, as evidenced by his statement made to Reich Minister Todt and Gauleiter Saukel on the 17th of October, 1941: “There’s only one duty: to Germanise this country [the occupied Soviet Union]… and to look upon the natives as Red-skins…I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” The conquest of the Soviet Union and its colonization by Germans was seen by Hitler as Germany’s version of Manifest Destiny, where the Volga, as he declared, would become Germany’s Mississippi. Slavic place names would be replaced with Germanic ones, especially in places like the Crimea. During the war, the Crimean towns of Simferopol and Sevastopol were renamed Gotenburg and Theodorichhafen respectively. The Germans planned to construct an autobahn directly to Crimea (and likely others elsewhere in Russia), because the Black Sea was to become a German Mediterranean.
The Nazi’s plans for the establishment of Eastern Lebensraum were concretely planned out as early as November 1940 when they proposed the establishment of 50 to 100 acre farms meant to support large families of ten or more, nucleated around massive farms of 300 acres. The east was supposed to be entirely rural; average German settlements were intended to be villages of some 300 to 400 inhabitants. The largest settlements in the east were planned to be large villages known as a ‘Hauptdorf’ (head village) which would contain economic and civic establishments intended to service the smaller settler communities surrounding it as well as rural power stations to remove their dependence on urban cities. Besides these communities of soldier-farmers, there would have been SS estates run by veterans of the war, and massive estates given to high ranking Nazis; the dictatorship even promised its generals huge tracts of land to make them more committed to winning the war in the east. There were two main competing theories for the pattern of settlement: waves of dispersed settlements spreading out gradually eastwards, or a “pearl string” pattern where settlements would be set up along roads and railways and spread into the hinterland over time. IIRC the pearl-string plan became the official pattern for colonization.
According to Hitler, urban areas and industry would not be tolerated in the east; in a private table talk in October 1941, he declared that “we shan’t settle in Russian towns, and we’ll let them fall to pieces without intervening.” Not only would Soviet towns be allowed to crumble, but its main urban centers of Kiev, Moscow and Leningrad would be destroyed. Furthermore, Hitler stated that those Slavs that remained in German colonial territory as slave laborers would only be given only the most rudimentary education; they would learn basic arithmetic and how to read signs but nothing else. The German East was meant to be entirely rural and agricultural, and would produce enough food and resources to make the Reich an autarkic economy, comparable to the internal markets of the United States of America. This establishment of a German autarkic economy would make it a world power capable of competing with the USA for global influence. The Nazis didn’t want to conquer the world; they wanted to compete for international influence without overseas colonies like the USA.
Sources:
Cameron, Norman & R.H. Stephens, trans., Hitler’s Table Talks. New York: Enigma Books, 2000
Kamenetsky, Ihor. “Lebensraum in Hitler’s War Plan: The Theory and the Eastern European Reality” in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 20 No. 3 (April 1961)
Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship, Problems & Perspectives of Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. War Land on the Eastern Front, Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Smith, Woodruff D. “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum” in German Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (February 1980)
Stein, George J. “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism” in American Scientist, Vol. 76 No. 1 (January-February 1988). (Tooze, 2008)
Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
I hope to be remembered for my atrocities! 