Tag: wwii

WWII British submarine, missing for 81 years with 64 crew members, discovered off Greek coast

A British World War II submarine, HMS Trooper, which vanished during a secret mission in 1943, has been discovered off the coast of Greece, solving an 81-year mystery.

The submarine, lost with all 64 crew members, including Australian volunteer Lt. John Stuart Ryder, was found at a depth of 830 feet (252 meters) in the Ikarian Sea between Ikaria and Kos islands. The wreck, discovered by the Greek deep-sea research company Planet Blue, is broken into three sections—the bow, middle, and stern—indicating a violent sinking caused by a German mine.

HMS Trooper was on a secret mission to patrol between Donoussa islet and Ikaria after British intelligence warned of a potential German landing on the island of Leros. It failed to return to the port of Beirut on October 17, 1943, and was declared lost, with the crew presumed dead. Subsequent searches, beginning in 2000, spanned 14 missions, none of which yielded results until the recent discovery by Kostas Thoctarides and his team from Planet Blue.

Thoctarides, speaking to Live Science and Greek news agency ANA-MPA, explained that his team located the wreck on October 3, 2024, after using shipboard sonar to create a detailed map of the seafloor, followed by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to inspect the wreckage. Thoctarides noted the wreck had been missed in earlier searches because previous expeditions focused too far east. He also emphasized the challenging nature of the Ikarian Sea, known for its harsh weather conditions, strong winds, and powerful underwater currents.

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During WW2, Ukrainian Nazis Committed Genocide Against 100K Poles, But Zelensky Refuses To Address the Issue – so Now Poland Plans to Block Their Entry in the EU Until He Does

Unlike the Mainstream media, that is maintaining a veil of silence over this, The Gateway Pundit is reporting on the increased tensions in the bilateral relations between Ukraine and its neighbor and top backer Poland.

Among many issues, the main disagreement lies over the settling of a historical wound of the Volyn massacre, during the Second World War.

The Volyn massacre was a series of war crimes perpetrated by Ukrainian Nazis, under national hero Stepan Bandera, that led to the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population.

Poland, to this day, considers the Volyn tragedy to be genocide of Poles.

Since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky aggressively refused to discuss the issue in the latest meeting in Kiev, Poland is no planning to use its upcoming EU presidency to pressure Ukraine on the issue and exhume victims of the massacre, giving them proper burials.

In its six-month EU presidency starting January 2025. Warsaw will play a key role in Ukraine’s EU accession negotiations.

The position of the Ukrainian government on the exhumation of the victims of the Volyn tragedy is deeply disappointing for Warsaw, so the Polish Foreign Ministry is ‘planning certain measures’.

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British gallery may lose prized £500,000 Renoir over claim Seated Nude is Nazi loot seized from original Jewish owners

A British gallery may be forced to give up a prized £500,000 Renoir after claims it could have been seized from its original Jewish owners by the Nazis.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Manchester Art Gallery is now treating the Impressionist painting – known as Seated Nude, from around 1897 – as a potential looted or ‘spoliated’ object.

The gallery has been approached by claimants who believe they may be the rightful owners of the oil painting.

If their claim of ownership is proved, the gallery could be forced to hand over the artwork.

Details of the investigation are included in a document obtained by the MoS under freedom of information laws.

It states: ‘This painting is under investigation as a spoliated object, which means it may have been stolen from or sold under duress by its Jewish owner during the period of Nazi power in Europe.’

Both sides agree that the artwork was once the property of Richard Semmel, a German-born Jewish art collector and entrepreneur.

Semmel and his wife Clara, who fled Germany for Holland in 1933, managed to arrange for the sale of about 70 of their artworks to pay for their living expenses.

It is believed the Renoir nude was offered up for the sale but did not sell.

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Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer

Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945.   In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”  As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts,  and in three books, since 1984:  Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End.   Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked – or mourned today.

Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly.  It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff (though not Oppie himself) proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”

Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff – who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan – placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.

Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.

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FBI File: Bacteriological Warfare

This FBI file relates to bacteriological warfare. It contains investigative information gathered over several decades. Significant portions of the file have been redacted or entirely withheld due to security or privacy concerns, using exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Reports detail the use of bacteriological weapons in the Korean War, allegedly by U.S. forces, as claimed by various organizations in China and North Korea. Chinese trade unions and women’s organizations made appeals to international bodies to denounce and act against these actions .

Some sections include accounts of individuals suspected of being involved in subversive activities or espionage. For instance, John T. Brady alleged bacteriological warfare conducted in Illinois, raising concerns about potential German agents during World War II. Further investigation found Brady had a neurotic obsession with disease and that his claims were largely unfounded .

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Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Seek Justice

On June 8th, 2024, in Hiroshima, Japan, The International People’s Tribunal On The 1945 Atomic Bombings met with the goal of holding the United States accountable for the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This People’s Tribunal focuses on the Korean bomb victims, 100,000 of whom were forcibly taken from their homeland by the Japanese to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the war and were subsequently exposed to the A-bomb blasts.

The recent Tribunal gathering in Hiroshima consisted of legal scholars from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, discussing legal theories to hold the United States accountable for violating international law for the 1945 atomic bombings, and attempting to establish the illegality of current nuclear threats and nuclear weapon states.

The Tribunal and its Korean plaintiffs are also seeking an official apology from the United States to the Korean victims for the dropping of the two atomic bombs. First and second-generation victims of these bombings were present at the conference and gave powerful testimony as to the multigenerational effects from the bomb blasts.

The Tribunal itself will hold its opening gavel proceedings in New York City in May of 2026 to coincide with the United Nations meeting on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Participants in the June 8th conference were given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Park and the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which solemnly exhibits the horrific events of August 6th, 1945. Throughout the museum are displays of the burnt and tattered remnants of children’s clothing, charred bicycles, panoramas of the city after detonation, and graphic pictures of atomic bomb victims staggering toward the rivers of Hiroshima in a futile effort to extinguish their pain.

In a single white flash, some 70,000 souls were extinguished at 8:15 in the morning on that August day. Black Rain followed, pouring down on the alive and the barely alive radioactive water. Charred bodies covered the ground and filled the rivers.

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The 80th D-Day Anniversary Combines Historical Revisionism With A Proxy War Powwow

Zelensky’s attendance has more of a practical meaning than just reinforcing historically revisionist narratives about World War II since his discussions with the American, British, French, and German leaders will decide the coming escalations and the new peace process that might follow them by the end of summer.

A lot of media attention has been focused on the 80th D-Day anniversary considering its emotive significance and the participation of several international leaders at the event. Zelensky’s attendance alongside Biden and several of his Western European counterparts appears out of place since Ukraine had nothing to do with this operation. The only reason that he was invited was to advance NATO’s historically revisionist narrative about World War II and engage in a proxy war powwow.

To explain, the first refers to the false claim that the Western Allies were chiefly responsible for the Nazis’ defeat, not the Soviet Union. That twisted version of the truth has always been around but began to be fiercely propagated after 2014 and especially following the start of Russia’s special operation in 2022. This narrative was popularized in parallel with the one portraying the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose real importance was clarified here, as forging a Soviet-Nazi Alliance that made World War II possible.

It accordingly became unacceptable among the Western elite and opinionmakers to acknowledge the USSR’s role in defeating the Nazis. Since facts about the post-war order can’t be erased, however, they’ve instead taken to manipulating the events leading up to it in order to spin the tale that the First Ukrainian Front which played a leading role in the Battle for Berlin was a semi-independent force. To that end, they overlook that it was named as such for geographic reasons and instead claim that it was for ethnic ones.

Some Ukrainians’ collaboration with the Nazis is either ignored or dishonestly explained as “a misguided form of anti-Soviet resistance”, which combines with the preceding claim about the First Ukrainian Front to craft an entirely new narrative. In the average Western mind nowadays, Ukrainians were victims of the Soviets before World War II and then of the Nazis during it; semi-independent victors in that war; and then once again victims of the Soviets after it like the rest of Central & Eastern Europe (CEE).

The metanarrative that’s formed through the abovementioned means is to equate the USSR with Nazi Germany in terms of moral responsibility for starting World War II and then comparing the first’s prolonged military presence in CEE after the war with the Nazis’ brief but highly genocidal occupation. It’s upon this basis that Russia wasn’t invited to attend the 80th D-Day anniversary but Zelensky was since the latter’s participation reinforces these views in the Western imagination.

Having explained the historically revisionist reasons behind Zelensky’s invitation to Thursday’s event, it’s now time to segue into its practical importance with respect to the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine. He’s powwowing with the American, British, French, and German leaders precisely at the moment that those four are “escalating to de-escalate” as was argued here with a view towards coercing Russia into freezing the conflict on comparatively better terms for the West and Ukraine.

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FBI Documents Allege Japan Used Germ Warfare in Attack on US and Canada

Two FBI reports, one of them newly declassified, suggest the use of biological agents, in particular bubonic plague and anthrax, as part of a large-scale balloon barrage – code name “Fu-Go” – carried out by Japan over the United States and Canada in late 1944 and the first four months of 1945.

One report, dated two months after the end of World War II, stated that anthrax was discovered in Japanese balloons that came down in the U.S. Midwest. The other report was dated five years after the war. Written by J. Edgar Hoover, or sourced to his office, it discussed outbreaks of bubonic plague that experts felt were linked to the Japanese balloon attacks.

During World War 2, Japan launched some 9,300 high-altitude balloons against the U.S. and Canada. Approximately 300 balloons, many carrying antipersonnel and incendiary bombs, were known to have touched land in North America.

According to Japanese testimony, all records inside Japan relating to their secret balloon program were destroyed at the end of World War II, along with the biological warfare research undertaken by Japan’s infamous Unit 731.

The new evidence presented in this article significantly changes our understanding of this important episode in World War II, and points to an intelligence cover-up more than seven decades old.

Balloons Downed in Midwest Carried Anthrax

Last year, stimulated by the controversy over the discovery of a Chinese balloon drifting over the United States, a number of news articles recalled the WW2 Japanese balloon episode. In a May 5, 2023 Time Magazine interview with historian Ross Coen, who has written a book on the Fu-Go attacks, Coen noted, “From the perspective of the War Department and Army intelligence, the thing that they feared most was biological warfare…. Ultimately there never was any biological component to the balloons.”

But a July 6, 1945 FBI memorandum addressed to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, Daniel M. Ladd, stated, “recently several Japanese balloons were found in [North and South Dakota, and Nebraska] which were determined to have been carrying bacteria.”

The bacteria were identified as anthrax. The pathogen was discovered in the hydrogen gas that inflated the massive paper-laminated balloons. The FBI report was written by the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Norfolk Field Division.

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Victims of a Nazi human sacrifice: Five skeletons discovered under Goering’s house at the Wolf’s Lair, buried naked surrounded by ancient talismans and missing their hands and feet are feared to have met a most terrible fate

As the monster who was responsible for creating the Gestapo and building the first Nazi concentration camps, Hermann Goering was one of Hitler’s most ruthless henchmen.

Yet nothing could have prepared a team of amateur archaeologists for what they were about to find in the basement of his former home in the Wolf’s Lair — the Nazis’ headquarters in what is now north-eastern Poland.

Set in dense forest, with barbed wire, guard towers and minefields all around, the once-impregnable complex of some 200 houses, bunkers and other buildings was where Hitler and senior Nazis planned the barbarities of the Holocaust and military campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa, their invasion of the Soviet Union.

They destroyed much of the base before fleeing the Red Army in January 1945 and today the mossy ruins are a tourist attraction drawing more than 200,000 visitors a year — among them a Gdansk-based team of German and Polish history buffs.

For years the archeological researchers have been unearthing ordinary items such as crockery and tools. But this month they revealed how, back in February, they entered the ruins of Goering’s once-imposing brick home and noticed a concrete ledge which had at one time supported a wooden floor. While digging for the nails which might have held it together, they found a human skull.

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Veteran Affairs Official Who Tried to Ban V-J Photo Has Controversial Past

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) official who attempted to ban the iconic photograph of a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day from VA hospitals has a controversial history of hospital mismanagement, reports have revealed.

Assistant Under Secretary for Health Operations RimaAnn Nelson became the center of a national controversy for sending out a memo to VA health providers demanding the “removal and replacement of ‘V-J in Times Square’ photographs” on February 29.

The letter leaked to social media earlier this week, prompting backlash from thousands who don’t agree with Nelson’s assertion that the nearly 80-year-old image violates “the VA’s no-tolerance policy towards domestic violence, sexual harassment, and assault.”

Nelson’s censorship bid caused such a firestorm that VA Secretary Denis McDonough made a statement rescinding the rule change.

“Let me be clear: This image is not banned from VA facilities — and we will keep it in VA facilities,” he wrote on X Tuesday.

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