A day of actual infamy…
Tag: wwii
Missing WWII fighter plane is FOUND after 80 years: Aircraft that vanished in a daring raid on Italy is discovered 40ft underwater off the Gulf of Manfredonia
A fighter plane that vanished in a daring raid on Italy – just days before the allies invaded – has been found, solving a mystery that’s endured since the Second World War.
Warren Singer, a US airman, disappeared with his P-38 Lightning on August 25, 1943, during an attack on Italian airfields near Foggia, in the east of the country.
The mission sought to blunt Italy’s aerial response to the coming landings, and was a great success – destroying 65 enemy planes, at the cost of seven P-38s.
But 2nd Lt Singer never reached his target, and air force records show he was last seen flying near Manfredonia, a town 22 miles east of Foggia.
Now, 80 years later, divers have found the wreckage of Singer’s plane at a depth of 12 metres (40ft) beneath the Gulf of Manfredonia.
Singer, who was just 22, was survived by his wife Margaret, who he’d married five months earlier, and who later gave birth to their daughter, Peggy, in January 1944.
Reacting to the discovery of the plane, grandson Dave Clark said: ‘Warren is a hero to us all, and we love him.
‘He was a very young man with love, hope, and dreams.
‘One of the really amazing things about the story is that Warren has 12 descendants.
‘We are all alive because of the very short time that that Margaret and Warren had together.
‘My mother recently realised there were three days between the wedding and him being shipped out.’
The diver who identified the wreck, Fabio Bisciotti, said that it was in surprisingly good condition.
Magic and Mystical Warfare in World War II
All throughout the history of war enemies have constantly tried to one-up each other. From fist, to stick, to stone, to spear, to guns and nuclear weapons, there has always been constant one-upmanship. In the old days, people often would turn to magic and dark paranormal forces to try and change the tide of conflict, but far from mere ancient superstitions and lore, this has persisted well into the modern day. During the brutal trial by fire that was World War II there were certainly those who sought to harness supernatural powers to their own ends, and both friend and enemy alike absolutely turned to magic to try to gain an upper hand.
When talking about using magic and World War II it is inevitable that we start with the Nazis. The Nazis have always made great villains and for good reason. Their twisted philosophies, seemingly all-encompassing presence during World War II, their ruthlessness, and their numerous secret projects have all sort of wreathed them with this ominous air of evil and inscrutable mystique. Throw in stories of unleashing top secret super weapons, occult powers, secret underground lairs, and quests for powerful ancient artifacts and you have the perfect recipe for a mysterious villainous organization. Yet the movie portrayal of Nazis is not always as completely so far removed from reality as one might think. Indeed, the Nazis were deep into research, expeditions, and experiments that are just as fantastic and at times downright absurd as any fiction involving them, and they were often involved in the dark world of the weird and the occult to a degree many might not be aware of. Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction, and man’s propensity for evil knows few boundaries. It is a potent combination that makes the reality of the Nazis something at once stranger and far more terrifying than any movie depiction of them.
How Zionists Rewrote the History of The Second World War
I’m old enough to remember when the Second World War was relived in the playground, with less popular kids forced to be Germans. Three decades after the conflict ended the Battle of Britain, Dambusters and D-Day lingered in boys’ imagination, as they read jingoistic comics such as Victor and Warlord. The atom bomb, which ended the war in Japan, loomed large in the Cold War between the West and the USSR.
But that was the generation of ‘baby boomers’. The war, as taught to children today, has changed in emphasis from factual detail about battles and strategy to a moral narrative. In the revised history, the main event was the Holocaust, and the perpetrators the most evil racist regime that has ever existed. Undoubtedly, Hitler’s tyranny persecuted the Jews, among other ethnic minorities, and its pursuit of the ‘final solution’ is a stain on humanity.
Whereas my generation saw the war in terms of a desperate fight against German invasion, the Blitz by the Luftwaffe, and Atlantic convoys bringing food and fuel harassed by U-boats. This British perspective was different to that of the Russians, or of any country overrun by the Wehrmacht. Of course, European Jews had a particularly traumatic experience, but for that to become the dominant account suggests ideological motive.
The truth about the relationship between the Third Reich and the Jews is more complicated than the induced horror of a trip to Auschwitz. Robert Oulds, in his masterpiece, World War II: the First Culture War (2023), describes what happened in Palestine, a less-known yet dramatic theatre of the Second World War.
In the 1930s Hitler had supported a Jewish homeland, as was already emerging since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But the Holy Land around Jerusalem was keenly contested. The British had suppressed the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, but Palestine and the wider Middle East were volatile.. Hitler sought to radicalise Muslims for jihad against the British and French colonial powers, as had the Kaiser in the First World War. As Oulds explains: –
‘Hitler planned to use Crete as a steppingstone to reach Cyprus and from there take Palestine from the British and Zionists who were in the process of colonising the Mandate.’
The Zionist paramilitary organisation, the Stern Gang, sought cooperation with the Nazis, to liberate Palestine from British control, but their overtures were coolly received. Hitler favoured the Arab nationalists. Meanwhile, twelve thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively Christian, had volunteered to serve in the British army.
According to Oulds, ‘the Nazis admired Islam because its adherents were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Furthermore, as the Nazis were opponents of Judeo-Christian heritage, they thought that Islam could be a useful tool in undermining the traditions which the National Socialists despised.’ Ironically, this was similar to the aim of the Frankfurt School, whose Cultural Marxist professors were predominantly of the Jewish intelligentsia targeted by Hitler.
The Coven of Witches That Fought the Nazis During World War II
These weren’t the “double, double toil and trouble” kind of witches Shakespeare wrote about in “Macbeth.” They were Wiccans, led by Gerald Gardner, the man whose writings would revive the pagan belief system to the modern era. In 1940s Britain, his beliefs were far from the mainstream, but like the rest of the country, he knew he might soon find himself under Nazi domination.
Gardner may have been 55 years old and leading a coven of witches, but he was still a patriotic Briton with a stiff upper lip. So the man who would be remembered as “The Father of Witchcraft” and his followers were going to do their part to defend the island, casting a spell that would target Adolf Hitler personally and end the threat of a Nazi invasion.
Gardner grew up in a wealthy English family that ran a timber company for the British Empire. He was a sickly boy who spent more time with his nursemaid than his parents. He spent much of his young life traveling and educating himself, eventually gaining a keen interest in spirituality, religious rituals and the occult. He would return to Britain as an older man, still sickly, but took up a career as a civil servant and amateur archeologist. Meanwhile, his interest in the occult only grew.
After Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Garder settled in Highcliffe-on-Sea and joined the New Forest Coven, a group of pagan witches in southern England that he believed were continuing a pre-Christian religious order that had been kept secret for centuries. As 1939 turned to 1940, Gardner’s affection for his coven grew, as did the coven itself. They practiced folk magic in tune with their beliefs and he began writing books that would later form the foundation for the brand of Wicca that still bears Gardner’s name.
What Imperial Japan Couldn’t Do in 250 Years American Christians Did in Nine Seconds
Seventy-five years ago today, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians, and wounding uncountable numbers of others.
For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.
At the time, the United States was arguably the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly have failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the peaceful ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).
The baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with a number of near-fatal glitches. Most Americans in 1945 would have done exactly the same if they had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew, and there would have been very little mental anguish later if they had also been treated as heroes.
Nevertheless, the use of that monstrous weapon of mass destruction to destroy a mainly civilian city like Nagasaki was an international war crime and a crime against humanity as defined later by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Of course, there was no way that the crew members could have known that at the time. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in when the bomb actually detonated. Of course, none of them actually saw the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal.
“Orders are orders” and, in wartime, disobedience can be, and has been, legally punishable by summary execution of the soldier who might have had a conscience strong enough to convince him that killing another human, especially an unarmed one, was morally wrong.
Who Opposed Nuking Japan?
“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
— President Herbert Hoover
“[T]he Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945… up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped. … [I]f such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.”
— Herbert Hoover
“I told [General Douglas] MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.”
— Herbert Hoover
“MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
— Norman Cousins
“General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. He wants time to think the thing out, so he has postponed the trip to some future date to be decided later.”
— Weldon E. Rhoades
Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pilot
“[Gen. Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. … MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off.”
— President Richard Nixon
“The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss. And that suggestion of giving a warning of the atomic bomb was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted. In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.”
— Ralph Bird, Under Secretary of the Navy
“I concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945. Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands scheduled for 1 November 1945 would have been necessary.”
— Paul Nitze, director, later Vice Chairman of the
Strategic Bombing Survey
“[E]ven without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
— U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946
Adolf Heusinger- Hitler’s Chief Of Staff who Became NATO’s Chief Of Staff
General Adolf Heusinger was Adolf Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army during World War II. With the outbreak of the Second World War Heusinger accompanied the German HQ field staff and assisted in the planning of operations in Poland, Denmark, Norway, and France and the Low Countries (coastal region in western Europe, consisting especially of the Netherlands and Belgium). He was promoted to colonel on August 1, 1940 and became chief of the Operationsabteilung in October 1940, making him number three in the Army planning hierarchy . In 1944 Heusinger assumed office as Chief of the General Staff of the Army. In this capacity, he attended the meeting at Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944, and was standing next to Hitler when the bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg exploded.
After the war, this German war criminal, the man who helped Hitler plan and execute his invasion of neighboring countries, was not even put on trial, quite contrary he was allowed to take over the newly established West German army, the “Bundeswehr”. This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post WW2 Western Germany. Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry the holocaust and other crimes against Humanity were never put on trial for their crimes against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians and the people of Europe, but instead were installed in top positions in the western German government, army, industry and western German society at large. Many former Nazis served in the new German military, media and government, attaining high offices. They also rebuilt western Germany, with the generous help of billions of dollars of US taxpayers money under the “Marshal Plan”, and became an integral and founding part of the “new” German elites which ended up ruling the “new” Germany, which was basically the same old Germany, just rebranded.
Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ‘Nuclear Tests’?
In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979”. As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki.
So, 35 years after the atomic bombings of those Japanese cities in August 1945, the Energy Department—the agency in charge of nuclear weaponry—was categorizing them as “tests”.
Later on, the classification changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential P.R. problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were not ‘tests’ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed . . . or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety”.
But the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were tests, in more ways than one.
Take it from the Manhattan Project’s director, Gen. Leslie Groves, who recalled: “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb”.
A physicist with the Manhattan Project, David H. Frisch, remembered that U.S. military strategists were eager “to use the bomb first where its effects would not only be politically effective but also technically measurable”.
For good measure, after the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert used plutonium as its fission source on July 16, 1945, in early August the military was able to test both a uranium-fueled bomb on Hiroshima and a second plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to gauge their effects on big cities.
Public discussion of the nuclear era began when President Harry Truman issued a statement that announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—which he described only as “an important Japanese Army base”. It was a flagrant lie. A leading researcher of the atomic bombings of Japan, journalist Greg Mitchell, has pointed out: “Hiroshima was not an ‘army base’ but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military headquarters, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city—and far from its industrial area”.
Mitchell added: “Perhaps 10,000 military personnel lost their lives in the bomb but the vast majority of the 125,000 dead in Hiroshima would be women and children”. Three days later, when an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, “it was officially described as a ‘naval base’ yet less than 200 of the 90,000 dead were military personnel”.
The Amazing Saga of Manhattan Project Engineer Who Tried to Halt the Atomic Bombings
A sure sign of the cultural impact of a hit movie is that, after the first week, we are still seeing one article after another inspired by it, from the often silly (who is buying Oppie’s hat?) to the serious. Somewhere in between is this interesting piece in today’s New York Times on imagery of the mushroom cloud, from the ‘50s and ‘60s (e.g. Dr. Strangelove) through to The Day After and much more in the 1980s, to Asteroid City and Oppenheimer now.
Nolan returns the nuclear explosion from the realm of symbolism to a primal zone of fears and urges – a cataclysm created by other human beings like us.
But let’s not forget Arnold and Jamie Lee in True Lies (with the real Terminator behind them)
After toiling in a top-secret government program for two to three years, many scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project, and not at Los Alamos, finally learned in 1945 that all that work was aimed at creating a revolutionary new weapon, the atomic bomb, and with Germany defeated it might very well still be used – over Japanese cities in the months ahead. Indeed, this would occur, seventy-eight years ago next week. This eventuality deeply troubled some of them, fearing the toll on civilians, and the uncharted radiation effects that would result, as well as setting a precedent for future use.
Yet none of them took these concerns public. Wartime security controls were still very much in place and anyone who did leak or speak to the press faced severe penalties. A key Chicago scientist, Eugene Rabinowitz, later recounted that he deeply considered speaking out. It wasn’t so much that he opposed any possible use of the bomb but that – I find this profound – Americans deserved to know, in advance, what was likely about to be done by their leaders, in their names. There is no record of anyone else within the massive Manhattan Project – with sprawling sites in a several states – coming close to doing that.
One of the most famous scientists who played a key early role in developing the bomb, Leo Szilard, did mount an earnest private campaign, gaining the support of dozens of atomic scientists in the project. We see a little of this in Oppenheimer, once via Szilard and a couple of times raised by Teller. They petitioned President Truman to never use, or at least hold off using, the new weapon until Japan was given a much longer period to surrender, or possibly demonstrate the power of the bomb for the enemy before actually dropping it over a city. The petition was blocked (partly by Oppie) from reaching the desk of the president before it was too late.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.