Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i History of War

The covert operations of Britain’s commandos during World War II range from the impressively daring to the downright unbelievable. In early 1940, volunteers were gathered for ‘service of a hazardous nature’ – but few could have guessed they would be taking on near-impossible odds. Men from all areas of the British armed forces, as well as many European refugees, took up the call to fight where no one thought possible. In this issue’s cover feature, we explore some of the toughest commando operations, from the near-suicidal St Nazaire Raid, which commando Tom Sherman survived, to the famous gruelling yomp across the Falklands. In all these thrilling accounts, the same skills, professionalism and sheer grit of the commandos prove indomitable. EMAIL frontline@imagine-publishing.co.uk www.historyanswers.co.uk FACEBOOK /HistoryofWarMag TWITTER @HistoryofWarMag…

D-DAY DECEPTIONS THE SAS, DUMMIES AND TIN FOIL 0030 6 June 1944 THE CHANNEL, SAINT-LÔ AND THE SEINE-MARITIME REGION Before the offensive, SAS teams begin deception operations to confuse the Germans during the vital early hours of the invasion. Dummy paratroopers simulate landings far from the real drop zones, and out in the Channel, the RAF drop thousands of pieces of foil to fool Nazi radar and simulate a ghost invasion fleet. AIRBORNE TROOPS LAND 24,000 ELITE PARATROOPERS DESCEND ON OCCUPIED NORMANDY 0015-0400 6 June 1944 PEGASUS BRIDGE AND SAINTE-MÈRE-ÉGLISE Across Normandy, the elite Allied Airborne Divisions landed on the edges of the beaches, securing their flanks and taking key towns and bridgeheads. The British landed to the east capturing bridges, including the famous glider assault at Pegasus Bridge. US…

DAVID JAMIESON YEARS ACTIVE: 1939-48 FORCE: BRITISH ARMY RANK: CAPTAIN Jamieson’s army career began early when he worked as a volunteer in the Territorial Army in 1939 aged just 19. Despite his young age, he was quickly promoted to second lieutenant. However, when his battalion went to France in 1940, he was considered too young to accompany them. Nevertheless, the intrepid young soldier soon followed, and by the time he turned 23, he had been promoted to captain of the 7th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. On 7-8 August, Jamieson was in command of a company just south of Grimbosq, Normandy, a position he filled by being the only officer remaining. The area offered the Germans useful cover to prepare their counter-attacks, so the company soon found itself under…

As Britain prepared for D-Day, it had to overcome a multitude of problems in order for the operation to succeed. The beaches of Normandy and beyond were covered with both natural and man-made obstacles that would work in the enemy’s favour. To combat this, a variety of unique tanks, known as Hobart’s Funnies, were specially designed to ensure victory would fall in the Allies’ favour. “THE DD TANKS WERE RATHER FRAGILE IN ROUGH SEAS, AND IN ONE INSTANCE DURING THE NORMANDY LANDINGS, 27 OF 29 TANKS SANK BEFORE REACHING THE SHORE” DD TANK Nicknamed ‘Donald Duck tanks’, this Sherman model was an amphibious swimming variant. The tank used a flotation screen and was powered to move through the water by a propeller. The DD tanks were rather fragile in rough…

As Soviet troops launched into East Prussia in January 1945, their political officers daubed slogans reminding fighters that they were “entering the lair of the fascist beast.” Civilians were murdered for their goods and POWs often executed on the spot. Those who suffered most, however, were women. “Red Army soldiers don’t believe in individual liaisons with German women,” wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, 12 men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.” As highlighted by the renowned historian Anthony Beevor, the mass rape of women was not limited to Germans; it was extended to Poles, Ukrainians and Belorussians. Even Russian women, forcibly sent back to Germany as slave labour, and those freed from concentration camps, suffered…

Sir John Norton-Griffiths, the man who inspired the British tunnellers, was an Edwardian celebrity. Born in 1875, this swashbuckling adventurer, whose ferocious temper earned him the nickname Hellfire Jack, started life as the son of a lowly clerk. He ran away from home aged 17, and after a brief stint in the army headed to Africa to work as manager of a gold mine. When the Boer War broke out, he re-enlisted, ending the conflict as a personal bodyguard to the British commander-in-chief. A series of huge engineering projects then followed, and he returned to Britain a rich man to take up a seat in Parliament. At the outbreak of World War I, he raised a cavalry regiment at his own expense and had himself commissioned into it as a…

Working for up to 12 hours a day in tense silence, life was tough and dangerous for the tunnellers. Every day they faced the same hazards underground. The tunnels were freezing and frequently rat infested or flooded. Fatigue, trench foot, and vitamin D deficiency all sapped their strength. The risk of cave-ins was ever present, as was the danger from asphyxiation or explosions caused by underground gasses. Then there was the threat of the Germans. Always listening, always waiting, maybe just on the other side of a slender wall of earth, to kill them. If tunnels collided, it meant cramped, candle-lit combat with knives, knuckle-dusters and bludgeons. If they didn’t, the enemy had explosives. Once a tunnel was detected, a hole was silently drilled towards it, a steel tube called…

One of the most spectacular exhibits within the Palace Armoury in Valletta, Malta, is Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt’s parade armour. Commissioned within the first two decades of the 17th century, likely from Milan, the armour was designed with opulence and grandeur in mind, rather than practical protection. Not only is the suit covered with intricate gold pattern, it is also much lighter than conventional, tougher armour. Wignacourt was among the most successful and popular Grand Masters of the Knights of St John, and ruled over the island and the order after his election in 1601. During his rule, he improved Malta’s defences against coastal raids and invasion, building a new fortified tower in St Paul’s Bay on the north of the island, and Fort San Lucjan, near Marsaxlokk to…

WILL LAWRENCE After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union lost momentum, the Red Army was soon poised to strike back with a vengeance. This issue, Will has looked at the Soviet advance from the ashes of Stalingrad to the gates of Berlin (page 60). JACK GRIFFITHS As well as compiling this issue’s cover feature on the toughest ever commando missions (page 26), Jack has been to visit one of the last surviving vessels from the Gallipoli campaign, HMS M33, now fully restored in all its glory (page 84). MIGUEL MIRANDA The Russo-Japanese War stands as one of the great underdog victories of the last century, with the fledgling Empire of Japan taking on Imperial Russia. Miguel looks at the conflict’s great turning point, the Battle of Port Arthur, on…

UNSTOPPABLE ALLIED AIR POWER The Allies had more than 11,000 aircraft at their disposal during the invasion, painted with black-and-white invasion stripes to identify them. 15,000 combat sorties were flown with just 127 planes lost. VITAL FRENCH RESISTANCE 15 days before the invasion, the French Resistance began operations to cripple German lines of communication. They cut telephone and railway lines in Normandy in more than 500 places, destroying 52 trains and sabotaging power plants. EISENHOWER PREPARED FOR THE WORST The scale of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was enough to cause the Supreme Allied Commander to consider failure. Drafting a short emergency speech to announce the possible failure, he wrote “the blame is mine alone.” EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THE WEATHER On 5 June, the invasion was briefly postponed due to storms. Group…

WHEN DID YOU JOIN THE ARMED FORCES? I joined the Royal Navy in December 1942 and was sent to HMS Collingwood in Fareham for a signalers course. I spent three months there before they shut the signaling school and I was transferred to Skegness. It was here that I became a Signalman-Trained Operator until a draft came for combined operations on landing craft, and I was sent to an LCG [landing craft gun] ship for close-in work on beach landings. I joined a flotilla at Glasgow and we did gun firing courses and then moved to the south coast to do full-scale landings at Studland Bay, aiming at on-shore targets with live ammo. HOW WERE YOU INVOLVED IN D-DAY? We loaded the armoury to its full extent and took on…

“Where there is Zhukov, there is victory,” said the Red Army maxim, and certainly, this shoemaker’s son from a small Russian village south of Moscow did much to earn that shining reputation. His father had fought for the tsar as a cavalryman in World War I and Zhukov himself rose to military prominence in the 1939 Mongolian conflict between Japan and Russia. He graduated to the Soviet high command during the early months of the German invasion and then won his laurels at the battles of Leningrad and Moscow. His undoubted ruthless streak did much to earn the respect of his tyrannical leader, Stalin, and he famously positioned tanks behind Soviet forward positions – not to mow down Germans, but to slaughter any Soviets who fled the battlefield. For all…

The subterranean world carved out by both the British and Germans on the Western Front was an elaborate network of tunnels, galleries and chambers. Here, deep beneath the roar of battle above, men terrified of discovery toiled in total silence, picking their way centimetre by centimetre towards each other’s lines. Working with shovel and bayonet in spaces often as narrow as a man’s shoulders, they crawled, dug, scraped and fought their way through the ancient layers of earth. 1 Tunnel entrance 2 Shaft house In this timber construction, rubble and soil would be hauled from below in sandbags by a winch and pulley, which would then be transported to the surface by a wooden trolley. Everything had to be shifted by hand. 3 Steel shaft The presence of quicksand in…

STALIN’S FAVORITE Writer Igor Nebolsin Price £45 Publisher Helion & Company THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE SOVIET TANK ARMY THAT SPEARHEADED RUSSIA’S COUNTERATTACK AGAINST THE NAZIS – PART ONE The war the Nazis waged against the Soviet Union in 1941-45 turned western Russia and Eastern Europe into the biggest slaughterhouse the world had ever seen. Fighting on a front that stretched for more than 1,000 miles, the killing took place on an unprecedented scale, leaving more than 24 million dead. Among the millions of lives swept up by this murderous tidal wave were the 60,000 or so who made up the Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Army. Between them they saw, from the vast tank battle at Kursk in July 1943 to the fall of Berlin in April 1945, arguably the…

D-Day wasn’t all beaches and German bunkers. One of the most memorable acts of courage was in a remote church in the small commune of Angoville-au-Plain. 19-year-old Kenneth Moore and 20-year-old Robert Wright only had minimal medical training, but found themselves thrust into action in Drop Zone D, the last of the 101st Airborne’s drops on D-Day. Known by the French as ‘la zone maudit’ (the cursed zone), the two medics would be caught in the crossfire while tending to the stream of injured troops coming in through the church doors. “AS NIGHTFALL APPROACHES, A US LIEUTENANT ARRIVES AND ADVISES A RETREAT. WITH NO WAY OF MOVING THE INJURED, MOORE AND WRIGHT REFUSE” THE UNTOLD STORY OF TWO COURAGEOUS MEDICS 1 DROP ZONE D D-Day is going well for the…

The scale of the impending disaster in the Soviet Union became apparent in mid-to-late November 1942, when the mighty German Sixth Army, numbering some 250,000 men and about 100 tanks, was encircled at Stalingrad. In his eagerness to take the city, Hitler had economised elsewhere and the forces protecting the Sixth out on the steppes and along the rivers and tributaries were made up from satellite states. The Russians targeted and defeated these troops in a furious counterstroke, leaving the cream of the German military marooned in an island of ruins. Hitler swore that relief would be imminent and Göring said (quite falsely) that the Luftwaffe could deliver up to 500 metric tons of supplies to the troops daily. Even in later November, Hitler was confident about the fate of…

1910 A Timorese luirai (chieftain) named Dom Boaventura leads a rebellion that is put down by the Portuguese within two years. 1916 A formal border is drawn up in The Hague between Dutch-controlled West Timor and the Portuguese East. 1941 Portuguese Timor is occupied by Australian and Dutch forces. The Japanese invade the following year and 60,000 Timorese are killed in the ensuing guerrilla war. April 1974 The Armed Forces Movement overthrows the dictatorship in Lisbon, beginning the ‘Carnation Revolution’. A rapid decolonisation of Portugal’s colonies accompanies political reform. September 1974 Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam meets Indonesian President Suharto in central Java and agrees that Portuguese Timor should ‘integrate’ with Indonesia. January 1975 A coalition is formed between UDT and Fretilin, the two largest pro-independence parties. Indonesian intelligence secretly…

William Hackett was a typical tunneller. Rejected by the army three times for having a weakened heart, the Nottinghamshire miner was finally accepted into the Royal Engineers in October 1915. Born in 1873, Hackett had grown up in the slums of Nottingham and, by the time the Great War broke out, had been working down the pits for 23 years. In June 1916, in Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée, shortly after his 43rd birthday, Hackett and four other men were entombed when an underground blast triggered by Germans digging the other way caused the tunnel they were in to collapse. Rescuers managed to reach the men and dig all but one of them out. The fifth, however, a 22-year-old from Swansea named Thomas Collins, was injured and unreachable. Although Hackett could easily have escaped…

Humid in the summer and freezing in the winter, M33 was far from luxury. The worst affected were the 67 non-officers on board who slept in hammocks at the bow and the stern of the ship. Private Richard Chapple joined the crew in June 1915 and was away from home for a total of three and a half years, marrying his fiancée as soon as he returned to land. Telegraphist Norman Milburn came aboard when he was only 16 as the British people got behind the war effort. The crew was mainly made up of reservists and volunteers from areas all around Britain and not one was conscripted. MARINE The military muscle of the ship, the Marines used the ship’s six-inch guns and Maxim machine guns to attack batteries and…

BIZARRE ENGLAND Author David Long delves into the depths of British history to shed some light on the more unique aspects of our colourful past. The humour is totally dry and typically British. XERXES: A PERSIAN LIFE Richard Stoneman takes us on a journey through the entirety of the Persian empire in the 5th century – this is a very thorough work on one of Persia’s most infamous kings. GERMANY’S SECRET MASTERPLAN Chris McNab takes a look at Hitler’s plans to mould the world in his own ideological choosing, including the creation of Butlin’s-type parks for his master race. NURSING THROUGH SHOT AND SHELL This work provides a valuable insight into the lives of the women at the heart of the war, told through the diary of World War I…