©A STEP AT A TIME…GERMANY LOSES THE ATLANTIC IN WORLD WAR II

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist, July 27, 2019

“…In a puffed-up display of military muscle with which the German High Command wanted to lodge terror in the hearts of the nations on its radar, in December, 1939 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) journalist William L. Shirer was invited to view the German fleet on the agreement that he would use his radio microphone to tell what he had seen. A sizable contingent of the fleet was then at the River Elbe harbor at Hamburg on Germany’s Atlantic coast, as well as at the Baltic Sea coast harbor at Kiel. In his best-selling book titled BERLIN DIARY, published in 1941, Shirer stated that his tour guide was one angry ‘Oberleutnant X, a typical World War II type of officer, monocle and all.’[1] Through sheets of rain that had reminded Shirer of Liverpool, the officer had led Shirer through foot-deep puddles onto the Hamburg docks to the location of several warships. They had spent copious time going through the ‘Admiral Hipper,’ a new 10,000-ton cruiser. He had been shown the ‘Leipzig,’ a smaller cruiser. Men had been frantically at work on the new 35,000-ton ‘Bismarck.’ It, and its sister ship, had been top secret.

            In the late afternoon of the same day, the rain had turned to snow and the roads to ice as the Oberleutnant and Shirer had sped by car to Kiel. Shirer stated in his journal that he had been surprised to see that almost the entire German fleet had been concentrated at Kiel Harbor, among them the pocket-battleship ‘Deutschland,’ two cruisers of the ‘Cologne’ class, both 26,000-ton battleships, and about fifteen submarines. There had been another three submarines in dry-dock. He had mused to himself that if only the British knew about the mass of German warships there, and with the help of a near full moon, the British could destroy the entire German fleet in one bombing raid on that one night.

            Taking a page from Shirer’s journal, as well as Japan’s playbook at Pearl Harbor of over nineteen months before, in an attack code named ‘Operation Gomorrah’ in late July, 1943, Allied Forces bombed Hamburg’s shipyards, U-boat pens, and oil refineries. The raid included concentrated attacks on civilian and civic infrastructures, which virtually destroyed most of the city. An estimated 35,000 people were killed and 125,000 wounded. There had been no rain in Hamburg for quite some time prior to the attack, and the dry conditions exacerbated the effects of the bombings. ‘Fire and brimstone’ was an apt term for the firestorm that enveloped the city. A vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air created a 460 meter (1,509 feet) high funnel of fire. There was no escape for the people or the Nazi nation-state. It was the inauguration of Germany’s loss of the Atlantic in World War II.

            In Berlin, Germany’s capital, citizen morale was already low stemming from the air attacks on their city four months before. Confidence in the ‘Luftwaffe,’ Germany’s aerial warfare forces, to protect them was slipping away. Berliners could kid themselves no more. Hitler’s bombast was receiving less play. Hamburg jolted Berliners to the terrible reality that Berlin was the center of the Allies’ bullseye. In an about face, even the therefore uncompromising Hermann Goebbels, the Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, admitted in a mood report to the people that the outlook for Berlin was dire. The report listed measures that he urged the people to take, which included the feeble safeguard of digging protective trenches.

            The response in Berlin was chaos. Orders were issued to women, children, elders, and other non-essential citizens to evacuate to places less vulnerable to attack. While over the rest of the summer and into autumn only nuisance strikes occurred, Berliners knew much worse was in store for them. Like rats jumping from a sinking ship, they jammed railroad cars, and purloined any other conveyance they could engage to flee Berlin, including setting out on foot. Bent over with heavy bundles on their backs, they struggled to salvage some vestige of their lives….”

**Author’s Note…the above is an excerpt of Linda Lee Greene’s World War II novel, which will be published in late 2019.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.    

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[1] BERLIN DIARY, THE JOURNAL OF A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT 1934 – 1941, William L. Shirer, TESS PRESS/Imprint of Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. in association with A Common Reader, p 213 – 215.

©A STEP AT A TIME… In War and Peace

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

When on May 13, 1943, the Axis forces in Tunisia fell to the Allied forces, ending the North Africa Campaign of World War II, Ohio-native soldier Bob Gaffin and his fellow US Second Armored Division warriors knew what was coming. The scuttlebutt was that Sicily was next. It made perfect sense. Knock out Sicily; punch through Italy; kill Hitler’s cohort, the fascist Italian dictator Mussolini, and you’ve destroyed Hitler’s southern flank. The Mediterranean oil secured—an army could run for a long time on that oil, straight north to Nazi-occupied Europe, to Hitler’s bunker, and then to jam his Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or his lonely Tweedledee according to rumor, down his throat for his breakfast. And that would be just an appetizer! Bob and his “Hell on Wheels” boys had trained for the offensive: they were tough; they were gritty; they were ready. The hitch in the overall itinerary was the actual fact of Sicily’s being the obvious next target. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself is reputed to have said, “Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it’s Sicily.” The Allies needed a con to deflect Hitler’s attention away from Sicily.

The elaborate deception operation, concocted and supervised by two members of British Intelligence, hinged on a dead Welsh tramp dressed up as a marooned officer of the Royal Marines carrying credible British correspondence indicating an Allied invasion on Greece and Sardinia rather than on Sicily in early July. Transported from Scotland to the southern coast of Spain by submarine, the body was released close to shore, where it was pulled out of the water the next morning by a Spanish fisherman. “Abwehr,” the German Intelligence organization, which maintained a strong presence in the area, an area chosen for the drop by the British for that very reason, examined the documents, and then transmitted the information to Hitler. He fell for the ruse and shifted his reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia, as a result. Sicily received none.

A violent summer storm kicked up huge waves in the sea and many of the Allied troops holed up on the landing crafts of the armada underway from North Africa to Sicily were green with seasickness and lost the contents of their stomachs over the sides. Commanders circulated among them, boosting morale, reassuring the men that the mission was secure. Actually, the storm worked to the Allies’ advantage, for the enemy let its guard down based on an assumption that no commander would brave such wind and rain. But brave it they did. While Hitler’s larger force dug in for the onslaught at Greece and Sardinia, before the sun broke the horizon on July 10, 1943 the combined air and sea landing, which was comprised of 150,000 Allied troops, 3,000 ships, 4,000 aircraft, and 600 tanks landed and commenced to crush the remaining enemy positions on Sicily. Bob Gaffin was a half-track driver in that armored brigade.

Ten days into the offensive, Mount Etna was merely an imprint on Bob’s internal eye as he and his comrades bypassed it in their aggressive drive toward Palermo. The bulletproof windshield of his half-track was thick with the volcano’s ever-present ash kicked up by the vehicle’s powerful tires and treads from the coast road. A hard day of fighting lay ahead, a battle in which several of the twelve men he carried in his half-track personnel carrier would lose their lives.

Twenty-six years from that very day, on July 20, 1969, as he and his wife and some of their children gathered around their television set in their home located in a little town in southern Ohio, USA and watched a fellow Ohioan place man’s first footprint on the moon, Bob recalled a footprint of his own in another landscape in an earlier time. It was a place as alien to him then as was the moon’s surface to astronaut Neil Armstrong, a footprint in the ashy soil someplace in Sicily when Bob hopped down from his seat behind the steering wheel of the half-track he drove to take a quick breather.     

By mid-August, the Allies conquered Sicily, and the heel of Italy loomed large in that unfolding theater of war. Meanwhile, Mussolini was soiling his underwear, and Hitler was scratching his Tweedledee, nervously, no doubt!

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.

©THIS DAY IN WORLD WAR II: JULY 8, 1943 – THE BETRAYAL OF FRENCH RESISTANCE LEADER AND HERO JEAN PIERRE MOULIN

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

A scarf swept around his neck and fedora angled rakishly over his dark brow, he was a fit character for a John Le Carré espionage novel. But World War II French Resistance leader and hero Jean Pierre Moulin was no figment of a writer’s imagination. He was the real deal! He was not the cute kid or the ace student one would pick to rise to the top of any walk of life of his choosing. He was the son of an influential father instead, who pulled strings. And the tilt of his head and swagger of his body in photographs suggest charm, courage, wit. That he was also lucky, was a sure bet—until he wasn’t lucky!

Gentle civil service doors opened for him. World War I ended while he was still in training to do battle that he never saw. An advantageous law degree sharpened his pedigree. Returned to the civil service, a rapid rise earned him a spot as prefect (regional administrator) of Chartres, the youngest holder of such an office in France.

A homosexual by some accounts, but an uncompromised lady’s man as sworn to by those who knew him best, at twenty-seven, his marriage to a young professional singer soon soured. His politics turned, as well, leaning to the left to the point that there were and are to this day allegations that he was a Communist, although no hard evidence has shed light on the claim. Through the interwar years, his was a rising star in various influential government posts. It is tempting to conclude that he caught the resistance bug when as chief of cabinet of the air ministry he allegedly delivered airplanes to the Spanish Republican Forces in their battle against the authoritarian Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.  

Swept up in the Nazi overthrow of France in June, 1940, the Gestapo pummeled his office door, arrested and tortured him as a suspected Communist, and for refusing to sign a document falsely asserting French army atrocities. Thrown into prison, he tried to commit suicide by slashing his own throat with a piece of broken glass, a desperate act suggestive of a marked man choosing to die rather than to collaborate with the enemy. Found by a guard and hospitalized, he recovered. The ubiquitous scarf around his neck thereafter masked the scar left by his failed suicide attempt. He slipped underground and joined the French Resistance through “Free France,” the government-in-exile and its military forces, led by Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in London, England, where de Gaulle had sought asylum. It was also the official organizing arm of the resistance in occupied France.  

From the outset of the Nazi takeover of France, opposition groups formed. But it was also a fact of life that savage reprisals against the civilian population by the occupying forces was the inevitable reply for every act of resistance. The helter-skelter approach amplified the danger. Unanimity among the various resistance groups was a must. By way of a circuitous route planned around meetings with the leaders of the separate resistance groups, Moulin was smuggled into London, met with de Gaulle, apprised him of the status of the resistance, and offered to do the job of coalescing the groups. De Gaulle was impressed with Moulin’s networking and political skills, and assigned him to the hard and dangerous mission. As of that day, there was a target on his back as big as France itself. Code-named “Rex” or “Max,” Moulin parachuted into southern France and got to work creating a cohesive anti-German underground.

Moulin lived incognito for a year and a half, traveling around France, spurred on by great successes and undeterred by some letdowns. The arrest of a senior colleague left a gap that needed filling. Moulin called a clandestine meeting with fellow resistance leaders for that purpose at the home and presumed cabinet médical (doctor’s office) of Dr. Frédéric Dugoujon in a suburb of Lyon on June 21, 1943. As the men assembled in the doctor’s waiting room, Klaus Barbie, the malicious local Gestapo chief, and his men stormed in. They had been tipped-off. Moulin and the seven others were arrested and imprisoned.

Interrogated hour-by-hour and day-by-day by the pitiless Barbie into early July, Moulin was not broken. He revealed nothing to his torturers. Taken to Paris and subjected to further interrogation, Moulin still held out against the enemy. Placed finally on a train to Germany, he died just outside of Metz. The date was July 8, 1943. In his trial for crimes against humanity years later, Barbie claimed that Moulin died of self-inflicted wounds—in other words: of suicide.  

This man Jean Pierre Moulin, about whom books have been written, and films produced; for whom French streets and institutions are named; this model of French resistance, civic virtuousness, moral rectitude, and patriotism is a man of mystery in the end, a man who continues to inspire questions about his personal life, his politics, and about the identity of his betrayer, and why he was betrayed. We are also left to wonder how he really died. Did he meet his end at the vicious hand of a Nazi, or at his heroic own?

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.

©THIS DAY IN WORLD WAR II: JULY 5, 1943 – BRITISH AIRMEN SINK GERMAN “U-535” By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

The slow, eastbound convoys delivering war materiel from the western Allies to Great Britain across the north Atlantic during World War II found it dangerous going in those German U-boat infested waters. But as the twilight sun of July 5, 1943 ignited the ocean’s black depths, it portended a good day for the Allied convoys.

Having set sail on her first and only patrol in the north Atlantic from Kiel in northern Germany on May 25, 1943, was also German submarine “U-535.” Under the command of Kapitänleutnant Helmut Ellmenreich and three subordinate officers and forty-four enlisted men, “U-535” had scored no kills during her tedious forty-one days and nights of subaquatic existence in that turbulent sea. Fourteen days into the U-boat’s tour of duty, the crew’s ennui was interrupted by depth charges rocking their boat, explosives dropped by Great Britain’s famous No. 269 Royal Air Force Squadron aloft in an American Lockheed Hudson Light Bomber, followed by a further aborted attack from another Hudson from the same air squadron. In return shelling, the U-boat’s flak damaged the second Hudson, and all the while the U-boat stayed up, and showed promise of much fight left in her. The wounded Hudson got on the horn lickity-split and apprised the incoming United States Navy Catalina Patrol Bomber (amphibious aircraft) attached to Squadron VP-84 of the outcome of the skirmish. Catalina shadowed the U-boat for several hours, but to no avail, for like a canny and tempered shark, she slithered away underwater and escaped the Allies as dusk pulled a gray and opaque curtain over the ocean once more.

Through the balance of June and the opening days of July, “U-535” continued her dogged hunt for Allied convoys to kill along the western borders of Europe. But as she and her pack comprised of “U-170” and “U-536” surfaced and headed inbound on the 5^th of July, they were attacked by an alert and hungry British Liberator Maritime Reconnaissance Aircraft of No. 53 Squadron Royal Air Force northeast of Cape Finisterre, Spain. They evaded the opening attack, but “U-536” was strafed in the second round, gave the signal to her sister ships to crash dive, and down she and “U-170” went to the safety of the deep. For reasons unknown, “U-535” stayed topside and gave return fire with her AA guns, hitting the Liberator. Nevertheless, “U-535” was torn asunder by eight depth charges dropped by the British aircraft. With all hands on board, the submarine sank, and with no remorse on the part of those war-weary British airmen. The Allied convoys were spared a terrible fate that day, and with one crewman wounded, the damaged British Liberator screeched back to base on a wing and a prayer, and some crack piloting.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.      

©THIS DAY IN WORLD WAR II: JULY 4, 1943 By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

July 4^th landed on Sunday in 1943. While the American servicemen stationed in areas of Great Britain who were lucky enough to have the day off kicked back in their bunks and read their latest correspondences from home and penned their own letters to “mom” or “sis” or “sweetheart,” oftener than not, a radio set filtering through a loud speaker into the barracks was background white noise to the settings. Compliments of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), those World War II Yank warriors were kept abreast of news and sports, and entertained by British fare delivered by British voices. It was all to the good, except that those programs didn’t go a long way in rescuing those young American boys from the doldrums once the excitement of the latest letter wore off and homesickness kicked them in the belly like a cantankerous mule.

Shoring up morale among the American fighting men as they prepared for the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe (D-Day) was an ever-present challenge for their superiors. One solution to the problem arrived by way of the American Forces Radio Network, which became the United States Armed Forces Network. Using equipment and studio facilities furnished by the BBC, from London on July 4, 1943 at 5:45 PM, the AFRN put U.S. Corporal Syl Binkin on the air, the first U.S. Military broadcasting voice those Yank fighters had heard in that venue. Over time, the American programs grew in number and reach and even gained favor among British and European listeners. Command Performance, a particular favorite, arrived from Hollywood via shortwave, with a weekly listening audience of an estimated 95.5 million. Productions were in direct response to actual troop requests such as: “the sound of Ann Miller tap dancing in military boots;” or “foghorns sounding on San Francisco Bay;” or “a slot machine delivering a jackpot in Vegas.” There were requests for Carole Landis and Lucille Ball sighs, and for Errol Flynn taking a shower. Why Errol Flynn taking a shower, I don’t know, but Frank Sinatra singing in the shower, I can understand. Sinatra, along with Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Jane Russell, and the usual suspects of that golden age of Hollywood stepped up to that microphone like clockwork, and did their part in sending to those American troops bits and pieces of home.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available on Amazon.com.

©THIS DAY IN WORLD WAR II: JULY 3, 1943 By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

July 3, 1943 saw the arrival of the first tenants of “Site X,” a family who moved into a trailer slotted onto a muddy road scooped out among a maze of neighboring tracks along a 59,000 acre spread of sleepy farmland bordering eastern Tennessee’s Clinch River. In the autumn of 1942, a seismic shift from bucolic calm to hectic war effort had seized the area, and in the many months that followed, the restricted area held within its restricted 92 square miles the means to the Allied victory of World War II. Designed originally to house 30,000 specialized workers and their families, within two years, “Site X” grew to a population of 75,000, and into the name of the Clinton Engineer Works. It was the home of the USA’s top-secret pilot plutonium and uranium enrichment plants (of the Manhattan Project) that gave birth to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945, ending the war. The town was designated as Oak Ridge following the war. 

A mere 20 miles from Knoxville, “them furriners” of the secret town were easy to spot when they moseyed into the big city during the war. Not only were their boots mud-caked, but their pockets overflowed with cash and ration stamps. In that time of depression-era and war-time scarcity among regular folks, such abundance allocated to those cloak-and-dagger individuals didn’t sit well with the locals. Despite the suspicion, speculation, and resentment on the part of native Tennesseans, the veil of secrecy was respected, and the town’s existence and purpose stayed hush-hush until after World War II.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.