Junkers Ju-87 Stuka: Death Screams From Above

A flight of Stukas October 1943. Photo sourced from WikiCommons.

One of the main reasons why Germany was so successful in its early military campaigns was its use of blitzkrieg, or lightning war. In blitzkrieg, the armored units thrust through the enemy lines and sweep in from behind, encircling the enemy forces and cutting off their supplies. One of the key supports for the following infantry was the Luftwaffe and their dive bombers, the most famous of which was the Ju-87 Stuka.

The Stuka was unique in that it had bent gull-wings and it also had a siren attached to it. When the plane dove on the enemy formations, wind would pass through the siren and the plane would be heard shrieking down on its 'prey' right before it released its bomb with pinpoint accuracy. The Stuka, in fact, was one of the best dive bombers the Luftwaffe had in its arsenal.

However, it was after the conquest of mainland Europe that the Stuka's main problems surfaced. When Germany turned its sights towards bombing Britain into submission, the Stuka was one of the main bombers used in that campaign. However, the fact that it was very slow and couldn't maneuver very well in tight turns made it easy prey for the RAF. This made the limitations of the Stuka painfully clear to the Germans.

Eventually the Stuka was phased out of the Western lines and shipped to the Eastern front, where it continued to be used in its ground support role throughout the rest of the war, raining screaming death from above. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts sourced from "The Encyclopedia of Aircraft f World War II" edited by Paul Eden)

Escaping is no longer a sport!

In my previous posts about the various prison escapes, I have talked at length about the methods used by the prisoners to outwit their German captors. However, one thing that may still be confusing is why so much emphasis was put on these escapes. The answer is because the prisoners showed immense courage to do what they did, but not only in the act of escaping itself.

The reason so much emphasis is put on these escapes is because of the daring of the prisoners to escape into the heart of a country whose contempt and hate for them grew with every Allied advance. This led Hitler to enact more and more severe punishments for escapees, but still within the bounds of the Geneva Convention, which laid out rules of conduct in war between POW and jailer. these bounds included the prisoner's duty to, in a nutshell, escape and confound the enemy and use an inordinate amount of resources to maintain their confinement.The other big bound was that jailers couldn't kill prisoners.

However, as the war went on Hitler could not afford to tie up more and more resources to round up escaping prisoners. After the Great Escape, where 76 prisoners escaped, an example had to be made. After they chose 50 of those captured to be summarily executed, posters popped up in all of the German POW camps warning the prisoners that if they were caught escaping again they would be killed.

 Even so, many prisoners dared to resist their German captors, although significantly less than in previous years. The prisoners of Stalag Luft III worked on yet another tunnel after the Great Escape, and the prisoners of Colditz built the Colditz Cock glider. These men knew the risks if they were to be caught and they still did these things. This was the kind of courage that legends were made of. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Sourced from "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill and "Colditz: The Untold Story of World War II's Great Escapes" by Henry Chancellor)

Icy Lifeline: The Arctic Convoys

Frost built up on the HMS Sheffield while escorting a convoy.
Photo sourced from WikiCommons.

One of the many success stories of World War II is the capacity of the United States to keep Britain fed throughout the war by making ships faster than the Germans could sink them. There was another convoy route, however, that does not get much attention but was equally as vital to the war effort. These were the Arctic convoys.

The Arctic convoys were put into place in the summer of 1941, days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. They were so named because they were forced to travel north of the Arctic Circle to deliver supplies to Murmansk, one of the USSR's northernmost ports.

However, these convoys had to brave more than just the cold. With the German conquest of Norway and Finland allied with the Germans, the route that the convoys had to take was fraught with enemy planes and ships.

One particularly notable convoy was PQ17 (PQ referring to travelling to Murmansk; QP meant departing Murmansk). It left at a time when the majority of the German fleet and a number of German planes were stationed in Norway, and intelligence leaked that the Tirpitz, the sister ship of the Bismarck, had sailed for the convoy. The Tirpitz, it turned out, wouldn't sail until the next day but the convoy was ordered to scatter and 23 of the 34 ships were sunk by U-Boats.

Nevertheless, these convoys were never deterred, and the Soviets were able to be supplied throughout the war. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts and figures sourced from "Campaigns of WWII Day by Day" by Chris Bishop and Chris McNab).

Seemingly Valuable Hostages: The 'Prominente' Prisoners

As the war in Europe went on the Germans accumulated more and more prisoners of war. The demographics of these prisoners reflect the stages of the war. Fr example, in 1943 before the landings at Normandy but during increased activity by the U.S Army Air Force there would have been increased numbers of American pilot prisoners.

However, throughout the war there were several prisoners that the Germans viewed as high value simply because they were related to key members of enemy governments. These were the 'Prominente', and they were held at the most secure prison camp in Germany: Colditz Castle.

The Prominente were usually servicemen who were captured in the line of battle, but some were civilians. Giles Romilly, for example, was a war correspondent who was captured in the Norway campaign and was the nephew-in-law of Winston Churchill. Other Prominente were usually distant cousins or nephew of high-ranking generals in the armies of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Poland.

These people were kept 'safe' and isolated from other prisoners in Colditz, and when the end of the war approached the Prominente feared that they had been saved only to be used as bargaining chips or worse, human shields. Eventually they were moved from camp to camp in the closing days of the war and by the end the officer in charge of the prisoners (who was regular army instead of SS and was afraid of SS reprisals if he surrendered) allowed the prisoners to go towards American lines, and he got a reduced sentence during the Nuremburg Trails for saving them.

In the end, the Prominente were little use to the Germans. Their potential value as hostages was overestimated ( a popular incident involves Hitler capturing one of Stalin's sons and asking to exchange him for a high ranking German officer and Stalin turned him down) and the end result was negligible. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts sourced from "Colditz: The Untold Story of WWII's Great Escapes" by Henry Chancellor)

Airliner Turned 'Liner-Killer: The Fw 200 Condor

An Fw 200 in flight. Photo sourced from WikiCommons.

In a previous article concerning the Germans' practice of making civilian planes with the explicit purpose of converting them to warplanes later, I talked about the Junkers Ju 52, which had a number of uses throughout the war. There's another notable aircraft to come out of this process, the Focke-Wolfe 200 Condor, which Winston Churchill dubbed "the scourge of the Battle of the Atlantic".

Like the Ju 52, the Fw 200 was originally built as a civilian plane and was operated by Lufthansa. Once war broke out, however, the Condor was quickly converted to serve the Luftwaffe. It was originally used to help the Kreigsmarine (the German navy) in their attempts to disrupt shipping in and around Britain after the invasion of France. It was reportedly quite successful in this role, what with its large and heavy-hitting arsenal. In February 1941 five Condors attacked a convoy and sank five ships in total.

However, by the middle of the war, with the advent of improved fighter planes and the entry of the United States into the conflict, the Condors became less and less effective. The Germans told Condor pilots to avoid conflict at all costs in order to preserve the planes. This didn't work, and it resulted in a Condor being the first German plane to be sot down by a U.S pilot in the war.

The Condor took on other roles during the war, such as reconnaissance and transport. But with Germany collapsing, the Condor was eventually phased out of the Luftwaffe's arsenal. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts and figures sourced from Wikipedia on the Fw 200 and "Campaigns of WWII Day by Day" by Chris Bishop and Chris McNab).

WWII Book Review: "Freedom's Forge"

Photo from Barnes and Noble's website.

This book is a unique historical piece about the "arsenal of freedom", the process from which the United States recovered from the Great Depression by putting the burden of armament on the private sector.

Its basic premise is to show the immense challenges America had to face in order to arm not only us but our allies. It constantly shows the incredible gap between the amount of war materiel that was needed and what the manufacturers thought they could make, and how they would eventually blow those numbers out of the water.

The Wonderful Tools for Escaping from a POW Camp

A compass hidden inside a walnut.
Photo sourced from  pegasusarchive.org.

One of the stories that is not looked upon as often as compared to the life and death struggles of combat during World War II is the life and death struggle of prisoners of war. In Germany, there were large numbers of Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, British, Russian, Greek, Czech, and later American prisoners all over the place. These men were duty bound to escape, and they had some of the most ingenious tools to do it.

In previous posts on The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III and Colditz Castle, I talked about the two most famous and glorified accounts of POW life in Germany. However, one aspect that hasn't been touched on were the escape aids. These were tools vital to escape, such as saw blades, money, compasses, and identity papers, hidden in such a way that the Germans couldn't find them, at least in theory.

A record containing German money.
Photo sourced from theescapeline.blogspot.com

These tools were the products of MI9, a branch of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the man who made them, Christopher Hutton, was a master of disguising contraband as harmless items. There were maps hidden as handkerchiefs, magnetic clips on pens so that they could be balanced on the tip to make a compass, spare uniforms that were specially designed to easily convert to civilian clothes, money hidden inside records, and even compasses hidden inside walnuts!

These were hidden in Red Cross care packages, and over the course of the war the Germans found most, but not all of these clever inventions, which only inspired MI9 to be even more clever, a war of wits if you will. These are the kinds of things usually seen in spy novels, but in reality, and it still makes a good story. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts from Wikipedia on MI9 and "Colditz: The Untold Story of WWII's Great Escapes" by Henry Chancellor).

Paris: A City Spared Devastation

German soldiers enter Paris.
Photo sourced from WikiCommons.

In today's society one of the most famous places in Europe is Paris for a number of reasons. We can soak in the history stretching back centuries, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. However, it could have ended up differently had events in World War II taken a different path.

By the middle of June 1940 the Germans had the Allies on the ropes. The British Expeditionary Force had evacuated from Dunkirk, the best French army units had already been encircled, and the government had abandoned Paris. The city was squarely in Germany's sights.

Earlier in the war, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and Rotterdam, a major city in the Netherlands, had both been severely bombed by the German Luftwaffe. The remaining city officials in Paris did not want to have their city share Warsaw's fate, and so on June 10 they declared Paris an open city, allowing the Germans to march in unopposed, an opportunity which the German propaganda artists (as well as Hitler, as described by his chief architect Albert Speer) took full advantage of.

Even when the Allies landed on Normandy and began pushing inland,, the Germans did not want to have bombs drop on Paris, so they moved their forces out of the city in 1944, leaving the city virtually unscathed throughout the war. These decisions have left us with a beautiful city to go to and enjoy for all its worth. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts and figures sourced from "World War II" by H.P Willmott, Robin Cross, and Charles Messenger.)