V-E Day: 70 Years Ago Today

Soldiers raise the Soviet flag near the Brandenburg Gate
upon Berlin's surrender on May 2. Photo obtained from Wikipedia.

There are seminal dates that are forever associated with events in World War II. December 7 will always be, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, "a day that will live in infamy", as it was the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war in 1941. June 6, the day General Dwight D. Eisenhower told his troops to "embark on the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months" on the beaches of Normandy, France.

May 8 may not be as well-known in the minds of popular American culture, but is an important day nonetheless: Victory in Europe Day, the day that Germany surrendered and World War II ended in Europe.

Of course, this day is somewhat deceptive. There were several steps that led up to the surrender. By the middle of April 1945 the Red Army had completely surrounded Berlin, Germany's capital. Within two weeks of heavy bombardment and bloody street to street fighting Berlin was in ruins, and on April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, along with many of the Nazi Party's highest officials including Joseph Goebbels.

Hitler had bequeathed the leadership of what remained of Germany to Admiral Karl Doenitz, the head of the German Navy, slighting Hermann Goering, head of the German Luftwaffe and Hitler's next in line whom Hitler had practically disowned in the war's final months.

Fighting would continue in pockets around Germany for another week, as many of the remaining combat units were SS fanatics clinging to Hitler's last order to not surrender. On May 2 Berlin officially surrendered to the Soviets, leading to surrenders in other small pockets of resistance. By May 5 Soviet troops had reached the outskirts of Prague, capital of then-Czechoslovakia and the last pocket of organized German resistance.

The formal declaration of surrender was signed on May 7 in Reims, France on behalf of the German Army. General Alfred Jodl, head of the German High Command, signed for the Germans. This was repeated in Berlin on May 8 for a very important reason.

The Big Three, the US, Great Britain and Soviet Union, had agreed to only accept Germany's unconditional surrender as one unified power, and had agreed to a draft of the surrender. However, the copy signed in Reims was slightly different than the agreed-upon draft, and the Soviet representative, General Susloparov, was apparently not authorized to accept the surrender on behalf of the Soviet Union, hence two ceremonies and why May 8, not the day before, is considered the official V-E Day.

However, fighting continued in Prague until May 11, which would seem to indicate that May 11 is the 'real' end to the war in Europe. Whatever the real date may be, V-E Day should be remembered as the day that the greatest conflict Europe has ever seen came to an end.

Thank you for reading, and have a pleasant day.

(Events and dates sourced from "Campaigns of World War II Day By Day" by Chris Bishop and Chris McNab)

WWII Movie Review: "Battle of Britain"

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", are some of the most famous words spoken by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in recognition of the monumental effort of the Royal Air Force in repelling the German Luftwaffe, which in turn prevented the German invasion of Britain.

The 1969 film "Battle of Britain" was the attempt to capture this effort and memorialize the brave men who fought in the battle. With an all-star cast featuring Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Curt Jurgens, and Laurence Olivier, this film has the recipe to blow the audience away with epic performances.

German bombers begin to bomb British airfields on Eagle Day
 (screenshot)

Some interesting facts about this film are that nearly all of the planes used in this film are actual vintage planes (with the exception of the Junkers 87 Stukas, which were 1:2 scale RC models). Also, in filming this movie, the amount of (blank) ammunition used in all of the takes the director ordered exceeds the amount of ammunition that was used in the actual battle!

Nevertheless, there are some problems with this film. The brief romantic scenes in this movie, meant to show the personal strain the battle had between pilots and their wives and lovers, seemed to be thrown into the mix and not done very well, at times appearing to be an afterthought of the scriptwriters to make this picture something more than a pure war picture, and therefore drag down the picture as a whole. Also, some of the aerial combat scenes tended to be drawn out a bit too long.

Overall, though, this film is a staple for any World War II movie library, as it does a fantastic job in honoring the soldiers who lived and died in the skies above Britain on both sides. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Image fair use rationale: 1. This image is being used to illustrate the article on the movie in question and is used for informational or educational purposes only. 2. This image is of low resolution. 3. It is believed that this image will not devalue the ability of the copyright holder to profit from the original work. 4. No alternative, free image exists that can be used to illustrate the subject matter.)

Georg Gaertner: The German Who Got Away

In a couple of my previous posts I have talked about the lauded successes of the Allied prison breaks from German POW camps and the few who made it all the way home. This story, however, is of a soldier from the other side and has a far less pleasant ending. His name is Georg Gaertner, and his name is Dennis Whiles. One identity is real, the other fake. Today, even the man himself has a hard time reconciling which is which.

Gaertner was a soldier serving in the Afrika Korps and was captured in Tunis in 1943. He was sent to a POW camp in Deming, New Mexico where he spent the remainder of the war. Upon the war's end, the Germans were going to be shipped to their homes. However, Gaertner knew that his home was in the Soviet zone of occupation and later ceded to Poland, where Germans in the region were pressured out.

Gaertner managed to escape in May of 1945 and spent the next 40 years on the run, assuming the identity of Dennis Whiles. He spent these years trying to live a quiet American life, even marrying. His circumstances finally forced him to confess his true identity to his wife, and later to the country in 1985. Until that point, Gaertner/Whiles was one of the top fugitives on the FBI Wanted list, with his POW picture posted in almost every post office in the country.

Whiles, having spent 40 years suppressing his birth identity, has spent the last 23 years trying to rediscover his past life. He is 93 now, and lives alone in Boulder, Colorado. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(For further details on Georg Gaertner, watch "Hitler's Lost Soldier" from 2006.)

Ghost Army: The First US Army Group

Today is the 69th anniversary of the Normandy landings and one of the defining moments of World War II. Many thousands of brave men died on the beaches due to heavy German resistance in some places, especially Omaha Beach. However, many more men may have died, and indeed the invasion may not have succeeded were it not for Operation Quicksilver: the Allied intelligence operation intended to draw German units away from Normandy and otherwise confuse the Germans into thinking the invasion was going to happen somewhere else.

While the main invasion was at Normandy, the Germans
believed it would come at Pas de Calais to the north.
Map obtained from WikiCommons.

The thinking behind this operation is clearly shown in the 1970 film "Patton", because General George Patton would play a vital role in the deception. In the midst of the fallout from Patton slapping a battle-fatigued soldier in front of the press, Patton was removed from command of the Seventh Army and temporarily relieved of duty.

However, the Germans followed his movements very closely, due to their belief that he was the Allies' best commander and he would be in charge of the eventual invasion of Europe. The Allies sought to use this and placed Patton in 'command' of the First US Army Group.

The group was, in fact, completely fictitious. However, through the use of staged radio traffic, mock-up vehicles to fool air reconnaissance, occasional real units moving in and out of the group, and turned German double agents relaying false information to the German High Command made it seem that the main invasion would come at the Pas de Calais, the closest point in the English Channel (it is possible to see the White Cliffs of Dover from France at this point).

This eventually led to the redeployment of several German units, including the majority of the Panzer units in western Europe, away from Normandy. When the invasion finally came, Hitler and the High Command believed that it was a diversion and the 'real' invasion would still come from Calais.

So successful was this deception that the men who worked to create it would go on to do several diversionary 'performances' in Europe. Their exploits have recently been declassified and can be seen in the new documentary "The Ghost Army" available through PBS. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

Trent Park and Candid German Generals

Watch Bugging Hitler's Soldiers on PBS. See more from Secrets of the Dead.

One of the most exciting things that a historian can have happen to them is to discover something that had been lost to history and adds to the understanding of an event. Such is the case with the discovery of 50,000 pages of transcripts from secretly recorded conversations between captured German generals about various aspects of the war.

As the episode of "Secrets of the Dead" describes, great trouble was expended to catch the German generals that the British had captured in giving away some morsel of important information in casual conversation that could change the course of the war. Such information included the confirmation of the existence of the V-2 rockets, the deep divide between the Germans loyal to Hitler and those who weren't, and tragically the deep extent of the Holocaust atrocities.

These files had been buried because the British did not want to reveal the effectiveness of their surveillance techniques in the atmosphere of the Cold War. They were recently rediscovered by accident by a German historian in the Royal Archives in London. This is what historians mean when we say that we aren't done making discoveries about the war, we haven't learned all there is to know about the war, and this is very exciting for us. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

Stars and Stripes Review: May 6, 1945

Scanned by Cody Lizotte.

This issue of The Stars and Stripes is interesting in that it was published two days before Germany's surrender, known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe). Of course, at that time they didn't know the exact day the Germans were going to surrender. After all, the Germans had been facing their ultimate defeat for the last two years, ever since the Germans lost their strategic offensive capability on the Eastern Front.

As shown in the headline, the Germans were still fighting like warriors right up to the end. Their last pocket of armed resistance was growing smaller and smaller. Elsewhere on the continent, the war was not over yet. German forces had captured Norway in 1940 and now that Germany was effectively in Allied hands this is where the leaders of German resistance were holed up, including Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the successor to Hitler after his April 30 suicide. In the article on Norway, it mentions that Swedish officials regarded rumors of German capitulation in Norway to be "premature". Little did they know...

Of course, the fighting was still far from over in the Pacific, where V-J Day wouldn't come until August of 1945. However, for a historian looking back on this issue, it's cool to see the reports of continued German resistance and to think that the people who wrote those articles had no idea that the war in Europe was that close to being over. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

The Main Challenge For World War II Historians

One of the greatest questions that historians face in any field of study is "what was this person thinking before X happened?" Often times historians are forced to make educated guesses based on the person's actions as to what their motivations are.

However, sometimes historians have documentation from a person to give us a glimpse into their mindset during an event. In the field of World War II research, we are fortunate to have some very interesting and enlightening perspectives into two of the war's combatants: Britain and Germany.

Of course, the person that people most want to get into the mind of is Adolf Hitler. Fortunately for historians, Hitler was an avid orator and there are numerous works of his that explain his motivations. People who at the time viewed Germany's aggressive actions as a shock obviously didn't read "Mein Kampf", in which Hitler states that:

"[the Nazi movement] must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the anger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation."