Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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| Clearing the Vierville Draw by Larry Selman |
(NYTBR) The historian Daniel Boorstin once complained to me about the Smithsonian Institution’s decision in 1980 to delete the final two words from the name of its Museum of History and Technology. Boorstin had a point. Scholars of other fields do often tend to underestimate the influence of technology. Although most of us know that World War II brought us radar, the literature of that titanic conflict is by no means exempt from this phenomenon. For instance, the biographer Joseph P. Lash subtitled his 1976 wartime account of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill “The Partnership That Saved the West,” in response to which I once heard a British scholar carp, “If Lash is right, then why did all those scientists and intelligence officers and factory workers bother working so hard?” Continued
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| Martin TA-4J Skyhawk |
(National Archives) George Clooney’s next film—which he will write, direct, and star in—is based on holdings from the National Archives!
Clooney announced last weekend that his number one priority is to make a film about the “Monuments Men,” a group of cultural scholars and historians who donned Army uniforms to serve the Allies by rescuing, identifying, and trying to return precious artworks looted by Adolf Hitler.
Clooney shared with the press that while the Monuments Men were not trained for combat, they did face live fire and even had to give orders. He offered a possible example: “Don’t aim your tank over there, that’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa!” Continued
(LoC) On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. A total of twelve ships sank or were beached in the attack and nine additional vessels were damaged. More than 160 aircraft were destroyed and more than 150 others damaged. Continued
(American Heritage) ... Both the bombardier and the artillery sergeant depended on the accuracy of the figures they fed into their weapon systems. If the sergeants had known where those numbers had originated, they probably would have been astonished. The data were the work of a group of remarkable women with a flair for mathematics who were employed by the Army: the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS) at the University of Pennsylvania. Known as "computers" in an age when that term referred not to machines but to human beings, some of the women went on to help create the first electronic computer, ENIAC.
Like the legendary Rosie the Riveters, who toiled in factories and war plants, they were also vital to the war effort, but these computing Rosies worked in secrecy and anonymity, their contributions still largely unknown and unrecognized today. Continued
(Wikipedia) Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves, Jr. (17 August 1896 – 13 July 1970) was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. As the son of a United States Army chaplain, Groves lived at a number of Army posts during his childhood. He graduated fourth in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1918 and was commissioned into the US Army Corps of Engineers. In 1929, he went to Nicaragua as part of an expedition whose purpose was to conduct a survey for the Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal. Following the 1931 Nicaragua earthquake, Groves took over responsibility for Managua's water supply system, for which he was awarded the Nicaraguan Presidential Medal of Merit. Continued
ST. LOUIS (AP) A doctor once told Albert Brown he shouldn't expect to make it to 50, given the toll taken by his years in a Japanese labor camp during World War II and the infamous, often-deadly march that got him there. But the former dentist made it to 105, embodying the power of a positive spirit in the face of inordinate odds.
"Doc" Brown was nearly 40 in 1942 when he endured the Bataan Death March, a harrowing 65-mile trek in which 78,000 prisoners of war were forced to walk from Bataan province near Manila to a Japanese POW camp. As many as 11,000 died along the way. Many were denied food, water and medical care, and those who stumbled or fell during the scorching journey through Philippine jungles were stabbed, shot or beheaded. Continued
(LoC) The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936 as a series of right-wing insurrections within the military, staged against the constitutional government of the five-year-old Second Spanish Republic. Because it was the first major military contest between left-wing forces and fascists, and attracted international involvement on both sides, the Spanish Civil War has sometimes been called the first chapter of World War II.
The rebels, or Nationalists as they came to be known, were backed by a spectrum of political and social conservatives including the Catholic Church, the fascist Falange Party, and those who wished to restore the Spanish monarchy. They received aid in the form of troops, tanks, and planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Germany field-tested some of its most important artillery in Spain. With the rise of General Francisco Franco as leader of the Nationalist coalition, the threat of fascism's spread across Europe visibly deepened.
The Republicans were backed by Spanish labor unions and a range of anti-fascist political groups, from communists and anarchists to Catalonian separatists to centrist supporters of liberal democracy. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico, but their most likely European allies signed a joint agreement of nonintervention. The most visible international aid came in the form of volunteers. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000 individuals from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight for the cause of the Spanish Republic. Between two and three thousand of these volunteers were men and women from the United States—most served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The Spanish Civil War posed a major threat to international political equilibrium, and Americans watched closely the events of the conflict. The brutality of the situation also forced many Americans to question the United States' post-World War I noninterventionist policies. Between 500,000 and 1 million Spaniards, both soldiers and civilians, died from war or war-engendered disease and starvation, and thousands more became displaced refugees. Continued
Photo: Robert Capa
(LoC) On June 13, 1942, some six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Office of War Information (OWI) was created. In October of that year, the documentary photography unit of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was transferred to the OWI to document the war effort, as it had the U.S government’s battle against poverty during the Great Depression. An important U.S. government propaganda agency during World War II, the OWI supported America’s mobilization for the war effort by recording the nation's preparations for war in films, texts, photographs, radio programs, and posters. OWI photographers documented American life and culture during the early years of World War II, focusing on such subjects as aircraft factories, training for war work, women in the workforce, and the armed forces. Photographs were created to inspire patriotism in the American public. Continued
York, PA (YDR) It was a Thursday, Dec. 16, 1943, when the Eighth Army Air Force's 413th Bomb Squadron took off from the airfield at Snetterton Heath, on the east coast of England, on the edge of the North Sea, to bomb Bremen, an industrial town in northwest Germany.
The fleet of B-17 Flying Fortresses left the base and climbed above the clouds, leveling off at 25,000 feet over the North Sea, heading northeast toward the coast of the Netherlands.
Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Elwood Slenker was the top turret gunner and engineer on one of those aircraft, one of 10 crew members. He was a 19-year-old kid, the second youngest of the four Slenker boys from West York, all of whom served during World War II. Growing up, Kenneth Slenker never ventured far from his family's home on West King Street -- the family didn't have a car -- and here he was, flying over the North Sea in a bomber. Continued
(LoC) In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, Americans received word that three years of concerted war efforts had finally culminated in D-day--military jargon for the undisclosed time of a planned British, American, and Canadian action. During the night, over 5,300 ships and 11,000 planes had crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of Normandy. The goal of every soldier and civilian involved in that effort was to drive the German military back to Berlin by opening a western front in Europe.
General Dwight David Eisenhower was in command of the invasion, which was code-named Operation Overlord. Continued
(WBAL) The remains of a World War II veteran returned home to Maryland on Tuesday more than 66 years after Pfc. Robert Bayne lost his life.
Like so many of his generation, Bayne went off to war as a young man. He was killed by Germans in France and was buried in an unmarked grave.
With the sound of jet engines more that 66 years after he lost his life fighting for his country, a soldier came home. Continued
(YDR) Hans and Sophie Scholl were college students when they organized a Nazi resistance movement, distributing pamphlets to encourage the German people to stand up to oppression.
When they were found guilty of treason and executed in 1943, they were just a few years older than the students at York Suburban High School who study them each year. ... The exhibit, which includes 45 panels of photographs and information, is on loan from the White Rose Society in Germany. Students designed how the exhibit is set up in the library, where books related to the Scholls, the Holocaust and related subjects accompany it. Continued
Photo: Description: Photograph of a student resistance movement called the White Rose, active in Germany during the Third Reich. The image shows Hans Scholl (left), Sophie Scholl (center), and Christoph Probst (right)(Willi Graf and Alex Schmorell are missing on this picture), Munich, Germany, 1942. Photograph from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikipedia.
(Baltimore Sun) In the photo from 1943, Tech. Sgt. Charles A. Bode and his fellow airmen gaze into the camera, some shirtless, some smiling, looking to modern eyes like cast members of the musical "South Pacific." But the B-24 bomber crew would soon embark on a very real mission during the intense combat for the Pacific in World War II. The men took off from a port in New Guinea on Nov. 20, 1943; after a routine radio check, the 11 crewmen were never seen or heard from again. Continued
