The Second World War.

[Dr Pepper]

Things got a bit ugly in Trieste around the same time and the NZ Division had some rather pointed discussions-involving .303 and .50 cal points to be exact-with Tito's partisans-who also had acquisitive designs-acquisition by force I might add- on Italian territory in the region. There was a race to secure Trieste which fortunately we won...but to quote a well known Englishman of an earlier era "it was a damn close run thing"...

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/schol...Ita-c12-1.html

[scoundrel]

On 4th March 1945 Russian forces made the first probing assault against the defences of the Baltic port city of Kolberg. Now called Kołobrzeg, the port is located in the part of modern Poland which was taken from Germany after WW2, when the whole territory of Poland was shifted about 100kms to the west and a large swathe of 1939 Poland was assimilated by Russia (now Lithuania and Belarus and western Ukraine).

Kolberg was cut off from the remnants of the Third Reich and beseiged as a part of the Red Army's East Pomeranian Offensive commencing on 24th February 1945, led mainly by Marshal Konstanin Rossokovsky. There were a number of encirclements, notably at Danzig, and at Kolberg. Ironically, Goebbels had completed a film project weeks earlier called Kolberg which "told the story" for propaganda purposes of the 1807 Siege of Kolberg; and now Kolberg was besieged again. There were about 70,000 German/Axis soldiers encircled in Kolberg and many thousands of fleeing civilian refugees, including survivors of the Steuben and Wilhelm Gustloff tragedies.

The defenders, including garrison troops, local Volksturm and elements of Army Group Vistula who were stuck there, numbered anything from 8,000 to 15,000. Some units of the SS were there, Frenchmen of the Charlemagne and 15th Panzer Grenadier Divisions (Latvian). They had about 60 guns, mostly 88s, but were also supported by the capital ships Scheer and Lutzow and a number of destroyers. By this stage of the war they would have had very little air support, if any at all. They also had an armoured train caught in the trap which they deployed to defend the railway station; and a small number of tanks, about 18, a regiment of the Third Panzer Army. As well as being there to defend the Reich, they also were there to buy time for Admiral Doenitz to evacuate as many as he could from the encircled city, a major chapter in the story of Operation Hannibal.

The Red Army had much superior resources but the Germans had prepared their defence cleverly and initial attacks were repulsed. On 7th March, Rossokovsky gave the problem to the Polish First Army led by Stanislaus Poplawsky: three infantry divisions. A Russian rifle division and tank brigade remained to support the Poles, and various artillery units from the Red Army backed everyone up.

The second assault began in earnest on 12th March. The Poles suffered heavy casualties, especially their 14th Infantry Division which led the attack, but they succeeded in overrunning the outer defences. They paused on 14th March to regroup and to pull the badly mauled 14th Infantry Division into reserve, and offered the Germans a chance to lay down their arms, which of course was refused. No one really expected that the Germans would quit; it wasn't their style to give in just because the situation was hopeless. They were not made like that. Also, there were still a lot of trapped civilians and this meant that the soldiers had an obvious duty to keep fighting and enable them to be taken to safety, so it wasn't just pride at stake.

On 15th March the last phase assault began. The German side had been reinforced by sea by marines from Swinemunde (just across the mouth of the river) and fought bitterly, but the Poles broke through on 16th March to capture the inner city, most of the railway station and to force the remaining defenders to retreat into the port itself. On 17th March the Poles took the rest of the railway station area and entered the port; but the German navy intervened and evacuated most of the remaining defenders. The last of the rearguard defended the port lighthouse to prevent harrassment of the last ships and boats as they took the survivors away. By sunset on March 17th, Kolberg had been taken. Most of the city had been flattened in the fighting.

[scoundrel]

Early in WW2 Britain was badly up against it due to more thn just lack of resources. Lack of resources was a big problem: true. Due to various other commitments, Britain had only 76 destroyers available for convoy protection everywhere in the world in June 1940, and of course France had just surrendered and the French navy was no longer helping. This was when FDR contributed 50 very old destroyers.

However, the Royal Navy also lacked tactical awareness. Their best anti-submarine expert, Commander FJ Walker, was still being kept on dry land, refused a command and refused promotion all the way to 1942. Before war broke out Commander Walker was being fast-tracked out and one has to suspect that someone very senior in the navy really, really had it in for him. He died on active service in 1944, a cerebral haemorrage cuased by overwork, In two years he had revolutionised British anti-submarine technique.

But even before FJ Walker was finally promoted to Captain and allocated command of an escort group, change was starting. The escort group concept was invented to remedy a big problem: command continuity. If a new destroyer joined an embattled convoy and her captain happened to be senior to the existing escort CO, the convoy had a new escort CO. This could happen more than once in one convoy battle, and experience proved that it was a bad arrangement. So a convoy had to have an appointed escort commander and unless he was killed or his ship was sunk, he remained boss, no matter who turned up; even a Fleet Admiral could not counternand him on that convoy.

More chilling by far, escorts were severely curtailed in their freedom to rescue casualties. Anything which involved staying behind while the convoy sailed ahead was not allowed; the escort must not be depleted. The men in the water had to take their chance. More often than not independent patrols were monitoring convoy radio traffic and would sniff around where the convoy had been, and many men were saved by small ships such as Royal Navy Patrol Service trawlers and minesweepers who added this chore to their normal workload. But if this happened you were fortunate, and it was just as likely that no one would ever see you again. Experience had taught that ships with cargo are valuable and men swimming after the loss of their ship were expendible.

Damaged ships had to be left to fend for themselves, as did anyone with engine trouble. Equally, even if you had a damaged U Boat you could not linger to finish the job. Leave it; stay with the convoy: this was the cardinal rule. The ghastly bloodbath of Convoy SC-7 on October 17-18 1940 started when the sloop HMS Scarborough, which later became a leading light of the Atlantic convoy war, stopped to prolong an attack on U-48, which it had damaged: the convoy escort for 35 remaining commercial ships was now three warships rather than four. A day later it was three warships escorting 15 commercial ships, of which 2 commercial ships had survived torpedo hits. Otto Kretchmer in U-99 sank 7. HMS Scarborough failed to regain her station and never saw SC-7 again, and this was no help.

Asdic/sonar proved to be nothing like as useful as the Admiralty had expected. In perfect conditions it could detect a U Boat at about 2,500 yards; in bad weather perhaps half that. A big convoy with, say ten columns of five ships per column in a long thin rectangle, perhaps 8,000 yards daigonally across and a perimeter 45,000 yards around. That takes a lot of escort asdic/sonar sets. The solution, which the British side had criminally neglected before the war, was escort carriers carrying Swordfish bi-planes. Two Fairey Swordfish could protect a convoy 45,000 yards around without difficulty and could indicate any U Boat so that the escorts were able to follow the trail and kill it. FJ Walker had been talking about this for years and no one had listened until the war forced people to listen. He led the first escort group and employed the first escort carrier, HMS Audacity. He proved the point: a convoy beset by seven U Boats reached Britain with only two ships lost and at least two U Boats sunk. HMS Audacity was lost, the first of quite a few escort carriers lost to U Boats on what was a very exposed and dangerous assignment; but not before she shot down enough German Focke Wolf Condors for the Luftwaffe to bitterly regret that they had ever met her.

Later still, escort groups became trouble-shooting. They were no longer convoy-specific, but loitered wiuth intent in mid-Atlantic and came running to the rescue of any convoy in trouble. This was a very efficient use of scarce resources. Weapons were improved exponentially: for example, aircraft were equipped with a homing torpedo called FIDO (irony intended) which homed in on the sound of a U Boat's electric engines. Success rates were 24% with FIDO compared with less than 9% using depth charges. But depth charges were more effective too, because the RAF learned that the best setting was the shallowest possible. The drill was to sneak up and give the U Boat the least time possible to react; come out of the sun, or out of the dark side at dawn or dusk, or at least from downwind so that the wind was blowing your engine noise away from the target.

[rupertramjet]

Brilliant book I have just finished:
' The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Churchill's Mavericks: Plotting Hitlers Defeat.
By Giles Milton.

Brilliant and amusingly written, the reason I mention it here is because one of the weapons which proved very effective against Submarines was developed by these folk, it is fascinating and very much worth a read!

[scoundrel]

On 28 February 1942 the British cruiser HMS Exeter departed from the port of Surabaya in Java for the final time. She had been damaged in the Battle of the Java Sea the previous day by a direct hit on one of her boiler rooms and could only make 25 knots. After very temporary repairs she was ordered to attempt to escape to Colombo in Sri Lanka; due to her draught she could not take any alternative routes and was forced to sail via the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, a sea lane known to be crawling with Japanese heavy naval units. In fact, she had two hopes of escaping; no hope and Bob Hope, and her final voyage was really only a token gesture. In the circumstances, it would have made sense to blow her up and put her crew on destroyers which had a better chance of escaping.

Sadly, HMS Exeter was escorted by two destroyers, HMS Encounter and (even more sad) the American destroyer, USS Pope. These two units were bravely and pitifully loyal to their ward when, as was inevitable, the Japanese navy located the little flotilla early the next morning. HMS Exeter was hit by a shell in her unlucky boilers again and this time she was totally disabled. Encounter and Pope laid down a smoke screen to protect her when they could (IMHO legitimately) have tried to flee the area. Both ships were quickly sunk by the Japanese, who had four heavy cruisers and four destroyers in the action. The Japanese sustained no damage and no casualties.

The survivors of the two destroyers and the cruiser were left to fend for themselves, clinging to floats and debris and many of them blind from the fuel oil covering them. As far as the Japanese squadron was concerned, they could jolly well walk home.

But by sheer chance a different Japanese destroyer passed by a day later, the IJN Ikazuchi. Her commander was Lt Commander Shunsaku Kudō an officer and a gentleman and a very different person to the senior officers of the Japanese squadron who sank the Encounter and the Pope. In spite of the known and very active presence of Dutch and American submarines in the area Lt Commander Kudō stopped and lowered his boats: I think you would have to say that he took pity on the Allied sailors he found in distress. Thanks entirely to the intervention of IJN Ikazuchi, 442 men were saved. It makes a pleasant change from the machine gunning of swimmers one so often hears about. Of course, about 25% of the survivors died in captivity, on the Burma Railway and so forth, but Lt Commander Kudō and his ship were not to blame for that.

Mr Kudō never spoke afterwards about this fine and chivalrous act. He died in 1979. It was only in 2007 that a documentary was made about the sinking of the three Allied ships and it became clear what a remarkable deed it was. Without Lt Commander Kudō and his ship, not one of the Allied sailors would have lived.

[Rogerbh]

If you ever researched the life of Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame, you probably already realize that he did not get the Medal of Honor for the events on D-Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%..._Manor_Assault) but received the Distinguished Service Cross - supposedly because of a one Medal of Honor per division policy and it was given to an officer who led a bayonet charge during that time frame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Cole

Today I noticed a comment in the Quora regarding fragging of officers. It is as follows:

Lt. Col Cole was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Normandy in June 1944 where he bravely led a bayonet charge on German positions. The assault, which came to be known as "Cole's Charge," proved costly; 130 of Cole's 265 men became casualties. The story of Lt.col. Cole being killed by a german sniper in September 1944 in Holland is well known.
However, about 35 yrs ago I heard a different story on Lt. Col. Cole's death. In the 1980ies I was living in Eindhoven in The Netherlands, near the area where the 101st US Airborne had been engaged in some heavy fighting as part of operation Market Garden. In the eighties, if you knew where to look, you could still see the foxholes and in some parts of the forest between Best and Son you could find ammunition and all sorts of other stuff that stays behind after a battle. I spent many days in this forest with my metal detector digging up cartridges, ammo clips, etc. I got to know the area and the positions of the various units pretty well.
In those days there was a Dutch association of volunteers organizing trips for airborne veterans. Every year groups of veterans were visiting the dropzones and battlefields and these volunteers organized transportation, lodging etc. During one of these visits someone of the association asked me if I could help one of the veterans in retracing his 1944 steps. He had been a private in the 101st airborne division and was captured on the second day during the heavy fighting for the bridge at Best. I spent two days with him and his son, retracing his steps from the dropzones to his foxhole near the Best bridge and to Liempde, the small town where he was taken by the Germans to be interrogated. On one of these days he started talking about Lt.col. Cole. He said that although the official story was that Lt.col Cole was killed by a German sniper, it was common belief among veterans that he was killed by one of his own men..... He told me that some of the men had not forgotten the events in June where many Americans lost their lives in a -what they believed- was a completely unnecessary bayonet charge on german positions. Some men wanted to get even, take revenge for the friends they lost or wanted to prevent a similar thing from happening again in Holland. He was considered to be overly aggressive. At the first opportunity they got, one of them shot lt.col. Cole....For obvious reasons this got never in the open but remained a closely guarded secret.

In Band of Brothers, I recall private Liebgott talking about potentially being clumsy with a grenade when he was near the incompetent Captain Sobel. I was just wondering if anyone heard a similar version of Lt Col. Cole's death.

Seems like the Greatest Generation was very much like the US troops who were in Vietnam.

[rupertramjet]

Rogerbh

Whilst not knowing the truth of this story, It has very strong echoes with a more recent tale from the Falklands War, and the death of Lt Col H Jones, who was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Many claim that his action at Goose Green, when he led an assault by the men under his command by charging the Argentine Positions was foolish and an unnecessary waste of life, and as a result he was shot by his own men during the assault, personally I do not know the truth, but from my own experience of close quarter battle, you are too concerned with the enemy to think of anything else. That said, there are many cases of unpopular officers meeting their end by friendly fire.

The troops in Vietnam did not want to be there, they did not believe in what they were doing, and they also knew few of the public back home were sympathetic to the war, the Second World War was seen in a very different light by the civilian population, and the attitude of the combatants was therefore completely different too.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by rupertramjet

Whilst not knowing the truth of this story, It has very strong echoes with a more recent tale from the Falklands War, and the death of Lt Col H Jones, who was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Many claim that his action at Goose Green, when he led an assault by the men under his command by charging the Argentine Positions was foolish and an unnecessary waste of life, and as a result he was shot by his own men during the assault, personally I do not know the truth, but from my own experience of close quarter battle, you are too concerned with the enemy to think of anything else. That said, there are many cases of unpopular officers meeting their end by friendly fire.

The troops in Vietnam did not want to be there, they did not believe in what they were doing, and they also knew few of the public back home were sympathetic to the war, the Second World War was seen in a very different light by the civilian population, and the attitude of the combatants was therefore completely different too.

I too am doubtful that Colonel Jones was murdered by one of his own men. In most of these cases, there is strong evidence of premeditation (malice aforethought as the courts used to call it). It would start with the officer doing something extremely wrong which official punishment would never capture; or with the officer simply being such a bad officer that the men needed to consider their own survival and even to think about what was their honourable duty to their comrades, the army and the nation and whether scragging the useless bastard was genuinely the right thing to do.

[Mal Hombre]

As Earl Siward asked of His slain son,Where were His wounds ? If it was one of His own,It would surely have been from behind..

[rupertramjet]

Although I did not fight at Goose Green, my Battalion got very busy later, the rumour mill, outside the Army started because Mrs Jones decided that her husbands remains should stay in The Falklands, along with the men he died alongside. Sergeant Ian McKay's widow decided to have his body returned and he, our other VC from the Falklands and a member of my Battalion, was buried in Aldershot Military Cemetery.

An autopsy on Colonel Jones would have been meaningless as the attack was against a series of dug outs with flanking points, so even had he been hit from behind, it could well have been one of the flanking points. To add to the complications, the Argentinian army also carried the FN Rifle (our SLR), with 7.62 rounds!

The Battle is covered in The Falklands Thread, for those interested.