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A 1944 magazine ad for Tangee lipstick read that, to a degree, ” . . . we’re still the weaker sex . . . It’s up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible . . . Whether you’re in or out of uniform, you’ll want to be completely appealing and feminine – you’ll want delightful satin-smooth lips and all the glamour of a silky, petal-smooth complexion.”
Looking good was essential for stateside women during the Second World War. In early 1940, marketing stressed the importance of women’s appearance and their obligation of bringing beauty into family life. The ongoing theme ‘beauty is duty’ prevailed.
The war, bringing on many civilian shortages, substitution became a way of life stateside, affecting daily life. Even though, powder, eye makeup and lipsticks were considered necessary for persevering wartime spirits, some ingredients were no longer available. Eighteen line of goods affecting style were in short supply, from castor oil and zinc to acetone.
One of these items, zinc oxide used in face powder was also needed in large quantities in tire plants. The soldiers needed tires for their jeeps, thereby forcing beauty suppliers to search for substitutions. The talc in face powder was imported from Italy and since we were at war with Italy, they shipped no more. The substitution for talc came from India and Manchuria which were countries thousands of miles away. Shipment was scarce. India was also a primary origin for titanium and titanium dioxide can replace zinc oxide which was also being seized by the paint and paper companies who used it for a zinc substitute.
Gums in the goo for women’s hair setting lotion and henna in most hair tints and dyes, instituted in the Near East. Nail polish, nail polish removers and hair-waving lotions all consisted of substantial industrial chemical ingredients. Shipments could not be depended on and all the above were in short supply.
Military and civilian provisions included the same manpower, and fibers. The government wanted to conserve materials to prevent shortages and also keep morale up, without harming standing industries. The War Production Board of the federal government established a series of regulations constituting many industries including cosmetics, lingerie and apparel. Private citizens had to adjust any new clothing to the conditions with very few exceptions.
Anything using vast amounts of cloth or thought unnecessary were not allowed, such as: Dolman, balloon and leg-of-mutton sleeves, aprons, over-skirts, decorative trim, patch pockets and petticoats.
Men’s suits consisted of two-piece suits–a jacket and pants without cuffs, although before 1942 they consisted of four pieces–two pairs of pants, a vest and a double-breasted jacket. This is where our sense of matching and mixing was established.
Research at the Smithsonian, Costume specialists seek threads of World War II clothing history, by Vicki Moeser, Smithsonian Office of Public Affairs – http://www.si.edu/resource/topics/ww2cloth.htm
Two things made the German Military a success during WWII, and that was organization and communication. “Blitzkrieg” allowed them victory after victory in Europe. This operation employed tanks (panzers) and dive bombers (Stukas). They cut off England’s supply line at sea with a well-aimed submarine “wolf pack” assaults on fleets.
The Germans used an electro-mechanical device; Enigma to encode information which assured the adversary would not seize critical data. They believed that even if the machine was captured by their enemy, it would be useless to them. Both receiver and sender had to have the same key, describing how the message was encoded.
The Enigma machine resembles a typewriter, but with rows of lights in the middle and three thumbwheels in the back. A project called Ultra which was a focused attempt to break the enciphered messages, and was the Allies greatest secret. The Poles begun this project, then the British continued it and later was supported by the Americans.
Messages sent to their various units had different keys. Messages meant for the Navy (Kriegsmarine) were not readable by the Air Force (Luftwaffe). Communication could be directed to the appropriate unit by assigning different keys to different units.
Three reasons for using codes for message transference was to hide the meaning of the message, in case the transference medium can’t carry voice (telegraphs can only transmit dashes and dots), and to make transmissions more efficient.
Encipherment, in which letters in plain text messages are represented by letters or characters according to some scheme and coding, in which words or phrases are represented by symbols were the two methods of preparing a message for transmission. Cryptology is a two-part science of making and breaking enciphered information. Cryptography is encoding. Cryptanalysis is the breaking of codes. Superencipherment is when the message is first coded, then enciphered. This makes the code twice as hard to break.
Codes are words made into numbers and usually kept on a list or book of phrases. Such as:
1006 rendezvous
1005 location
1004 ammunition
1003 attack
1002 will
1001 coast
“Attack coast location” would be 1003 1001 1005. This type of message is extremely complex if the code groups aren’t arranged alphabetically as you can see my example was not. This system was used by both sides during WWI. To use this type of system, every group needed a code-book and if the book was captured, the enemy could decipher the messages. During WWI, in 1914, the German warship, Magdeburg grounded in the Baltic and because of errors, the Russians were able to salvage the code-book and the German’s didn’t know the codes were no longer secure; therefore, they continued to use them.
Mono-alphabetic substitution was the simplest of all ciphers. A second alphabet is randomly written out under the original alphabet.
Example:
abcdefg . . . z
LHNTBER . . .
Rotating cylinders and mechanical ciphering rings have been used since ancient civilization. A ciphering devise consisting of a number of rings on a common shaft was invented by Thomas Jefferson. Three men simultaneously invented the first electro-mechanical rotor device. Edward Hugh Hebern from the US was first in 1918 and was used by the Americans in the second world war. Hugo Alexander Kock from the Netherlands in 1919 invented his own machine and Arvid Gerhard Damm from Sweden in 1919 came up with another version.
The Poles kept their eye on Germany, their neighbor during the period between the world wars. The Enigma codes were broke by a team, comprising of Henryk Zygalski, Jerzy Rozycki and Marian Rejewski. By the end of the war thousand of people, anyone with high tech computers were decoding Axis messages. And it could have never been accomplished without the pioneering efforts of these three men.
Germany’s naval messages abruptly underwent excessive major changes in 1926 and the Poles could no longer decipher them. By 1928, Army transmissions followed their lead. They learned by espionage that the Germans had begun to machine encode their messages.
Hans Thilo-Schmidt persuaded his brother, a Lieutenant Colonel to give him a job and part of that job was to destroy invalid Enigma codes. This granted him access to information he sold to the French. He equipped Gustave Bertrand, French Intelligence with a booklet containing the Enigma machine’s setup procedures. Only two things were missing from the book and this was the rotor wiring and information on the keys.
The French and the British agreed that the information was insufficient and could not be used. Bertrand offered it to Rejewski in Poland. He was happy to receive the booklet. Then Schmidt obtained some outdated Enigma keys which Rejewski had requested from Bertrand, and they were sent back to Poland.
The Poles had the keys used to convert plain text to code, messages in code and messages in plain text. Eventually they were able to make a duplicate Enigma machine, based on a commercial copy with the rotors rewired. They set up the machine according to the codes, but their first try at encoding came up as gibberish. They rechecked their equations numerous times until Rejewski was almost ready to give up. Then he wondered if the wiring from the keyboard to the scrambler was A to B, B to B, etc. instead of like the commercial model’s Q to A, W to B, (keyboard order). After rewiring, another test was ran and they succeeded with plain text. This was 1933 and their Enigma replica was functional.
However, this was only half the battle. It was still useless without the keys. A fragment of plain text in order to correspond to a section of code of the same length is a “crib.” The Poles were furnished with cribs unknowingly by the Germans. Most of their messages started with “anx” (an means to in German and x is a word separator).
It took the Poles a year to construct a card catalog of each of the possible positions. By November 1, 1937 the card catalog was useless because the Germans changed the umkherwalze wiring and it took the Poles less than a year to finish another card catalog, which the Germans changed their method of enciphering the keys, rendering the card catalog useless again.
There were many complications in breaking the Enigma machine codes. The Germans added two new rotors; making five available on December 15, 1938, but only three were used at any one time. Knowing that their country was about to be invaded by the Germans, the Poles shared their information with the French and the British. The British tried to break the codes but the Germans had added complications, making a break impossible. The Poles gave the British their complete solution of German codes, their Enigma copy and bomby (a machine that tried different cycles of codes, made a ticking noise as they worked and stopped when they arrived at a solution) to the British on July 25, 1939.
Four days after Hitler invaded Poland; the code breakers packed up their equipment and left for France, although they had to destroy their equipment on the way. They continued their work in France and shared with the British, using their equipment.
How was the Enigma codes ever ciphered? The codes could have been unbreakable with the methods available at that time. That is if the machine had been used correctly. The Germans believed the Enigma invincible and that was their biggest mistake. Occasional operator laziness combined with procedural errors allowed the Poles, then the British to break the invincible codes. Each army unit used two Enigma operators. One worked the machine while the other wrote down the lit-up letters on the lamp board. These men weren’t always properly trained how to use the machine and picked their own message keys, often making poor choices.
However in the navy, only officers were able to set up the machines, making them more secure. Sub-codes were carefully chosen, minimizing any possibility of a code breaker deducing it. The code lists that were printed with water-soluble ink were always kept under lock and key. These precautions proved to be very effective and the Allies didn’t crack the naval codes until two years after they did the army’s.
The Enigma Exhibit–Museum of National Security- http://www.nsa.gov.8080/museum/enigma.html
The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook–Critical Cryptology: The Second World War – http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wadh0249/scrp2.html
The Enigma Machine–Museum of Science and Industry – http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/u505/ENIGMA.html
How The Poles Broke The Enigma Code Prior to WWII 1926-1939 – http://members.aol.com/nbrass/1enigma.htm
Code breaking and Secret Weapons in WWII – http://members.aol.com/nbrass/enigma.htm
German Enigma Cipher Machine/History of Solving – http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~lmazia1/Enigma/text.html
Victory-in-Europe Day (V-E Day) was a celebration of the end of war in Europe. On May 8, 1945 V-E Day was proclaimed and celebrated in Western Europe, Britain and the United States, and in the Soviet Union the following day. There was dancing in the streets and fireworks. Newspaper photographs showed the jubilation exhilarated by the relief from war time sorrows, hardships and privations.
Although for many civilians and soldiers that were injured or had died, the war ended much earlier, V-E Day was the focal point of memory and celebrations.
In Normandy and Northern France liberation had begun with D-day, the end of spring the year before from June, 1944 through July, 1944 and Paris civilians had celebrated their freedom in August.
Those freed from Auschwitz, who survived the ‘death marches’ were freed in April 1945 as were many prisoner-of-war camps, holding hundreds of thousands Allied soldiers, airmen and sailors. Some of these had been held captive for
over five years.
The beginning of the end started by the end of March, 1945. Allied armies were on both borders, East and West. Belgium and France had already been freed though fighting continued in Northern Italy, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Remaining under German occupation were Norway, Denmark and Holland. The prospect of renewed German submarine offensives and the terrors of bombs were over, as were the threat of Hitler’s secret weapons.
Fighting on German soil continued at the beginning of April. Germany winning was no longer a possibility once the American Ninth and Third armies encircled the Rhur, thereby severing Germany from its industrial heartland. This was done on April 1st when the two armies met in Lippstat–an accomplishment that shocked all Allied observers.
Once deep into Germany on April 4th, American troops found a camp like none they’d ever seen. Laying in the ground around the barracks were more than three thousand emaciated corpses. This camp, Ohrdruf was a slave labor camp.
On April 6th, in the town of Merkers, deep in a mine, American soldiers found paintings that the Germans had looted from the art galleries of Europe. Also found were paintings from Berlin’s art galleries hid there for safe keeping.
Other than works of art, a hundred tons of gold bars were discovered–some made from the gold fillings and gold teeth taken from the murdered Jews mouths at Auschwitz and a dozen other camps. Why didn’t the Germans move the treasures before the American troops approached the mine? Because German railway workers insisted on observing Easter Sunday.
On April 11th, two more concentration camps were liberated, Nordhausen (Mittlebau-Dora factory–a vast slave labor camp)and Buchenwald. Soldiers active in this liberation saw mounds of dead bodies, piled high and naked. They vomited from the sight and the stench.
The death of President Franklin D. Rossevelt on April 12th gave the Germans a ray of hope that his successor, Harry Truman would settle for an armistice. Millions of Americans had wept when they heard of their Presiden’s death, and American soldiers were troubled by the loss of their Commander-in-Chief. But nothing would weaken the resolve to see the battle through to an unconditional surrender from the Nazis. This had been Roosevelt’s demand to which Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had endorsed. This remained the Allies aim.
On April 15th, British soldiers came upon the first of the largest concentration camps. Belsen is where tens of thousand of Jews were brought from the slave labor camps of eastern Europe where they were left to starve and to rot with almost no food or medical help. At Belsen, they had no work for them to do. So why were they brought here you might ask? So they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Russians. The soldiers felt an outrage from what they found. Here, they didn’t have gas chambers, but the victims were left to die of starvation and disease.
When the British tank rolled into the camp of Belsen, he opened the door and yelled into a bull horn the sweetest words the prisoners would ever hear, “You are free. You are free. You are free.” Though thousand lays dead because they no longer had the strength or the will to live, those that were still alive became free. This was a moment to be engraved in the memories of those behind the barbed wire with the first British tank entered.
This was a moment that transformed the Allied perception of the war. Before the liberation of Belsen, the full nature of the tyranny they’d been out to destroy had not been grasped. There was a rave of outrage as photographs and films of ten thousand unburied bodies, stacked in piles in the camp and scattered between the huts were seen. Many of the living men and women who didn’t look much different from the dead. This brought anger and loathing toward the Nazis.
In the days and weeks that followed many more concentration camps were liberated. The death of Hitler on May 1st was broadcast over Hamburg Radio. Negotiations began. General Hans Krebs asked for a truce, but Stalin insisted upon an unconditional surrender. But Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, both were determined not to give in.
On May 2, the last 40,000 Germans in Italy surrendered. On May 4, four German officers signed a document of surrender. Cease-fire was to take effect at 8 o’clock on May 5. All German forces in Holland, Denmark and northwest Germany would lay down their arms. The war was ending all over Europe.
On May 4, 446 American sailors were killed when in the Pacific, off Okinawa, seven American ships were hit by Japanese suicide aircraft.
There were many more surrenders during the span of May 5 through May 7, but at one minute past midnight on May 8, the so awaited V-E Day came.
May 8, 1945, celebrations commenced, hundreds of flags and pennants and bunting flew from most of the buildings in the center of town. Winston Churchhill and heads the minsters of the wartime coalition appeared on a balcony overlooking Whitehall while the crowds cheered. Celebration caused chaos in the streets of London. Tables full of joyous people sat in the street at an open-air street party in London. Victory parades were held throughout Europe to welcome home returning soldiers. Though for those still fighting in the Pacific, the end of the war didn’t end until Victory in Japan (V-J Day) on August 15, 1945.
“The Day The War Ended: May 8, 1945” by Martin Gilbert – Copyright in 1995 by Martin Gilbert. Published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
1939:
On September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, and by the 3rd of September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The British passenger ship, Athenia, was sunk by the Germans, killing thirty Americans on board on September 3rd.
Due to the war in Europe, the economy surged forward. Twenty -five cents per pound was paid for coffee. Admission at movie theaters in America ranged from twenty-two cents to fifty-five cents, where Americans averaged seeing one movie per week. “Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With The Wind” played at the theaters.
The helicopter was invented. The first regularly scheduled transatlantic flight began by Pan Am with its airliner, the “Dixie Clipper.”
Thirty-two million people attended the New York World’s Fair, held in Flushing, Long Island from April through October. The New York Yankees won the World Series, victorious over the Cincinnati Reds.
A national fad became popular among college students. One student swallowed forty-three live goldfish.
1940:
War continued as Germany occupied Norway and Denmark on April 19th. Then on May 10th, a little over a month later, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands was invaded by Germany. Italy declared war on France and Britain on June 10th and on June 21st, France was defeated and surrendered. In August “The Battle of Britain” started. Germany attacked Great Britain by air, but aided by airborne radar, British RAF defeated the German planes two to one.
Due to increasing factory orders induced by the war, unemployment dropped as the forty hour work week was adopted nationwide.
Axis powers, a form of economic and military alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan was formed. And the first peacetime draft was conducted by the United States. The belief that marriage would defer men from service caused a speed up of engagements.
Because of the war in Europe, the Olympic games were cancelled.
The chain known today as McDonalds was opened and by Richard and Maurice McDonald in Pasadena, Californian. This was the first drive-in restaurant. M & M candy bars were also developed.
In the World Series, the Cincinnati Reds beat the Detroit Tigers. The movie star, Tom Mix died in a car crash.
1941:
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. The U.S. destroyer, Ruben James was sunk by a German submarine. Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked, sinking the California, Utah, Oklahoma and Arizona and heavily damaging others. Three thousand Americans were killed. Japan also attacked Guam, Wakes Island and the Philippines. On December 8th, the United States declared war on Japan. Then Italy and Germany declared war on the United States on December 11th. Cities throughout the United States, blackout and air raid tests were staged.
On December 27th, the rationing of rubber went into effect.
The New York Yankee’s first baseman, Lou Gehrig, died at thirty-seven on June 22nd. In the World Series, the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers.
1942:
In the Pacific, the United States suffered numerous defeats, especially in the Philippines and Manila Bay. But in May, the defeat of the Japanese in the “Battle of the Coral Sea” and again in the “Battle of Midway” in June, thereby turning the tables. Japan lost 17 ships, 275 planes and 4,800 men in Midway. Major General James Doolittle and his squadron of sixteen B-25s infiltrated Japan, bombing Tokyo and other cities on April 18th. The US morale was boosted by the attack.
The American and Japanese forces started a battle for supremacy when the Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on August 7th.
More rations began in the US; sugar on May 5th and gas on May 15th. National gas rationing didn’t begin until December 1st.
In Boston, on November 28th the Coconut Grove nightclub fire killed 492 people.
The most decorated soldier in WWII, Audie Murphy, joined the army at the age of sixteen.
The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series, beating the New York Yankees.
1943:
Twenty-two Japanese ships were sunk and fifty Japanese planes were downed by the Americans in the “Battle of the Bismarck Sea” on May 24th. British forces captured Tunis, and the U.S. captured Tunisia on May 7th.
John F. Kennedy and ten crew members swam to safety and were marooned on an island for days after their PT boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands.
In May, in the surrender of North Africa 250,000 Axis troops were taken prisoner. On July 10th, allied forces invaded Sicily and allied planes bombed Rome on July 19th. In the fight for Sicily, Axis forces lost 167,000 men. On August 17th, the allied forces were triumphant. Italy surrendered to allies on September 8th.
On December 24th, Dwight Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied forces for the invasion of Europe.
Americans were limited to 3 pairs of shoes per year as of February 7th, when shoe rationing went into affect. March 17th, canned goods were rationed and on March 29th meat and cheese were rationed.
St. Louis Cardinals lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series.
1944:
On January 22nd, Allied forces landed at Anzio, Italy. On March 6th, eight hundred U.S. flying fortresses bombed Berlin.
In Operation Overlord, the most massive military operation in history, Allied forces invaded Normandy, France on June 6th, D-Day, involving over five thousand ships, three thousand planes and close to four million troops.
On June 13th, Germany began to use V-1 rocket bomb and in the fall, the larger V-2s.
In the battle of Saipan, the U.S. forces were victorious and twenty-five thousand Japanese soldiers were killed. On September 24th, Lieutenant George Bush’s plane is shot down by the Japanese over Chi Chi Jima, during a bombing run on the island, but he was quickly rescued by an Allied submarine. U.S. takes Guam and seventeen thousand soldier were killed on August 9th.
On August 25th, Paris was liberated. And on September 12th, U.S. forces infiltrate Germany for the first time. The Japanese adopted suicide bomber strategy out of desperation. At the massive naval battle of Lete, Philippine
Islands on October 23-26, Kamikaze pilots and their suicide dives were seen for the first time.
December 16th, Battle of the Bulge began.
Assassination attempt on Hitler failed on July 20th.
Ringlin Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus tent in Hartford, Connecticut caught fire during a performance on July 6th and one hundred, sixty-seven people were killed and nearly five hundred injured.
In the U.S., twenty thousand cases of polio were reported. Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected for a record fourth term as president, Harry Truman elected his vice-president.
In World Series, St. Louis Cardinals were victorious over the St. Louis Browns.
1945:
From February 13th to the 14th, allied planes bomb Dresden. In the resulting firestorm, an estimated seventy thousand refugees died.
In the battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese lost over twenty thousand men. Over one thousand were killed when two hundred seventy-nine U.S. B-29s napalm-bomb Tokyo on March 9th through 10th. On April 1st, the United States invaded Okinawa.
On April 28th, Mussolini and his mistress were killed by a firing squad and Adolph Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun committed suicide in Berlin on April 30th.
By May 3rd, British forces occupied Hamburg. On May 8th, V-E, Victory in Europe day begins. The war in Europe ended.
Before the Japanese surrendered on June 21st, one hundred thousand Japanese soldiers died at Okinawa. On July 5th, the Philippine Islands were liberated.
On July 16th, the first atomic bomb was test-detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in the Enola Gay on August 6th. Eighty thousand perished. On August 8th, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Forty thousand perished when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9th.
V-J, Victory in Japan, day, was established on August 15th and the War in the Pacific ended. The Japanese officially signed the surrender document on U. S. S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2nd.
A B-25 bomber crashed into the 78th and 79th floor of the Empire State Building, killing thirteen people during a blinding fog on July 28th.
Twenty-one war criminals were put on trial for various atrocities during Nuremberg war crime trials.
At the age of sixty-three, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, and Harry Truman assumed the presidency.
October 30th, the shoe rationing ended. Meat and butter rationing ended on November 23rd. Tire rationing ended on December 20th.
In Atlantic City, Bess Myerson won Miss America title. And the Detroit Tigers were victorious over the Chicago Cubs in the World Series.
Information gathered from “The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition through World War II” by Marc McCutcheon, copyright 1995 by Marc McCutcheon.
Each country in the war had an area which they excelled, and for the Germans that was the powerful U-boats with cannons, big guns and torpedoes, sailing the Atlantic. There were many operations for U-boats during WWII. First we’ll discuss the Larconia incident.
A German U-boat (U-156) torpedoed a large target in the South Atlantic Ocean. A British liner (Larconia), carrying a 136-man crew, military material and personnel (268 men), about 80 civilians, and around 1800 Italian prisoners of war along with armed guards of 160 Polish soldiers sank at 2323 hours military time.
Amazed to hear Italian voices, the commander, Kptlt. Werner Harenstien at once began a rescue mission for the people struggling in the sea and those in lifeboats. Offering to cease hostilities, he radioed an uncoded message to every vessel within hearing distance for help.
In the days that followed Harenstien’s crew save about 400 survivors, half of which were brought on ship and the other half in lifeboats. Next U-506 arrived and began to help rescue the survivors and a little while later U-507 and an Italian submarine came to help. As the boats headed for shore, towing the lifeboats behind them, an American B-24 Liberator bomber operating from the Ascension Island, its pilot spotted the boats.
The pilot radioed base asking for instructions. Following orders he attacked, forcing the rescue boats to cut the lines leading to the lifeboats, leaving hundreds of survivors in the water again.
Because a French warship from Dakar appeared and began fishing people out of the water again, the US attack didn’t cause as many dead as it could have. Approximately 1500 people survived.
Many times U-boats had helped their survivors with supplies, water and directions of which way to go. After this incident, an order was issued (called the Larconia order) that no U-boats were ever to take part in rescue operations again. They were to leave their survivors in the sea.
Hitler was bound by a promise to Japan to declare war on the US and after the Japanese’s attack on Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941, he did on December 11th. All restrictions on German U-boats not to attack American shipping were removed. Donitz immediately drew up plans to devastate the US eastern seaboard with swift blows.
The only boats capable of cruising that far were the 12 type IX boats. This was Donitz’s plan, but he was forced to lower the number to 6 boats because of Hitler’s preferences of the Gibraltar area. Only five of the six were able to sail as one was in need of repairs.
The first ship of the drumbeaters sailed on December 18th, 1942, the next on the 23rd, one on the 24th and the last two on the 27th. Taking over two weeks to get to the US waters, they were given strict orders not to attack anything unless a warship, carrier or battle ship was located.
Operations ended on the American coast on February 6th. The drumbeats had sank 25 ships. The U-boats destined for home. The Paukenschlag operation began its fast surprise attack on the eastern seaboard. Other waves of U-boats followed that weren’t considered Drumbeaters.
397 ships were sank, costing approximately 5000 lives though only 7 U-boats were sank and 302 Germans lost their lives. In May the US started running convoys on the east coast and proved very effective. Later, on July 19th the war shifted back to where it had all begun, into the North Atlantic where it would eventually end.
What was Operation Deadlight? It was the code name for the scuttling of unwanted German U-boats surrendered to the allies after the end of World War Two (WWII) from 1945-1946.
In the near future you may see these boats raised from the bed of the ocean since the British government has awarded a salvage contract for them.
U-boat Net–The U-boat War 1939-1945 – http://uboat.net
The Larconia Incident – http://uboat.net/ops/larconia.htm
Operation Drumbeat – http://uboat.net/ops/drumbeat.htm
Operation Deadlight – http://uboat.net/fates/deadlight.htm
Although WWII didn’t end until May 8, 1945, the ending began with the “Invasion of Normandy”. Many Americans refer to this day as “D-day” which means only one thing–June 6, 1944. I like to think of this day as the day the Allied troops whooped butt on the coast of Normandy, France.
This is the day the greatest combination ever assembled of land, sea and air forces cast themselves upon the Normandy coast and struck with such an impact that it was the beginning of the end of the German military.
The planning of the invasion had begun as early as 1943, and early in that year US Navy forces began to arrive in the British Isles to prepare for the invasion. There were two bases established with “Base 1” in Ireland and “Base 2” in Scotland while they began construction of other bases in England to be used as “jumping off” points for the great attack. Soon other amphibious bases were constructed in every cove and bay to be used for harboring and loading naval vessels.
Intensive training operations from gas-mask drills to boat handling were initiated in every phase of warfare.
To take dominant command of all invasion forces, General Eisenhower arrived in England in January 1944. And by March the US 8th Airforce, the US 9th Airforce and the Royal Airforce started three months of constant pounding along the coast and in Northern France, the Low Countries and Western Germany.
The world knew it was coming–even Germany, but no one except a few men of the highest commanders in the Allied forces knew when or where the blow would come. Air attacks intensified as D-day approached. On June 1st the actual loading of assault troops began as the ships were sealed and the men briefed. Then they awaited the final “this is it” from the Supreme Allied Headquarters.
The invasion that had originally been planned for June 5th was postponed for twenty-four hours because of adverse weather conditions. The night of June 5th, last minute air strikes heightened while the great armada moved across the channel and paratroopers jumped far inland. The next twenty-four hours would tell the fate of Europe.
But everything had been planned long months before, figuring the last inch and the last second. A fleet of 4,000 ships, all of varying sizes and speeds, with split-second timing reached the rendezvous. From then on all the vessels continued to operate just as precise.
A stretch of beach on the Normandy coast between the Seine and halfway up the Cotentin Peninsula was selected for the landing. British troops were scheduled to land on the eastern beaches and American troops on the western beaches.
Sweeping channels right in to the beach, the minesweepers far ahead of the rest dropped lighted buoys to mark the channels they had already swept. Posted at every turn in the courses were reference vessels to guide traffic into the precise lanes. Special control vessels inside the 1,000 yard line off shore were to direct the assault boats in the last dash.
The great armada stretched all across the channel with cruisers, destroyers and battleships that guarded the flanks while air coverage acted as an impenetrable umbrella that protected the vessels against air attacks. Then the bombardment ships made their move and fired a blizzard of shells against the surprised Germans.
Transports lowered their assault craft, the troops hurled down and the amphibious craft sailed toward shore with their loads. The Navy and Army demolition teams drove through the shallow water, blowing up underwater obstacles. Nazi guns, lying outside the zone of fire began to shower them with heavy crossfire. Casualties were heavy. The US Coast Guard, especially outfitted and instructed, thrust in under the fire and made spectacular rescues. Then hidden guns were searched out by the bombers and ships’ gun fire and they completely disabled them.
The landing beaches were secured by our troops by late afternoon. Sixty-six thousand troops had landed on the two American beaches by the end of the first 24 hours, and almost 250,000 Americans were ashore at the end of seven days.
Wow! The invasion of Normandy or D-day is my favorite part of WWII history. What energy and patriotism these guys had.