Davey Jones' Locker
12 hours ago
I don't know if you've read Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the African and European theaters of WWII, but I learned a lot from reading these books. //

Davey Jones' Locker Reddog
11 hours ago
Another great trilogy read is Ian Toll's War in the Pacific. The first book is The Pacific Crucible. Toll also authored one the best American history books I've read: Six Frigates. The beginning of the U.S. Navy.

“Oppenheimer” is a 3-hour epic about the life of J Robert Oppenheimer. In certain ways, it’s reminiscent of how movies used to be made. The dialogue is smart. The editing was crisp, and (because I know the sound editor), the soundtrack was terrific—being “big” when it was needed and subtle when required. It’s also a “whodunit” wrapped in soft commie propaganda inside leftist messaging. //

The film bends time by blending Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance revocation hearing with the 1957 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the nomination of former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. Christopher Nolan flips back and forth from Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing (shot in color) to the Commerce Committee public hearing, as if they are being held contemporaneously. //

The movie soft-pedals Oppenheimer’s lack of personal morals throughout. //

Oppenheimer recognized Nazis as imperialists and evil, as Jew-hating madmen but apparently couldn’t see the Jew-hating Karl Marx and mass-murdering Joe Stalin in the same light. The film follows a well-worn script that communists weren’t “all that bad”. It tracks the oft-used illustration of how communists were “ruined” just for being communists. It never mentions that most American communists were counting on and willing to foment a Soviet-style revolution in America. //

“Oppenheimer” is an interesting story, but the film is way too long. It spends too much time mythologizing a conflicted (mostly immoral) man and ultimately left me empty – not caring for the man beyond the fact that (if he liked it or not) helped end the war against Japan with the deaths of 100,000 dead civilians. Oppenheimer had an unintended hand in my dad coming home from the war. For only that reason, I thank him.

Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. //

Looks like the encryption algorithm was intentionally weakened by intelligence agencies to facilitate easy eavesdropping. //

And I would like to point out that that’s the very definition of a backdoor.

Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea. //

Clive Robinson • July 26, 2023 11:51 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : It started in WWII.

“Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea.”

Remember this actually goes back well into the last century, that is it’s more than 20years old.

In 1946, a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist when his screwdriver slipped. To tell his story, Ben Platts-Mills pieced together what happened inside the room.

Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test, a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life.

In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.

Last week, BBC Future explored the consequences of this fatal accident in a specially illustrated story created by the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills:

• The Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

In this gallery, Platts-Mills explains how he composed the illustrations, based on reconstructions created shortly after the accident, archive photographs, and his own mock-up of the apparatus built from household materials.

One day in Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, a brief, casual moment of carelessness killed one scientist and severely injured another. In this specially illustrated story, the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills recounts what happened to these atomic bomb-makers – and why their accident holds powerful lessons for today.

"...In the search for a harmonious attitude towards life, it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are both actors and spectators in the drama of existence." – Niels Bohr, physicist //

On 21 May 1946, the physicist Louis Slotin was in his final weeks of working for the Project. He was an expert in bomb assembly and had played a central role, hand-building the "Trinity" device for the first test in July 1945, just a month before the Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But, like Oppenheimer, in the months that followed, he came to object to the continuation of the nuclear weapons programme and had decided to go back to civilian life.

Slotin was giving a tour to Alvin Graves, the scientist who was due to replace him. A little before 15:00, in the middle of one of the laboratory buildings, Graves spotted something he recognised: the "critical assembly", which was Slotin's specialism. Like an experimental nuclear bomb, it was used to safely test the reactivity of a plutonium core.

Graves commented that he had never seen the assembly demonstrated. Slotin offered to run through it for him.

From the other side of the room, Raemer Schreiber, Slotin's colleague, agreed. However, he encouraged him to proceed slowly and with caution: //

There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin's approach on this occasion was "improvised". Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber's official report, he said Slotin acted "too rapidly and without adequate consideration", but that the others in the room "by their silence, agreed to the procedure".

"I turned because of some noise or sudden movement," wrote Schreiber. "I saw a blue flash... and felt a heat wave simultaneously." It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone "prompt critical" as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in "a few tenths of a second." Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.

Then Slotin said quietly: "Well, that does it." //

Slotin died nine days later from organ failure. "A pure and simple case of death from radiation," as a colleague would later describe it. //

In fact his boss, Enrico Fermi, had explicitly warned Slotin only a few months earlier about his approach to critical assemblies. "You'll be dead within the year, if you keep doing that," he had said.

But it seems Fermi's was a lone voice in an institution that tended to downplay the dangers of its work. //

Relatively unscathed by the accident, Schreiber went on to help re-design the way procedures like the one that killed Slotin were conducted, with a greater emphasis on safety.

Standing at Slotin's shoulder, Graves received a high dosage of radiation and became critically ill. //

Floy Agnes Lee, the haematologist treating Graves after the accident described in a 2017 interview how severe his condition was. "His white blood cells were so low that they didn’t understand why he was still living," she said. "I don’t remember how long it took before his hair started growing back again."

The movie “Oppenheimer” opens Friday. I’ve read and seen a lot about the man and his contribution to the Manhattan Project. Was he a genius? Sure. Was he later conflicted about what he did to usher in the atomic age and end World War II? Apparently. Would atomic energy have eventually found its way into weaponry without him? Of course.

The movie will spark a renewed “debate” regarding the efficacy and ethics of dropping two atomic bombs to end the war in the Pacific. On one side of the scale, there are people who firmly believe that killing a massive number of civilians wasn’t necessary. (The fire-bombing of Tokyo likely killed more people than died at Hiroshima, but that is another story.)

Those people might be pacifists; they might just be contrarians who believe that America could have warned the Japanese of our “super weapon.” America did, in fact, drop leaflets warning civilians of Hiroshima to get out. It was done throughout the war, but both cities were warned.

Or there are people who contend that we could have “demonstrated” one of the bombs by blowing up an open field. There is no evidence that the Japanese were not going to surrender after a demonstration.

On the other side of the ledger are people like me, who believe that although Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible means to an end, those two events brought a close to a world war. I am also convinced that without those bombs, I never would have been born because my father never would have come home.

My dad joined the Marines in 1943. Thereafter, he participated in five assault landings—island hopping with the Marines—then ending with the 4th and 6th Marines Divisions. The last big battle he was in was the assault on Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa, which resulted in 3,000 US casualties. It was the only time he gave any thought to dying. When he was in combat before that, he never thought he wasn’t coming home. Others were fatalistic. My dad was an optimist. But there was one other time he thought about death and dying in combat. Fortunately, it was after Japan had surrendered.

He was part of the occupying force that landed in Tokyo Bay (Task Force 31). He and thousands of Marines, sailors, and soldiers were on ships that slowly worked their way into the bay. That’s when he saw them. Thousands of flags. White flags. Like the hills were blanketed in snow. After the Japanese surrendered, the Japanese home forces were instructed to place a white flag on gun emplacements on the hills around the bay, so occupying forces would know where they were. My dad described it

Chills ran up and down my spine. I thought: “Man, if we’d invaded here, we would have been cut to ribbons.”

Operation Downfall was the invasion code name. Operation Olympic was the code name of the invasion of Kyūshū. My dad would have been part of Olympic’s landing and invasion force. Estimates of casualties vary, but most estimates place casualties in the millions, and that was just for Allied forces. DoD estimates of KIA were conservatively placed at a half-million dead soldiers, sailors, and Marines.

When my dad stood on the deck of his ship and stared at the hills around the bay, he knew. He knew had he been on a landing craft in November 1945 for his 6th assault landing, he wasn’t going home. After three years of never being wounded, his odds of survival were slim.

Chris DeRose @chrisderose
·
Oppenheimer is sure to revive some debates about the end of WWII. Worth noting: Purple Heart medals awarded in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, War on Terror—all 370,000 since 1945—were manufactured for the anticipated invasion of Japan. We have 120,000 remaining.
10:34 AM · Jul 21, 2023

Communist in FDR's Administration
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 3, 2019
The Venona Secrets
I had read the book by Herbert Hoover, “Freedom Betrayed” the book, “Witness.” by Whittaker Chambers, the book by Diana West, “American Betrayal,” the book by M. Stanton Evans, “Blacklisted By History,” the book by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Raomerstein, “Stalin’s Secret Agents,” and the book by John Koster, “Operation Snow” so I had a good idea how the Communist had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration. More than one of these books that I had read referred to the Venona cables.

Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel stated in the preface of this book that of particular interest to both of them was the Soviet attitude toward Jews. They wrote that they were not surprised that the NKVD, the Soviet foreign intelligence service, showed disdain for and made cynical use of the Jews willing to work for them. What surprised them was the Venona code name for Jews- “Rats.” They devote chapter 10 to this subject of Jews serving the Communist.

The authors made it clear that Moscow’s agents in the United States helped prevent an earlier Nazi surrender to the Anglo-Americans; the prospect of which haunted the USSR throughout the war. How Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White played an important role in the Soviet endeavor. White was what intelligence professionals call an “agent of influence.”
He not only spied for the Soviet Union throughout the war but also sought to shape critical U.S. economic policies in obedience to the orders of his Moscow masters. As a spy, he was a rival in perfidy to Alger Hiss and to the trio of British traitors, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean. The authors of this book go on to explain how “Operation Snow,” was executed by White and Soviet agents.

One of White’s greatest contributions to the Soviet effort was his role in the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. The Morgenthau Plan was to convert Germany into a pasture. This book explains how it was conceived and what effect it had on Germany, Jews and our military forces.

White’s political star within the Roosevelt administration was never higher than in 1944. White was the chief American delegate at the historic conference in Britton Woods, New Hampshire, that plotted the postwar financial rules by which the Allies intended to restore their battered economies. Read this book to see how that turned out!

On March 31, 1945 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius wrote to White, “
On behalf of President Roosevelt and the members of the American delegation, it is my privilege to extend to you an invitation to become an official advisor to the delegation of the United states to the United Nations Conference on International Organization….” Less than a week later, a Moscow Venona message ordered Alhmerov to make arrangements with Silvermaster (Robert) about maintaining contact with White, then called (Richard), and another member of the Silvermaster ring, William Ludwig Ullman (Pilot) in San Francisco (Babylon).
During White’s attendance at the San Francisco conference, he was handled by NKVD officer Vladimir Pravdin (Sergej), who served in New York but attended the conference as a Soviet news agency TASS, reporter. White gave the Soviets information of the American delegation’s internal discussions. White also reported that “Truman and Stettinius want to achieve the success of the conference at any price.”

Alger Hiss, as agent of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), was the acting secretary general at the founding conference of the UN. This provided the Soviets with the advanced notice on how the Americans would handle questions during the deliberations.

President Harry Truman had appointed the Treasury official as executive director of the International Monetary Fund. J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, President Truman’s military aid, asking him to give the enclosed background on White to the president. Hoover described White as a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization operating in Washington D.C., also the Canadian government sources had expressed their concern to the FBI about the appointment of White. The Canadians knew of White through the Soviet military intelligence defector Igor Gouzenko. Harry Truman did nothing with these reports and White was appointed.

Herbert and Eric go into great details of how the Soviet agents made an Apparat (was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Soviet government apparat (аппарат, apparatus), someone who held any position of ...)

Chapter 4 is a chapter that explains Whittaker Chamber’s Spy Ring, I think Chambers does a much better job if this in his book “Witness.”

Chapter 5 details the Elizabeth Bentley Spy Ring, also the Silvermaster Ring, The Perlo Ring, and talks some about how Eleanor Roosevelt was targeted by the Soviets agents. The authors seem, to me, to be letting the Roosevelts off the hook, to their way of thinking, it is only because the Roosevelts are so naïve, that these spies were all over the White House. Why would Eleanor give the order to shut down the act of deciphering the Venona cables??? I’m glad her orders were not carried out.

Chapter 6 and 7 lays out the details of the Atomic Espionage. Here I found what I was looking for when I ordered this book. I had read much about Harry Hopkins in Diana West’s book American Betrayal and wanted more sources concerning him as a spy. Since he, to me, was so important because of how close he was to the Roosevelts. Harry had lived in the White House, slept in the Lincoln bedroom for three years and six months. Harry had dined with the Roosevelt every night. In this chapter on page 212 I read, In the 1960s, Oleg Gordievssky, a KGB officer, attended a lecture by the veteran Chekist Iskhak Akhmerov, who, had been the” illegal” Rezident in the United States during the war. Akhmerov mentioned his contact with Alger Hiss, but “the man he described as the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” was Harry Hopkins. Direct evidence in Venona confirms Akhmerov’s statement of his connection with Hopkins. This explains why Hopkins was adamant about shipping uranium to the Soviet Union despite the objections of the military authorities. Another example was Hopkins promotion of his friends including Colonel Philip R. Faymonville, who had been military attaché in Moscow from 1933 to 1938. Faymonville’s colleagues considered him to be extremely pro-soviet, calling him the “Red-Colonel.” When Hopkins in 1941 suggested sending him back to Moscow to expedite Lend-Lease, army intelligence objected. Hopkins said only, “You might as well get his papers ready, because he’s going.” Hopkins arranged for Faymonville to be promoted to brigadier general and later to general. Long story short, Faymonville was set-up, he met a young man that became his lover but was also a Soviet NKVD agent.

Later we learn about “Kvant” a mercenary spy, and Arthur Adams a Veteran Spy, Klaus Fuchs, a spy from Germany, The Rosenberg Case, other members of the Rosenberg Ring, Sarant and Barr Flee.

Chapter 8 Atomic Espionage in California at the University of Berkeley, how the Soviets used Trade Unions, The J. Robert Oppenheimer Case,

Chapter 9 How the Soviets targeted the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), VENONA reveals how easy the NKVD penetrated OSS, The French Connection.

Chapter 10- see above
Chapter 11 The Jack Soble/Robert Soblen Ring, Zarubin’s Stern Gang

Chapter 12- Polecats (Trotskyites) and Rats, (Jews), Stalin: Jews and Negroes Are Not Americans, Targeting Jewish Organizations, Duping Albert Einstein, The Murder of Erlich and Alter, Target: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The International Workers Order and Espionage,

Chapter 13 Target: Journalists, The recruitment of I.F. Stone, Target: Lippmann, Mission in Moscow,

Chapter 14
The new documentation available since 1991 has been broadly, in two categories-(1) the archives of the Communist International, which were kept in Moscow, and the files of other Communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe; and (2) the Venona papers, which were kept in Forte Meade, Maryland. But finally made public, the material from east and west combined shows that the U.S. Communist Party was extensively and fruitfully in Moscow’s espionage infrastructure in America. The Party’s personalities, including General Secretary Earl Browder, were active participants in recruiting and vetting Party members on behalf of Soviet intelligence. Indeed, most of the wartime Soviet agents in the United States were members of the communist Party. Through the Party, the USSR was able to draw prospective agents from a pool of ideologues loyal to Moscow, a circumstance unique in history. This reality, which was clear to U.S. government investigators and many others for decades but which was- and is- disputed by liberal historians, is now a known fact.

Fact: There existed in important agencies of the U.S. government networks of American spies under the control of Soviet military intelligence and NKVD officers. These included individuals whose disloyalty has been acknowledged for years by almost all serious students of the subject, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and the Rosenbergs through the years have had a shrinking pool of defenders. Others, until the Venona documents were aired, were considered heroes of American liberalism.

Fact: Venona has shown conclusively that the highest-level American government officials working for Soviet intelligence was Harry Hopkins, the close friend and advisor of President Roosevelt. His clandestine contact with “illegal” Soviet intelligence officer Iskhak Akhmerov,
To whom he provided secret government information, alone makes the case against Hopkins. Only a Soviet agent would be permitted to know that an “illegal” intelligence officer such as Akhmerov was connected with the Soviet Union.

Fact: Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performed work on behalf of the Soviet Union. Although it has long been known that several of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed the world would be safer if the secrets of the atomic energy were shared with the Soviet Union, it had been considered bad manners even to suggest that the sensitive Oppenheimer could possibly be so crude as to be a conscious collaborator with the Soviet secret police. But he was.

Fact: The Left (Liberals) liked to use one of the right wing’s favorite complaints as evidence of its inanity-its belief that American journalists, including some of the best known, had been deliberately enlisted in the Soviet cause. The Venona documents leave no room for doubts that this was exactly the case, in particular regarding the loyalty of I.F. Stone to the Soviet Union and, in his case, to his book account.

Fact: The Communist movement displayed systematic and consistent anti-Semitism.

https://www.amazon.com/Venona-Secrets-Exposing-Espionage-Americas/dp/0895262754/

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Back in 2017, the first D-Day I wrote at RedState, I shared the story of D-Day through my grandparents’ eyes. The next year, 2018, we re-published the story, and I tweeted out photos of the letter my grandpa sent home to his bride of just two-and-a-half-months the day after D-Day. A reporter from EuroNews found those tweets and covered their story as part of the outlet’s D-Day 75th Anniversary coverage.)

https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/06/d-day-soldier-s-letters-to-wife-reveal-endurance-of-love-during-war

A large Chinese-registered barge was detained by Malaysian authorities after it was found carrying massive piles of steel ship parts and old artillery shells believed to have been looted from a pair of British battleships wrecked during World War II. //

It is suspected the metal was stripped from the nearby wrecks of the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales, two ships sunk by Japanese torpedoes in 1941 just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The attacks killed 842 sailors and the shipwrecks have since been designated as war graves. //

Looters have been known to target WWII shipwrecks for their raw materials. Known as “prewar steel,” the metal the ships were built from was untainted by radioactive elements created and spread across the world by the detonation of the first atomic explosion in 1945, making it extremely valuable for use in sensitive medical and scientific measuring devices.

Photos from the barge showed towers of rusted metal, cables, and maritime refuse piled high on the deck, with an excavator and large crane stationed nearby.

Last Friday, a Marine celebrated his 100th birthday. On December 7, 1941, he was sitting in the “great room” of his fraternity when news of Pearl Harbor arrived in the form of a shout. A fraternity brother was listening to the radio and loudly announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl. America was at war, and so were each of the “brothers” in the house. Some joined right away. Others waited.

This Marine finished his freshman year and then enlisted. Why the Marines? “Because the Marines are first in the fight,” he said. //

He knows that he was one of the lucky Marines to come home. The heroes, he said, never came home.

“That was the roughest 10-15 minutes I ever spent,” said one pilot. A squadron of B-24s had flown in one of the first days of Operation Argument. It had been a success. Only three crews didn’t return. It was the beginning of the Eighth Air Force’s big winter of 1944 push to cripple or crush the Luftwaffe ahead of the D-Day invasion. The crews called it the “Big Week”.

Jim had been promoted to Major. In comparison to most of the bomber crews, Jim was ancient. He was 36. On a cold February 24th in 1944 he watched from the tower as bombers returned. That day, it wasn’t his turn to fly. Half of the flight didn’t come back on February 24th. 12 crews were lost. He would lead the next day’s mission over Fürth. It would be his second mission of the Big Week.

The next day, German skies were filled with Allied aircraft. 754 bombers and over 200 fighters dotted the skies over Bavaria. Flying at 18,500 feet, with the bomb bays already opened, a sudden incalculably loud blast ruptured the air in the cockpit. Jim was in the copilot’s seat. Although he was strapped in, his body rocked upward and back down. An 88mm shell had blown a hole in the aircraft almost directly between Jim and the pilot. Both men looked at the hole and down at the German landscape below. The crew was on oxygen and wore wool flight suits to keep the intense cold at bay. It made little difference. 40 below zero air was sweeping into the interior. With a gaping hole in the middle of the Dixie Flyer, Jim watched in horror as other planes were hit by flak. Another B-24 took a direct hit and disintegrated before his eyes. One parachute. The rest of the crew, if not already dead, fell to their deaths. The Dixie’s parachutes were blown up with the 88 shell that ventilated their cockpit. No exit now. Jim and his pilot knew that they would either make it back or die. No parachuting into German and a POW camp.

At 18,500, ice was forming around their oxygen masks and on their exposed skin. The instruments were icing over and the two pilots had to collectively muscle their crippled bomber back home. They made it back as the Dixie, split almost in two, and came to a stop just seconds away from falling completely apart. Jim was “blue” from the cold and shell-shocked. He would fly again but he was “broken” for a few weeks.

Jim, Jimmy Stewart returned home to a film carrier that he thought was over. His hair had turned gray. Stewart rarely spoke about the war after he returned. He refused to do a movie about his life. His Distinguished Flying Cross was displayed in his father’s hardware store.

Before he was an actor, Walter Matthau was a radioman and gunner aboard a B-24 in the same group as Jimmy Stewart.

Most crew members weren’t famous or about to be famous like Stewart and Matthau. They were mostly “kids” who were 18 to 21 years old. Even pilots commanding a crew were usually in their early 20s. College-aged boys-to-men. Most bomber crews knew the odds of returning home were small. The Memphis Belle reached the magic number of 25 combat missions. Few did. Statistically, it was impossible to reach 25 missions and earn a ticket home.

Exclusive: the unmarked graves of thousands of sailors are threatened by illegal metal salvagers //

The rusted 70-year-old wrecks are usually sold as scrap but the ships also contain valuable metals such as copper cables and phosphor bronze propellors.

Experts said grave diggers might be looking for even more precious treasures – steel plating made before the nuclear testing era, which filled the atmosphere with radiation. These submerged ships are one of the last sources of “low background steel”, virtually radiation-free and vital for some scientific and medical equipment.

Farewell of a hero
Last living World War II Medal of Honor recipient dies at 98

The last living Medal of Honor recipient from World War II — a hero who fought enemy forces with a flamethrower in Iwo Jima — died Wednesday morning in West Virginia. He was 98.

Hershel “Woody” Williams, a former Marine corporal who earned the military’s highest decoration for his bravery in the Battle of Iwo Jima, died peacefully at a veterans medical center, according to The Woody Williams Foundation.

What moved the brave men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was the firm resolve and spirit that liberty and virtue, freedom and duty, God and justice, were bound together and it is only in this unity that true freedom and progress be enjoyed. The relativism preached today is contrary to the American Founding and the American resolve and spirit that confronted the great darkness of Nazism and totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century.

Looking back at the great American tradition of freedom, we find the necessity of virtue and belief in the justice of God as the common pillars upon which freedom stands. Today’s license of choice exiles virtue and God from freedom. This is intentional. The enemies of freedom and progress who seek to enact centralizing decrees over all need the elimination of virtue and God from the hearts of the people in order for their totalitarian impulses to be realized.

Grandpa’s June 7 letter, though noteworthy because of the event it references, is also emblematic of the Greatest Generation. They were a newlywed couple in their early 20’s facing an extended separation, war, and an uncertain future, and he found a way to mix lighthearted everyday experiences with his friend Frank in with romantic assurances that he was going to be okay.

Even from 7,000 miles away he was simply a husband doing all he could to protect his wife – while working to “liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.”

http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/06/06/ronald-reagan.-d-day.-boys-pointe-du-hoc./

On the road south from Los Angeles, two-thirds of the way to San Diego, one will drive past Camp Pendleton. Each time I pass it, I can’t help but think of my dad and brother who both went through boot camp and training at Pendleton. In my father’s case, as a combat Marine, he later witnessed many of his mates die in combat. My brother, serving as a corpsman, held the hand of many a Marine as they took their last breath. My family members returned. Too many did not.

Before one passes Pendleton, you’ll see a road at the north end of the base called “Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone Memorial Highway.” It’s named after a WWII Marine who earned the Medal of Honor for bravery on Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal, the Marines pulled him out of combat to raise money for the war effort. Basilone could not shake a deep feeling of guilt that his mates were still fighting a war while he was not. He begged to be returned to active duty. The Marine Corps acquiesced. On 19, February 1945, Basilone was killed on Iwo Jima. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for heroism, being the only enlisted man to earn both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross.

Last year, I repeated a story that my father wrote in his war memoir about how death affected him. Here it is:

“Over the side, down the Life Net and into the landing craft. Once full, our boat headed to the rally point. Signal given, then to Engibi. The landing craft hit the sand at the south end of the island. The ramp went down and we ran for whatever cover we could find. Rounds were zipping past us. I hit the sand, looked for where the fire was coming from and got up and moved for cover. I was running for a better spot when a Marine in my company, who was in my landing craft took a round in the chest. Thump. The bullet seemed to hit him dead center. He went down like a sack of potatoes. I stopped and yelled for a Corpsman. Eventually a corpsman took over, and I headed for a hole or something to get behind. I rolled into a shell hole.

“The grim reaper was about to say hello again. Although it seemed like an eternity, we had been on the beach for just moments. Guys were hopping shell hole to shell hole. Our company captain, Captain Blood (yes, his real name) was next to me, when we were raked by machine gun fire. Captain Blood took a direct hit, and was killed instantly.

“Later, when the battle was over and the graves detail was preparing Captain Blood’s body to be taken back to the ship or buried I asked the Marine removing his personal effects if I could look at his wallet. Captain Blood took his last breath right next to me, and I wanted to know more about him. In his wallet was a photograph. Staring back at me was his beautiful wife and two children. I was crushed. What was running through my mind was – A wife would never see her husband again. Children would never again feel their father’s touch. That photograph was burned into my memory. It remains there still.”

Each man or woman lost in combat had a family. Each Soldier, Sailor, Marine, or Airman had a loved one who never saw them return. Over a million Americans have given the last full measure and each one had a story.

At the time most of the French gold was in Paris, in the largest safe in the world, “La Souterraine” (The Underground). A room 30m (100 ft) underground, an area of 11 000 m² (118,403.01 ft²), supported by 658 pillars, closed by a turret of steel and concret weighing 130 t.

The rest was scattered through the 200 branches of the Banque de France.

In 1932, while most of Europe watched with worry the situation unfold in Germany, France decided to move the gold far from its eastern and southern borders. In the first months of the year, 148 branches of the BdF are emptied and 275 t of gold were moved. //

After the Anglo-French troops got pushed back from Dakar by Vichy’s troops, it was decided to send the 1100 t of gold 900 km inside the continent in Kayes. Because they wanted more than just the ship.

After that, it stayed roughly the same, they had to sacrifice the Belgian gold to satisfy the invader, who promptly smelted it and sent it to Switzerland to pay for its weapons, and also to keep it clean, if you see what I mean. But they had to wait for 2 years before getting all of it, the Banque de France didn’t want to do it, but was forced to act so they took the slowest route possible.

After the War, France used its own reserve to replace the Belgian gold.

And in all that movement, do you know how much gold was lost?

395 kg. Yep that’s kilograms.

Only 0,016% of the 2500 t of gold went missing.

And all that gold helped the reconstruction, in the two years before the Marshall Plan went in action.

Samuel Sorie Sesay, one of a dwindling group of West Africans who fought in the British army in World War Two, died last month in Sierra Leone at the age of 101. Ahead of his funeral on Friday, Umaru Fofana looks back at his life.

Vincent Pankoke ID'd Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as most likely culprit.

This is my interpretation of how the Axis won WW2 in the timeline of The man in the high castle on what is mentioned. It is not the most accurate way the war could have gone but I had to fill in the missing info with the most likely results still in Axis favor.

On February 15, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated by Giuseppe Zangara. Afterward, the United States is subsequently led by John Garner (FDR's vice president) and then by Republican John Bricker. These presidents led to the destabilization of the country and both failed to enact the New Deal to pull the country from the Great Depression. They continued to maintain an isolationist philosophy during the war and, as a result, they were unable to support the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and they are unable to protect The World from the rise of the Axis threat of the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Empire.