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Πέμπτη 21 Απριλίου 2016

WW2 Pacific Treasures: The submerged Sherman tanks of Saipan


The Battle of Saipan was a battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II, fought on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands from 15 June 1944 to 9 July 1944. The invasion fleet embarking the expeditionary forces left Pearl Harbor on June 5, 1944, the same day Operation Overlord was launched with the invasion of Normandy (AKA the D-Day landings). The Normandy landings were the larger amphibious landing, but the Marianas invasion fielded the larger fleet.


By July 7, the Japanese had nowhere to retreat. Saito made plans for a final suicidal banzai charge. On the fate of the remaining civilians on the island, Saito said, “There is no longer any distinction between civilians and troops. It would be better for them to join in the attack with bamboo spears than be captured.” At dawn, with a group of a dozen men carrying a great red flag in the lead, the remaining able-bodied troops, about 3,000 men, charged forward in the final attack. Amazingly, behind them came the wounded, with bandaged heads, crutches, and barely armed.


The Japanese surged over the American front lines, engaging both Army and Marine units. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th U.S. Infantry were almost destroyed, losing 650 killed and wounded. 

However, the fierce resistance of these two battalions, as well as that of Headquarters Company, 105th Infantry, and elements of 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines (an artillery unit) resulted in over 4,300 Japanese killed. 

For their actions during the 15-hour Japanese attack, three men of the 105th Infantry were awarded the Medal of Honor – all posthumously. Numerous others fought the Japanese until they were overwhelmed by the largest Japanese Banzai attack in the Pacific War .


Many hundreds of Japanese civilians committed suicide in the last days of the battle, some jumping from “Suicide Cliff” and “Banzai Cliff”. Efforts by U.S. troops to persuade them to surrender instead were mostly futile. 

Widespread propaganda in Japan portraying Americans and British as “devils” who would treat POWs barbarically, deterred surrender (see Japanese Military Propaganda (WWII)).

In the end, about 22,000 Japanese civilians died. Almost the entire garrison of troops on the island — at least 30,000 — died. 

For the Americans, the victory was the most costly to date in the Pacific War. 2,949 Americans were killed and 10,364 wounded, out of 71,000 who landed. 


The Tank was probably off-loaded from an Landing Ship, Tank or LST (not so jokingly referred to as Large Slow Targets). It is also possible that the LST was disabled by Japanese shelling. 

The tank crew may have tried to make a mad dash to the beach but it was just too far away. The water was shallow enough that the crew probably escaped without drowning, but, the withering rain of bullets, artillery and mortar fire may have killed them.


This tank was about 300 meters off the beach. There were 3 but not really close to each other and this one is turned and looks to be engaged with a pillbox on the shore and has a nasty antitank round below the water line on the starboard side right behind the driver/front gunner. 

Being the typical tourists we couldn’t resist swimming out and getting close to it and checking it out. I will see if I can find the interior shots of it. What was really neat is the barrell is actually pointing at a bunker/pillbox that had taken a shot and collapsed. 





SOURCE

Τετάρτη 20 Απριλίου 2016

Then and Now: 75 years after this photo was shot, the same spot, as it is today


It's been 75 years since the nazi hordes invaded Greece and on April 27, 1941 the Germans entered Athens through the northern suburbs of the Greek capital.

In the period photo, two German soldiers on a motorbike with a sidecar strike a pose on Kifissias Avenue, just outside "Zirineio Sports Club".


This is the same spot, as it is today, taken from Google Street View. 

Note that the electricity column, the utility pole supporting wires for electrical power distribution, remains exactly the same, despite the 75 year gap between the two shots!

The same applies for the main entrance of "Zirineio", which remains virtually unchanged!



This is another view of the exact spot, from above. The Germans were at the junction of Kifissias Avenue and Zirini Street.

Τρίτη 19 Απριλίου 2016

‘Skull on a Tank,’ Guadalcanal, 1942 - The story behind one of the most unsettling photos from any war, anywhere




In February 1943, LIFE magazine published a series of photographs from Guadalcanal—the largest of the Solomon Islands and the site of the Allies’ first, pivotal offensive in the Pacific during World War II.

One of those pictures, made by a 25-year-old LIFE photographer named Ralph Morse, instantly struck a nerve with the magazine’s millions of readers. Seven decades later, it remains one of the most unsettling images to emerge from any war. Morse’s picture (the first in this gallery) of a severed Japanese soldier’s head impaled on a tank captures more graphically and immediately than volumes of words ever could the relentless and often casual barbarity of war.
Here, seven decades after the end of that critical campaign, LIFE.com presents not only Morse’s memories of how he made that photograph but also other pictures from Guadalcanal, photos that ran in LIFE and many more (by Morse and two other staffers, the brothers Joe and Frank Scherschel) that were never published in the magazine.

The caption that accompanied Morse’s disquieting photo in the Feb. 1, 1943, issue of LIFE read, “A Japanese soldier’s skull is propped up on a burned-out Jap [sic] tank by U.S. troops. Fire destroyed the rest of the corpse.”

Morse, however—still remarkably spry at 96—remembers it a bit differently. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of World War II knows, U.S. troops (and troops of every other country who fought in the long, brutal conflict) sometimes engaged in the sort of grisly behavior evinced in Morse’s photograph. But in the photographer’s recollections of that day, it seemed just as likely that the Japanese were the ones who placed the torched skull on that ruined tank as a gruesome trap for curious Americans.

“The Army had taken over from the Marines,” Morse tells LIFE.com, setting the scene on Guadalcanal in late 1942, “and I was traveling with a group of soldiers on patrol. In the forests on those islands, you had to walk in a single line. The brush was so damn thick that if you didn’t keep your eye on the shoes of the guy in front of you, you were lost. I think it was three or four days of solid walking, but we were fine.” A pause. Then, “We were all young,” he says, a hint of wonder in his voice.

For its part, LIFE described Guadalcanal’s terrain this way: “The jungle is a solid wall of vegetable growth, a hundred feet tall. There are huge palm leaves, elephant-ear leaves of the taro, ferns and jagged leaves of the banana trees all tangled together in a fantastic web. Near the ground are thousands of kinds of insects, praying mantises, ants and spiders . . . In such hot, damp weather mosquitoes live luxuriantly. Sometimes they imbed themselves so deeply in the soldiers’ flesh, they have to be cut out.”

“We came to a big opening on the beach,” Morse says, “and there was a tank with a skull on it, right near the turret. The sergeant leading the patrol looks at it and says, ‘Guys, that skull has been put there for a reason, and the Japanese have probably got mortar shells aimed right at this spot.’ A disgusting scene like that will always draw people in, and the idea, of course, was that any American troops who came along would obviously want to stop and take a look.

“‘Everybody stay away from there,’ the sergeant says, then he turns to me. ‘You,’ he says, ‘go take your picture if you have to, then get out, quick.’ So I went over, got my pictures and ran like hell back to where the patrol had stopped.”

Asked when he was able to see the photos he made on Guadalcanal, or in any of the other places he shot during the war, in the Pacific and across Europe, Morse laughs and says, “Not until a copy of the magazine arrived—months later, sometimes—or until after we went back to the States.”

Unbidden, he offers a revealing glimpse into the logistics of photographing in a war zone in the early 1940s, and the creative measures photographers invented in order to get the job done.

“Before flying to where the fighting was, you went to the PX in Honolulu,” Morse explains—the PX (or post exchange) that operates on military bases all over the globe—”and you bought a big box of condoms. When you were out shooting in the jungle or on the beaches, you wrote your captions and dropped them into a condom with your undeveloped film, tied it in a knot and stuffed that in an envelope—and hoped everything would stay dry.

“Then, when you got to a place where there was a ship or a plane heading out, you’d send the film back to the States. It would always go straight to the censors in Washington, and then the stuff that was okay would be sent on to the magazine or newspaper or wherever. But because we didn’t see the developed film for weeks or months, sometimes we didn’t even know if our cameras were working! They could be broken, and we wouldn’t know. We just kept shooting. I think I first saw that picture of the skull after I got malaria and the Army shipped me back home. I finally saw the photo at the LIFE offices in New York.”

One last point worth stressing: Ralph Morse was lucky even to be alive in late 1942, when he made that photo of the skull. A few months before, he had been aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes when it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes during the Battle of Savo Island, not far from Guadalcanal. In John Loengard’s 1998 book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Morse describes the action on the Vincennes:

Off Guadalcanal in 1942, at one o’clock in the morning . . . they sound general quarters. I roll out of bed and throw on my clothes, run out and get up on deck because we’re being pounded.
It’s jet black, but we’re throwing flares up, and boats are blowing up. It was like a movie set. . . . Pieces of the boat kept getting blown away, and you don’t get scratched, but the people you’re with are no longer there. We started to list over, the deck was so slippery with blood that it was like an ice skating rink. The captain gave orders to get the wounded into the water. Well, at that point you’re not taking pictures. You’re throwing wounded. You’re covered with blood. Guys are screaming. . . . But it ends, and the battle’s over, the light went down.
Orders came to abandon ship. I went over the side with one of the ship’s photographers, and we were short one life preserver. We had five people and four life preservers. So we kept passing one around. You could float on your back for a while, and then, as we floated around, we met more and more groups. We used to play bridge, and two of my bridge partners floated by, so we spent the rest of the night floating by people asking if they played bridge — to keep from worrying about sharks. We were very lucky that night because there was all that blood in the water, but with all the depth charges being thrown I guess every shark in his right mind had got out of there. We were picked up around six hours later by destroyers.
Morse remained with LIFE, covering every imaginable type of story—from the Space Race to sports (he made the single most famous picture of Jackie Robinson) to Broadway—for the next 30 years, until the magazine finally folded as a weekly in 1972.

A RAF graveyard in Greece, April 1941


An assortment of destroyed RAF aircraft located in Greece and dated April 1941, in this propaganda colour photo, which appeared in the nazi book "Wir kämpfen auf dem Balkan", published under the auspices of the "VIII Fliegerkorps".




Greece, 1941: Help us identify those vehicles!


Here are some guesses, as identified by researchers Alexios-Nikolaos Tsagris and Akis Kosionidis

Ford V3000
Renault Type AGC 48 CV '1939
Opel Olympia (OL38)
Morris Comercial C4 MK II or Morris CDSW
Ford V8-51

WW2 Wrecks in Greece: Unidentified shipwrecks, 1941





According to respected researcher Aris Bilalis, this ship is the "ORION"
Few details, as to the identity of those two shipwrecks are available. 

On the back of the first photo (above), it mentions "Vouliagmeni, April 1941", while on the second one (below), it says "Greece, 1941".


Any idea as to the names of those ships and circumstances of their sinking are more than welcome!

UPDATE: According to respected researcher Aris Bilalis, the ship on the first photo above  is the "ORION".

A profile of the "ORION" by respected researcher Manolis Bardanis (IN GREEK) with many photos:




Δευτέρα 18 Απριλίου 2016

1941: Poets at the front - Greek soldiers write short poems on the back of photos


A group of Greek soldiers are posing for a photo in Albania in 1941, during a short break from hostilities.

The soldiers are in an... antiaircraft mode, sporting a variety of weapons.

The most interesting part of this photo though, is the handwritten poem on its back, which, roughly translated, reads as follows:

"Armed with courage, we took the guns from our enemies and now they are on their way back to Rome to eat... macaroni (pasta)".

There's always space for a dry sense of humour, even in the midst of war.



Rod Pearce: Searching for WW2 aircraft wrecks and giving closure to their families (PART ONE)




Rod Pearce has dedicated his time and efforts finding underwater aircraft wrecks and seeking closure to the families of hundreds -if not thousands- of Missing in Action (MIA) airmen from all nations that fought during World War Two.




Rod has been diving in Papua New Guinea for 40 years and is credited with discovering most of its best underwater wrecks, including B-17F "Black Jack" 41-24521 and co-finding s'Jacob, along with many other WW2 shipwrecks and aircraft.



"I have been working with the American nonprofit organization called "Pacific Wrecks" (see pacificwrecks.com) for the past ten years or so "Rod says and adds: 


"While Justin Taylan -founder and director of Pacific Wrecks- and the rest of his team has mainly been focused on our overland-work, and for the last two years has had a US government contract to investigate MIAs in Papua New Guinea, my interest and focus has always been the underwater side. 

Together I'd say we make a pretty good team for doing what we do".


Rod's vessel, the m/v Barbarian II, used to be a dive charter-vessel and he ran this for 22 years as such, along with his previous vessel Barbarian I for 10 years prior to this.



"Nowadays I don't have the will or energy to do regular charters any longer, and would rather just spend my time finding underwater aircraft and seeking closure to the hundreds of MIA's from all nations".



Here's what Rod Pierce has to say about his work:



When and why did you start looking for missing WW2 aircraft?

As a small boy growing up in Papua New Guinea, I have always been fascinated by World War II: Exploring tunnels, guns, bunkers and so on.

After I left school, a friend of mine, Dave Pennyfather, ( who was with me when I found Blackjack) got me involved in MIA's. 

This was back in the late 60's, or very early 70's, and I found my first aircraft in the water around 1970 or a bit later, with my brother.



This was a Japanese Ki-61 Tony - this still remains my most memorable find.

Why i got involved... I have always had a love of World War II aircraft, and as a pre teen I used to build models of aircraft - I think it went from there. 

I had no interest in flying aircraft, only diving on what I could find, and in my early days of diving I was into finding shipwrecks and doing deep wreck penetration dives (Yokohama Maru 73 mts).




I quickly learned that you could not get a large ship wreck in a camera lens - hence my switch to aircraft.

Also by then, most of the ship wrecks had been found, the rest were in deep water, so I switched to looking for aircraft... and in Papua New Guinea there are hundreds, and most of them are in the water and relative divable waters

So I would say it was a calling. 

And an acute interest, a passion, that these aircraft had to be found, photographed and documented.


Especially after finding my first one, this was quickly followed by a 2nd, an A6M2 Resin of the Tainan Wing based out of Lae, and it was from here I thought to bring closure to these airmen and their families.


The mentioned Ki-61 Tony holds the most memories for me.

And even now after finding B-17s, B-24s, and other multi-engined and single engined aircraft, this simple single-engine, inline aircraft in relatively dirty water remains my most memorable achievement - not the least due to the scars it gave me, quite literally, as fuel was leaking out of it, and I was terribly burnt under my wetsuit.