Walking in the Shadows

Random musings from Warwickshire on life in general... Things that make me laugh, make me cry, things that wind me up beyond all endurance - and everything in between.

Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

In an old Brownie camera

Isn't is amazing how a film could last so long in a camera without disintegrating?

Fantastic photos taken 68 years ago. Some of you will have to go to a museum to see what a Brownie camera looked like?

Here is a simple picture of what we are talking about. . .



These photos are absolutely incredible....Read below the first picture and at the end...



PHOTOS STORED IN AN OLD BROWNIE CAMERA

Thought you might find these photos very interesting; what quality from 1941.

Pearl Harbor photos found in an old Brownie stored in a foot locker. And just recently taken to be developed.


THESE PHOTOS ARE FROM A SAILOR WHO WAS ON THE USS QUAPAW ATF-11O.


I THINK THEY'RE SPECTACULAR!































Pearl Harbor

On Sunday, December 7th, 1941 the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the U.S. Forces stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. By planning this attack on a Sunday, the Japanese commander Admiral Nagumo, hoped to catch the entire fleet in port. As luck would have it, the Aircraft Carriers and one of the Battleships were not in port. (The USS Enterprise was returning from Wake Island, where it had just delivered some aircraft. The USS Lexington was ferrying aircraft to Midway, and the USS Saratoga and USS Colorado were undergoing repairs in the United States)

In spite of the latest intelligence reports about the missing aircraft carriers (his most important targets), Admiral Nagumo decided to continue the attack with his force of six carriers and 423 aircraft. At a range of 230 miles north of Oahu, he launched the first wave of a two-wave attack.

Beginning at 0600 hours his first wave consisted of 183 fighters and torpedo bombers which struck at the fleet in Pearl Harbor and the airfields in Hickam, Kaneohe and Ewa.

The second strike, launched at 0715 hours, consisted of 167 aircraft, which again struck at the same targets.

At 0753 hours the first wave consisting of 40 Nakajima B5N2 'Kate' torpedo bombers, 51 Aichi D3A1 'Val' dive bombers, 50 high altitude bombers and 43 Zeros struck airfields and Pearl Harbor within the next hour, the second wave arrived and continued the attack.

Casualties

US Army:             218 KIA (killed in action),

                                364 WIA (wounded in action).

US Navy:               2,008 KIA, 710 WIA.

US MarineCorp:  109 KIA, 69 WIA.

Civilians:                68 KIA, 35 WIA.


TOTAL: 2,403 KIA, 1,178 WIA.

----------------------------

Battleships

USS Arizona (BB-39) - total loss when a bomb hit her magazine.

USS Oklahoma (BB-37) - Total loss when she capsized and sunk in the harbor.

USS California (BB-4 4) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.

USS West Virginia (BB-48) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.

USS Nevada - (BB-36) Beached to prevent sinking. Later repaired.

USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) - Light damage.

USS Maryland (BB-46) - Light damage.

USS Tennessee (BB-43) Light damage.

USS Utah (AG-16) - (former battleship used as a target) - Sunk.

----------------------------

Cruisers

USS New Orleans (CA-32) - Light Damage.

USS San Francisco (CA-38) - Light Damage.

USS Detroit (CL-8) - Light Damage.

USS Raleigh (CL-7) - Heavily damaged but repaired.

USS Helena (CL-50) - Light Damage.

USS Honolulu (CL-48) - Light Damage.

----------------------------

Destroyers

USS Downes (DD-375) - Destroyed. Parts salvaged.

USS Cassin - (DD -3 7 2) Destroyed. Parts salvaged.

USS Shaw (DD-373) - Very heavy damage.

USS Helm (DD-388) - Light Damage.

----------------------------

Minelayer

USS Ogala (CM-4) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.

----------------------------

Seaplane Tender

USS Curtiss (AV-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.

----------------------------

Repair Ship

USS Vestal (AR-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.

----------------------------

Harbor Tug

USS Sotoyomo (YT-9) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.

----------------------------

Aircraft

188 Aircraft destroyed (92 USN and 92 U.S. Army Air Corps.)

Chilling out with a Film – and the historical implications…

Well, Mum is on the road to recovery. What makes me say this? Simple. We walked around Solihull on Saturday (ok – I admit there were lots of little pauses) but she managed it. Ok – she didn’t drive – I did – but it’s an improvement.

Saturday night was a quiet one for me – no plans to head out on the town or anything daft like that – so I settled down with a film – The Great Escape with Steve McQueen as the “Cooler King”.

It’s the sort of film that got me thinking, and strangely enough, whilst I was coming into work this morning, I heard an interview with Andy Wiseman, who was a POW at Stalag Luft III.

I’ve pasted the article from the Radio 4 website, as I found the interview very thought provoking.

Karen


Now some things you hold on to - and some you just let go
Seems like the ones that you can't have
Are the ones that you want most

**********************************************

This week, a group, including relatives of the survivors and young RAF recruits, retrace the 1,000-mile march which followed the evacuation of the Great Escape camp, Stalag Luft III, and which resulted in the death of 200 POWs.


Andy Wiseman, a former POW at the camp and a veteran of the Long March, tells his extraordinary story.

I was born in Berlin in 1923, so that makes me 87. My father was Polish, my mother was American. They were both Jewish, so I'm Jewish too. I went to a German school. I saw the rise of Hitler, experienced my first anti-semitism and we left Germany in 1934 for Poland.

In August 1939 my father decided to send me to England. I volunteered for the Royal Air Force for flying duties, bombed a few targets in Europe and got shot down on 18 April 1944 over France. Bailed out, lost three members of my crew and walked through bits of France for a few days.

Then I was picked up by the Gestapo and ultimately finished up at the most famous of RAF camps in Germany, Luft III, the scene of the Great Escape.

There was no point in getting killed at five minutes to midnight
Andy Wiseman
The Great Escape had taken place about three weeks before I got into the camp. The camp was shocked by the murder of the 50 officers who had escaped and had been caught by the Germans.

Until then, escapes were a game. You escaped, you got caught, you came back, your friends waved and cheered you up. You went into solitary confinement, you came out, you got more cheers and you planned the next escape.

The Germans announced that, from then onwards, all escapees would be shot. And there was a great argument whether one should carry on escaping or not. But gradually the camp went back to normal.

One of the things that was quite good in the camp, we listened to the BBC, unofficially. It was read to each hut once a day, so we knew what was going on.


We knew that the Russians were approaching, getting nearer, and we argued with the German camp commandant that we wanted to stay in the camp and wait for the Russians to liberate us.

And then came 25 January 1945 when the German camp commandant announced we had two hours to leave the camp. It was one of the coldest nights of the year. Temperatures were between -22 and -25 centigrade. We had no boots, no gloves, no hats: we were dressed in whatever we had.

The experience of the long march varied tremendously. Some people had a very very very tough time, with dysentery, with frostbite with diphtheria. Others had not so bad a time.

I think march is the wrong word, its not the long march anyway, it's the long shuffle.

You just followed into the footsteps of the guy in front of you. You bowed your head because snow was falling, and somebody said, if you bow your head as you walk or shuffle, you'd be less affected by the wind coming at you.

You didn't talk because that was an effort. You concentrated on walking. You concentrated on putting your foot into the footmark in the snow of the person in front of you. You didn't think.

Obviously the most important person on the long march was you. You were also looking after the people who had become the nearest and dearest. So you helped.

You concentrated on putting your foot into the footmark in the snow of the person in front of you
Andy Wiseman
It became more and more difficult. People fainted, Germans threatened to shoot them if they didn't march, so you helped them. You helped them to the best of your ability.

Some German guards were reasonably nice, others were real bastards. Again, it depended.

As the march went on, day after day after day, night after night after night, the column got longer and longer and longer.

You lost some of your friends. You lost all your friends. And when you finished up in a school or a church or a glass factory, you spent some time walking around looking around to see whether there was anyone there you knew.

Sometimes slept in the open, sometimes in churches, sometimes in schools. It was totally disorganised.

German civilian reaction to us differed. There were some villages where people came out with water and bread and we gave them cigarettes. There were villages where people threw stones at us. They were varied and you never knew what going on.


The long march brought to the fore qualities that you never knew you had. If somebody had said to me you will go on a long march for days on end at temperatures of minus 25, I'd have said, "You're mad, I'm not going to do it."

When it came to it, you did it, because the alternative was death. And there was really no point in getting killed at five minutes to midnight.

My group were taken south of Berlin and there we were liberated by the Russians in April before Berlin had fallen. And there I had the time of my life because I think I was the only RAF officer who spoke Russian, so I became tremendously important. I argued with Soviet generals, spoke to Soviet officers. I was fully occupied.

The Russians kept us there for a month. Then we were taken by lorries to Torgau and from there to Brussels and flown from there in Lancasters to Britain.

I came back to England in May 45, I married within a few weeks. I had a fiancé that I refused to marry during the war because I thought I wouldn't survive it.

I joined the BBC fairly soon afterwards, which having been aircrew and having been prisoner of war helped no end, vis-à-vis the administrators who hadn't had the experience.

What the long march taught me, and I go on long marches with current RAF people, is that cometh the hour cometh the man. There is no such thing "I can't do it" there is no such thing "its impossible".

Have a go and you'd be amazed what you can do. If you see a barrier, don't turn around and pretend it isn't there, you've got to get over it or under it, there's no other way of living.

And you can learn more about the RAF's retracing of the Long March at http://www.raf.mod.uk/longmarch/

The History of the Middle Finger

Somethings are worth shareing - and this was one of them...

Karen

I've been watching, I've been waiting
In the shadows for my time


Well, now... Here's something I never knew before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my more intelligent friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified. Isn't history more fun when you know something about it?

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future.

This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as 'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew').

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew!

Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird.'




IT IS STILL AN APPROPRIATE SALUTE TO THE FRENCH TODAY!
And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing!

A visit to a city’s history

What a way to send a weekend! I spent time with someone who means an awful lot to me, and I was able to see and do things with someone who enjoys the same sort of things as I do – i.e. we’re both petrol heads!

It started on Saturday, meeting at our normal meeting point of Warwick services (ok – the services are closer to Gaydon, but that’s just local knowledge speaking!)

We had a coffee and our normal chat about the route, then headed into Coventry to the park and ride at the Memorial park, as parking in Coventry is horrendously expensive.

As the main point of interest didn’t open until 10am, I suggested that we visited the two cathedrals. No – I didn’t mistype that – Coventry has two cathedrals - the old cathedral (the one that the Germans bombed in 1940) and the new one, which was built next to the old cathedral in the 1960s.

The old cathedral still has remnants of the stained glass that decorated the windows, and is most noted for the so-called Cross of Nails:

The Cross of Nails – on the night of 14 November 1940, the city of Coventry was devastated during an air raid and its cathedral burned. Shortly afterwards three nails from the bombed roof timbers were taken and formed into the shape of a cross…

In places, the damage from the bombs can still be seen on the outer walls of the old cathedral, and I will admit, I’d never really taken much notice until my friend remarked on it.

The new cathedral however, is very different. The outside has a huge bronze sculpture of St Michael and the Devil, by Sir Jacob Epstein, and is quite an impressive sight.

But, I guess the thing that the cathedral is most famous for (apart from standing next to the bombed ruin of the old cathedral) is the huge tapestry – Christ in Glory. I seem to recall being told that this is one of the largest tapestries in the world…

Then, it was off to the main reason for my friend coming into the city – the Museum of Road Transport. The museum is a real mix of old, new and incredibly fast (it holds both the land speed record cars – Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC) and holds some incredibly rare and unusual cars.

There was one car that I was really keen on seeing – Thrust SSC. When it was brought back from America (after breaking the land speed record and the sound barrier) I wasn’t able to go to the parade that was held to celebrate its success, so seeing it in its new home in the museum was a real treat for me.

After seeing that, the rest of the museum seemed to be a little bit of a come-down, but the exhibits were quite interesting. They had a small section of motorcycles, which was quite interesting for me, as they had one of the original speedway bikes!

Sunday was a lazier day, as the pair of us headed to the National Motorcycle Museum at Bickenhill. This was the museum that my friend had been teasing me about acting as the guide for him, as he is passionate about his own bike.

However, that didn’t stop him falling for a 1930’s motorcycle. He said that it had nearly every feature that he takes for granted on his own bike.

My own personal favourite was (and still is) the 1969 Triumph Bonneville. Ok – I know all the arguments about it being unreliable, etc but it is still one of those bikes that I have a real soft spot for.

Guess I should call this quits – I’m supposed to be working, not blogging!

Back when I get the chance.

Karen

Learning to fly, but I don’t have wings