201 réponses à ce sujet

[DeathScepter]

To Eternal Phoenix, Thank you very much.

[Das Tentakel]

Ah, the "poor" Lieutenant must have been afraid of what would have happened if word spread that he killed Reichminister Herman Göring. Which is probably the only reason that Herman Göring was allowed to remain alive. He was probably allowed to escape after his identification was verified. If only more people shared the misfortune of sharing the names of prominent Nazi's during that time.

Well, Lieutenant Schatz was apparently so frustrated he seized people left and right afterwards and things looked pretty bad. Young Göring's boss, however, was able to get through to a higher-ranking officer, and as a result everyone was released.

But when it comes to names, somebody once looked up how many famous 'Nazi' surnames occur in the Netherlands (remember, the Netherlands have < 17 million people and is a fairly old nation-state; the USA has 300+ million and is a nation of immigrants).

The result (as of 2007): Hess: 460; Goebbels: 73 (however, the Gubbels / Gobbels variants of the surname are very, very common in the Dutch province of Limburg. Guess where Joseph's mom was from); Bormann: 34, Barbie: 22, Göring: 16 (descendants of lucky Herman?) and a handful of Eichmanns. Back in the day (World War II and immediately after) there were also some Himmlers and Hittlers (with two T's), but there are now none. It could be they emigrated or died out in the male line, but if not it's likely they found it prudent to change their names...

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

 
I like how you state your belief as the truth never-mind the fact that as DeathScepter pointed out, Hitler's "Christian beliefs" were back in the 20's when he needed political support still from the German people and the Catholic Church. He continued the ruse for a while until the Catholic Church realized what he was. Hitler soon gave up trying to win their support and began persecution. That's when the persecution of the Catholic Church begun in Germany and the establishment of a pagan religion known as the "German Faith Movement" more in line with Hitler's actual real religious beliefs:
 
http://www.leics.gov...master_plan.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.u...cas/1753469.stm
http://en.wikipedia....urch_in_Germany
 
That's not to mention what Hitler said about the Abrahamic religions in Hitler's Table Talk which were recorded from 1941 to 1944. It's clear that if he was Christian, by the forties, he certainly wasn't anymore.
 
I know you have an agenda but Hitler's motivations were racial superiority and the Nazi politics, spurred on by his belief in social Darwinism. Early quotes don't make a man a Christian, if so, Charles Darwin was still one.

@DeathScepter

His name is Joseph Goebbels. He was the master of Nazi propaganda and yeah, he was strongly anti-Christian.

true I could be wrong but I simply pointed out the history.

 

The Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 is the shortest war on record lasting an exhausting 38 minutes.

 

In 16th-century Canada, women drank a potion with beaver testicles ground into it as a form of contraception.

[Dermain]

true I could be wrong but I simply pointed out the history.

 

The Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 is the shortest war on record lasting an exhausting 38 minutes.

 

In 16th-century Canada, women drank a potion with beaver testicles ground into it as a form of contraception.

 

Well, at least snake oil merchants have remained the same throughout the centuries... 

 

As for the Anglo-Zanzibar war, I never heard of that in any of my history classes around thattime. This makes me sad.

 

The only "fast" war I was taught was the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. 

[metatheurgist]

In 16th-century Canada, women drank a potion with beaver testicles ground into it as a form of contraception.

Yeah, we're not doing much better today. But it's off topic since it's not history.

[Aimi]

Malta is an island that has sometimes played a very bizarre role in European high politics.

It used to belong to the Sicilian crown after the Hauteville Norman dynasty conquered it from the 'Moors' in the eleventh century; it stayed with Sicily after that kingdom passed under Aragonese control, and when Charles V became the ruler of all the vast Habsburg domains in the early sixteenth century it came under his possession.

As Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry in the Mediterranean began to heat up, Malta played an increasingly critical role as a military base and defensive bastion. Ottoman fleets led by 'Aruj and Khair ad-Din "Barbarossa" dueled with the Spanish over modern Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Malta itself; Habsburg forces responded with their own piracy, and for a time Charles even conquered Tunis and Tripoli.

At the other end of the Mediterranean, the Ottomans did battle with the various Italian maritime republics, Crusader states, and knightly orders. The Knights of St. John - the Hospitaller Order - ruled the Greek island of Rhodes along with several bases on the mainland of Turkey at that time. But where the Habsburgs in the west were more or less able to stalemate Ottoman forces, the Ottomans had the better of it in the east, slowly eradicating most of the Christian holdouts. In 1522, they besieged Rhodes with overwhelming force and compelled the Hospitallers to retreat to Sicily after what was by all accounts a heroic defense.

In 1530, Charles hit upon the idea of letting the Knights Hospitaller help him out in the war in the western Med. He gave them a lease on Malta in perpetuity, the sole price of which was a yearly tribute of a single Maltese falcon (hence the Sam Spade story's name; it concerns a statuette of such a falcon). The Knights also got Tripoli, because why not. They successfully defended the island for centuries, including an epic siege in 1565 by yet another overwhelmingly large Ottoman force. Hospitaller ships and troops continued to fight pirates - and do a great deal of piracy of their own - for the next two hundred years.

The Knights were mostly French; one of the Grand Masters, Jean Parisot de Valette, gave his name to the modern capital of Valletta. Native Maltese spoke an entirely different language, were kept out of the government of the island, and reportedly didn't much like the Knights' foreign imposition. They also didn't get to share in the loot that the Hospitallers collected from all of the "Turkish" merchants they regularly boarded.

While ruling Malta, the Hospitallers embarked on some frankly odd foreign policy projects as well. One member of the Order was made the French governor of St. Kitts in the Caribbean in the 1630s, and made the island a de facto Hospitaller possession; the Knights gained three other islands over the next few decades (St. Croix, St. Barthélemy, and St. Martin) to create their own American mini-empire. Like most of the random attempts at empire in the seventeenth-century New World, it fizzled out quickly, and the Knights sold off their possessions to the French West India Company in the 1660s. Still, it's pretty amusing to think that the Americans now own one island that used to belong to a crusading order of knights.

The Knights' rule of Malta ended rather abruptly in 1798. Napoléon Bonaparte was launching his expedition to Egypt and required the use of an anchorage, and Malta was the most convenient waystation. The Grand Master tried to limit the French to only two ships in Malta at a time; Bonaparte presumably rolled his eyes and ordered a cannonade. His troops landed and smashed the defenses that had once held up to Ottoman forces, and the Knights surrendered. As the French established firm control of the island, the Hospitallers fled to Europe, and Napoléon continued on his merry way toward North Africa.

In Europe, most Knights were welcomed in at, of all places, the Russian imperial court in St. Petersburg. Tsar Pavel I was...eccentric, and had some esoteric interests, but also genuinely appears to have been interested in the Knights' "plight". In exchange for shelter, the (Catholic) Hospitallers in St. Petersburg illegally elected the (Orthodox) tsar as Grand Master of the Order, a decision that became unchallenged when the previous Grand Master resigned. Pavel opened up the Order to all Christians and gave the Knights large estates in Russia to replace the ones they had lost in France during the Revolution there.

He also seems to have taken his position as Grand Master very seriously. In 1799, he joined the War of the Second Coalition against France, with Napoléon's invasion of Malta as the casus belli; he even sent Aleksandr Suvorov, his best general, marching into Italy with a whole field army to support his Habsburg allies. Pavel's decision probably wasn't solely motivated by his supposed stewardship of Malta; he was also concerned about French activity in Central Europe and about Napoléon's war on the Ottoman Empire (another partner in the new coalition). But it's still remarkable to think of Russia going to war with France because the tsar was the illegal head of the Maltese Knights.

The mercurial tsar had one last Malta-related card to play, naturally. It was British seapower and Maltese native revolutionaries that liberated Malta from the French in 1800, not Russian forces. (Pavel had also sent Suvorov's army home earlier that year because of a falling-out with the Austrians, and so when Napoléon, having returned to Europe, crossed the Alps to take on Austria's Italian army, the Austrians fought alone and suffered a narrow defeat at Marengo.) The tsar had expected the British to return the island to the Order, but London wanted its own Mediterranean naval base and took the island for itself. So Pavel, without actually making peace with Bonaparte, tried to change sides in the war. He reconstituted the League of Armed Neutrality from the American revolutionary war, to make Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia into a stick with which to hit British interests in northern Europe. Nelson's fleet famously scuttled that effort by annihilating the Danish navy off Copenhagen despite the fact that the League wasn't actually at war with Britain (yet). Then Pavel started scraping together an expeditionary force of Cossacks that would cross Central Asia and Afghanistan to invade British possessions in India. This was, apparently, the last straw for Russia's nobles, and he was assassinated in 1801, after which Russia backed out of both its conflicts with France and with Britain.

Many observers have remarked on how ridiculous it is that a world war erupted over comparatively irrelevant Serbia in 1914. But in 1798-1801, an even stranger world war was fought, with tiny Malta playing a starring role.

[TheChosenOne]

This is quick read with cites. Beware nude art on the site.

 

 

http://www.heritaged...-evidence/92015

 

I really like the article and the way it defines the concept of beauty as something beyond what modern society's eyes can see. Cleopatra could be an important lesson for our modern fixation on the purely physical.

[TheChosenOne]

I don't know a lot of "weird" history ( I tend to stick with events and people that change the world,for better or for worse ) But I do know a lot of funny Star Wars facts! Here are some of them!

 

- Harrison Ford was paid only $10,000 for his performance in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

-Yoda was originally going to played by a monkey carrying a cane and wearing a mask.

-The word “ewok” is never said out loud in the Star Wars movies.

-The bounty hunter droid IG-88 was actually built from recycled film props. His head is the drink dispenser from the cantina scene in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

After all the Conquests Khosrau II of Sassanid Persia had (in Syria, Levant and Egypt) thanks to power and greatness based on strong economy and military, he lost all those lands and half the army and made some border cities razed by Byzantines in the second phase of war. Left the Empire weak and chaotic, against the invasion of Muslims.

[BioWareM0d13]

 

An interestintg coincidence...

 

A photographer captured the funeral procession for Abraham Lincoln as it makes its way through the streets of New York. What that photographer didn't know at that time was that Lincoln wouldn't be the photograph's only link to the presidential history.  In the 2nd floor window of the house on the left, two boys are seen watching the events. The house belonged to a man named Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt, and the two boys were his grandchildren. One of them, Theodore, would go on to become the 26th President of the United States.

[mybudgee]

I don't know a lot of "weird" history ( I tend to stick with events and people that change the world,for better or for worse ) But I do know a lot of funny Star Wars facts! Here are some of them!

 

- Harrison Ford was paid only $10,000 for his performance in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

-Yoda was originally going to played by a monkey carrying a cane and wearing a mask.

-The word “ewok” is never said out loud in the Star Wars movies.

-The bounty hunter droid IG-88 was actually built from recycled film props. His head is the drink dispenser from the cantina scene in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

 

Even though this belongs in the Star Wars 7 thread, I'll contribute:

 

- The Island nation of Nuie in the south pacific accepts Star Wars ltd. edition coins as legal tender

- John Ratzenberger (Cliff of "Cheers") has a cameo as a rebel officer in Ep. 5

- Three "E.T.s" can be seen for a moment in Ep. 1

- Leia was NOT originally meant to be Luke's twin sister (that kiss) 

- The original hologram scene between Vader & Darth Sidious/Palpatine did NOT feature Ian McDiarmid, but a composite of Rick Baker's wife and a Chimpanzee. The voice was that of the great Clive Revill (Fitting, since his name has "EVIL" in it twice!)

- Han Solo is the only Non-force sensitive character to use a Lightsaber (Taun-taun dissection)

- Yoda is the only "good" character to throw an activated Lightsaber

- The guy with the Hookah-type pipe in the Cantina scene is an Anzati, an alien species with a proboscis used to suck cerebral fluid from their victims (space Vampire)

- Chewbacca is the only character to use a projectile weapon; his bowcaster (this is why he carries ammo on a bandolier)

- Despite his 3rd cousin being on the Jedi Council in ep. 1, Yoda's species has yet to be revealed...

[BioWareM0d13]

[Dermain]

Since it was slightly mentioned in the Weapons thread. I decided to mention a trio of eccentric weapons devised to be used in WWII.

 

The first is known as Project Pigeon: 

 

During WW2 psychological behaviorist B.F. Skinner's proposed a missile guidance system. The system relied on three different pigeons pecking at certain parts of a screen (generally the center) in order to keep a missile on course. The pigeons had been trained with operant conditioning (also referred to as Skinnarian conditioning) with positive reinforcement (a food pellet) to peck at certain parts of the screen. While initial testing went well, Skinner's plan was met with skepticism and was ultimately scrapped.  And so ends one of the times where a psychologist suggests a way to kill people...

 

The second was known as the bat bomb:

 

The bat bomb was devised by Dr. Lytle S. Adams, DDS. Dr. Adams also had the benefit of being friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, and that's likely how this idea got approval. The idea, was that bats would be fitted with napalm charges and dropped over Japanese cities, particularly industrial areas dedicated to wartime production. The bats would then seek shelter in the awnings of the buildings, and sometime during the daytime the bombs would be set off. The belief was that thousands of fires would be able to be set if about ten bombers were able to deliver their package, which was considerably higher than if they used traditional napalm bomb. In 1944, more tests were considered for the bat bomb, but it was eventually cancelled as it was believed they would not be ready until late 1945. This unfortunately coincides with when the atomic bombs were ready, and instead of fire bombing Japan, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs. Dr. Adams would continue to maintain that his plan was far superior to the atomic bombs because fewer people would have died.

 

The third was a tactic used by the Russians to counter tanks:

 

The anti-tank dog. Which is thankfully self-explanatory...Besides some accounts during battles near Stalingrad and the battle of Kursk there is little evidence that the anti-tank dog was successful. 

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

^ Actualy according to reports the dogs were traind useing russian tanks.. and knew to fun under there own tanks. 

so the project was scrapped.

 

Dureing WW2 there were plans to build the worlds bigest aircraft carrier.. out of ice.. well ice whith wood chips in it.

this is pikecreat it is heat resistant and almost bomb proof. pluss literaly unsinkable due to being ice.

[Das Tentakel]

Pieter Erberveld (alternatively Erbervelt or Elberfeld) was a man of mixed heritage (the son of a father from Westphalia - now in Germany - and a mother from Siam, now Thailand) in Batavia - modern Jakarta - who was arrested in 1721 on suspicion of being heavily involved in a native conspiracy to rise up and murder all Europeans.
 
What followed was his torture, judgment and subsequent disembowelling, beheading and quartering. So far, so good (regardless of whether he was truly guilty or not, later generations either made him into an early Indonesian resistance hero or have suggested he was innocent). His treatment was pretty much how this kind of treason was dealt with back in Europe, so strictly speaking the good man couldn't complain.
 
However, it was decided to make of him a permanent example (though not without precedent in Europe). His house was demolished and it was permanently forbidden to build on this parcel of land. The area was surrounded by a schandmuur ('shaming wall') and a monument was added,  featuring a representation of poor mynheer Eberveld's skull impaled on a spike, as well as an inscription vilifying his memory.
 
We Dutch do tend to bear grudges for a long time. The monument stayed in place until 1942. It was only during the Japanese occupation that the monument was demolished.
Here's a picture of the monument:
 

 
The Japanese were trying to use their demolition as a piece of propaganda aimed at the native population:
 

There was a notice which urgently requested participation of people from each military unit in the “Jacatra Head” removal ceremony. Since I had an active curiosity, three of us decided to go to see it after receiving permission from the head of our unit.
The Dutch kept the severed head on the top of the wall to teach Indonesians the consequences of insurgency against colonial policy. It was the famous “Jacatra Head.” It was a symbolic figure of Dutch colonial policy and would be removed by the hand of the Japanese military.

Hundreds of residents and soldiers thronged to see the real skull inside of the monument. The commander of a military unit raised a hammer against it. Then The plaster was destroyed and scattered on the cobblestones just below the monument. I rushed to the place to see it, yet there was no skull, though it was supposed to have been inside. I was deeply disappointed to know that it was a fake figure, artificially created by the Dutch. The Indonesian Spectators were surprised on seeing it, and all laughed at it.

(Taketomi Tomeo, a Japanese NCO who witnessed the event)

Erberveld´s fate seems to have had a kind of twisted tail. With Erberveld many natives (including his own slaves and servants) were arrested, tortured and executed, and for a while there seems to have been a spirit of paranoia in the colony regarding native conspiracies and any involvement by (part-)Europeans. One of the notables present was a certain Peter Vuyst, a man of good family and one of the colony's Councillors. Later that year he became Governor of the Dutch holdings in Bengal, and in 1726 he was appointed Governor of Ceylon.
 
There, Vuyst appears to have become totally bonkers and paranoid. He began to see conspiracies everywhere, and he dealt with them according to the example he had witnessed in Batavia in 1722 (some scholars have suggested a direct link in Vuyst's unstable mind). Feeling that he was surrounded by traitors who wanted to hand over the colony to the Portuguese, he arrested, tortured and executed numerous people, including quite a few Dutch colonists, officials and soldiers.
A contemporary Dutch record lists four executions ordered by Vuyst involving 19 Europeans. A poor lieutenant by name of Andries Swarts was broken on the wheel, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered; a bunch of soldiers were luckier, and were merely hanged. A few got the middle treatment, and were just broken on the wheel and left to rot. As with Erberveld's home, the houses of the executed were demolished and ' shaming'  monuments put in place.
 
Erberveld may have been either guilty or just plain unlucky. Vuyst, however, was clearly bonkers (for instance, it appears he actively participated in the tortures). In the end, he was dismissed and recalled to Batavia in 1729, followed by his trial and execution. The remains of his victims (in so far they could be recovered) were dug up and given proper burial after the Governor's fall. The shaming monuments were demolished.
 
Vuyst himself suffered that relatively rare fate, the execution of a former colonial governor. After a long legal procedure, he was taken from Batavia's city hall on July 3, 1732, in the very early morning at four o' clock. At eight, he was seated in a wooden chair and his head cleaved off with a sword (we're talking good German-Dutch practice here, none of that amateurish ' three-chops-oops, that took long sorry old chap / madam'  axe-wielding English stuff). After that, the fun stuff started with his body being moved to wooden bench were it was disembowelled, quartered etc. At least Vuyst was treated leniently, as poor Erberveld and Lieutenant Swarts had the misfortune of these things happening to them before the decapitation bit.
Afterwards, Vuyst's remains (and the chair and bench) were burned and thrown into the sea, ' tot een eeuwige Memorie, opdat er niets van overig zoude blyven', (very loosely translated: so that it would be forever remembered that there was nothing of him left').
Thus perished '...den Edele Heer Petrus Vuyst, Gouverneur te Ceylon geëxecuteert als een Landverrader, en Tyrannig Moordenaar toekomt'  (...the noble Lord Petrus Vuyst, Governor of Ceylon, executed as befits somebody who committed high treason and was a tyrannical murderer'.
 
No monument for him though. Erberveld, a relative nobody, was rewarded for his being chopped to bits by the colonial authorities by being elevated to hero by Indonesian nationalists, Vuyst, the fallen Governor who was chopped to bits in the same place 10 years later and who may have been ' inspired'  by Erberveld's trial and execution, entered history as a kind of barely-remembered proto-Kurtz.

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

dureing WW2 Ittalian propoganda claimed that bombing raids on Scottland were so effective that the Loch Ness monster was killed by a direct hit.

[Nattfare]

dureing WW2 Ittalian propoganda claimed that bombing raids on Scottland were so effective that the Loch Ness monster was killed by a direct hit.

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

Eees not a dead chicken.

Ironicaly the BBC show Allo Allo lasted longer than the war it was set in.

[Dermain]

Eees not a dead chicken.

Ironicaly the BBC show Allo Allo lasted longer than the war it was set in.

 

Similarly, the television show M*A*S*H also lasted longer during the war it was set in. The show was set during the Korean War. The show lasted eleven seasons while the war only lasted three.

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

Napoleon was attacked by bunnies.

History tells us that Napoleon’s most upsetting defeat came at Waterloo. Or it may have occurred eight years earlier, after the French emperor was attacked by a relentless horde of rabbits.

There are a couple versions of this story. Most agree it happened in July 1807, after Napoleon signed the Treaties of Tilsit (which ended the war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia). Looking to celebrate, the emperor proposed a rabbit hunt, asking Chief of Staff Alexandre Berthier to make it happen.

Berthier arranged an outdoor luncheon, invited some of the military’s biggest brass, and collected a colony of rabbits. Some say Berthier took in hundreds of bunnies, while others claim he collected as many as 3000. Regardless, there were a lot of rabbits, and Berthier’s men caged them all along the fringes of a grassy field. When Napoleon started to prowl—accompanied by beaters and gun-bearers—the rabbits were released from their cages. The hunt was on.

But something strange happened. The rabbits didn’t scurry in fright. Instead, they bounded toward Napoleon and his men. Hundreds of fuzzy bunnies gunned it for the world’s most powerful man.

Napoleon’s party had a good laugh at first. But as the onslaught continued, their concern grew. The sea of long-ears was storming Napoleon quicker than revolutionaries had stormed the Bastille. The rabbits allegedly swarmed the emperor’s legs and started climbing up his jacket. Napoleon tried shooing them with his riding crop, as his men grabbed sticks and tried chasing them. The coachmen cracked their bullwhips to scare the siege. But it kept coming.

Napoleon retreated, fleeing to his carriage. But it didn’t stop. According to historian David Chandler, “with a finer understanding of Napoleonic strategy than most of his generals, the rabbit horde divided into two wings and poured around the flanks of the party and headed for the imperial coach.” The flood of bunnies continued—some reportedly leapt into the carriage.

The attack ceased only as the coach rolled away. The man who was dominating Europe was no match for a battle with bunnies.

It was Berthier’s fault. Rather than trapping wild hares, his men had bought tame rabbits from local farmers. As a result, the rabbits didn’t see Napoleon as a fearsome hunter. They saw him as a waiter bringing out the day’s food. To them, the emperor was effectively a giant head of lettuce.

[Das Tentakel]

Napoleon was attacked by bunnies.
 

Well...
 

[BioWareM0d13]

World War Two's Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together

 

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II. Andrew Roberts on a story so wild that it has to be made into a movie.

 

The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?

 

The rest of the article

 

 

From Wikipedia:

 

 

 

The commander of the prison, Sebastian Wimmer, fled on May 4, 1945, after the suicide of Eduard Weiter, the last commander of Dachau. The SS-Totenkopfverbände guards departed the castle soon after. The prisoners took control of the castle and armed themselves with the weaponry that remained.

 

Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav communist resistance member imprisoned in Itter,  left the facility in search of Allied assistance two days prior to Wimmer's departure. Čučković encountered the American 103rd Infantry Division near Innsbruck and informed them of the castle's prisoners. Major Josef Gangl, commanding a unit of Wehrmacht soldiers, and who had collaborated with Austrian resistance in the closing days of the war, had intended to free the castle prisoners, but decided instead to surrender to the Americans.

 

A rescue of the Itter VIPs was planned. Lieutenant Lee volunteered to lead the rescue mission, and was accompanied by Gangl's soldiers. Lee's forces now consisted of fourteen American soldiers, two Sherman tanks, a Volkswagen Kübelwagen and a truck carrying ten German soldiers. En route, the small column left one of their Shermans behind to guard a bridge. Four miles from the castle, they defeated a party of SS troops that had been attempting to set up a roadblock.

 

The French prisoners greeted the rescuing force when it arrived at the castle, but were disappointed at its small size. Lee placed the men under his command in defensive positions around the castle, and placed his Sherman tank, named "Besotten Jenny", at the main entrance. They were soon joined by an SS officer, Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, who was staying in the village of Itter while convalescing from wounds.

 

A small force of Waffen-SS began their attack on the castle soon afterwards, on the morning of May 5. Before the main assault began, Gangl was able to phone Alois Mayr, the Austrian resistance leader in Itter and request reinforcements; two more German soldiers under his command as well as Austrian resistance member Hans Waltl quickly drove to the castle. The Sherman tank provided machine-gun fire support until it was destroyed by German fire; its crew escaped without injury.

 

Lee had ordered the French prisoners to hide, but they remained outside, and fought alongside the American and Wehrmacht soldiers. After six hours of fighting, a relief force from the American 142nd Infantry Regiment arrived and the SS were defeated.

 

The Battle for Castle Itter (Wikipedia)

[Katiefrost]

Ancient Roman households sometimes hung wind chimes of a phallic nature to ward off the evil eye.
http://www.britishmu...wind_chime.aspx

[Decepticon Leader Sully]

The first American to hear about the death in Stalin was Johnny Cash who was a Radio operator at the time.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

The first American to hear about the death in Stalin was Johnny Cash who was a Radio operator at the time.

 

Two/Three years before both Johnny Cash and Elvis start their musical career?