Rare Pictures From The Second World War: Part 1

American soldiers in action against the Japanese

HOW MANY AMERICAN SOLDIERS DIED DURING WW2?

There were approximately 302,000 U.S. military personnel killed in military action in WW II. This number includes about 9,000 merchant marine. This number does not include about 130,000 non-combat military deaths during WW II. 

The German defences in Normandy: The Atlantic wall

SOME INTERESTING FACTS

German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was absent from the action at the onset of the invasion. Why?

He was celebrating his wife's birthday in Germany. Because the weather in the English Channel appeared to be too severe to launch an invasion, Rommel felt it would be safe to leave the front for several days to see his wife. Although he was concluded to be complicit in the attempt on Hitler's life, and subsequently commited suicide with poison because of this, these events did not happen until later.

These German paratroopers landed at the wrong time

The German 240 mm gun trundles into Russia

Early days of the war in Russia. German troops in 1941

An inglorious end: This German general was killed in Arnhem

BATTLE OF ARNHEM VIDEO

German POWs stagger along in Russia. Very few of them made it back home.

FATE OF GERMAN POWS IN RUSSIA

Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. "In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay," wrote British military historian Max Arthur. "For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw."

Josef Stalin's regime was ill equipped to deal with prisoners: In 1943 as more enemy units fell into Soviet hands, death rates among POWs lingered around 60 percent. Roughly 570,000 German and Axis prisoners had already died in captivity. By March 1944, conditions began to improve, but for economic reasons: As its manpower was swallowed up in the war effort, the USSR turned to POWs as a surrogate work force. While POWs were not technically part of the gulag system, the lines were often blurred. Camps and detainment centers often comprised poorly constructed huts that offered scant protection from bitter Russian winter winds. The Soviet Union repatriated prisoners at irregular intervals, sometimes in large numbers. As late as 1953, however, at least 20,000 German POWs remained in Russia. After Stalin's death, those men were finally sent home.

Source: Historynet.com

German soldiers with a captured T-34 tank

THE T-34 TANK

The T34 tank was developed by the Russians both before and during World War Two. The T34 revolutionised the way tanks were designed and made. Close up in battle, the T34 proved to be more than a match for the powerful Tiger tank. The T34 combined developments from both America and, ironically, Germany. 

Historylearningsite

This Japanese officer surrenders. A rare picture. Japanese soldiers were very motivated and preferred to die fighting than surrender

Policemen in the Jewish ghettos. These men were policing their brethren for the Germans

THE JEWISH GHETTO POLICE

Jewish Ghetto Police also known as the Jewish Order Service and referred to by the Jews as the Jewish Police, were the auxiliary police units organized in the Jewish ghettos of Europe by local Judenrat councils under orders of occupying German Nazis.

Members of the Judendienstordnung did not have official uniforms, often wearing just an identifying armband, and were not allowed to carry firearms. They were used by the Germans primarily for securing the deportation of other Jews to the concentration camps.

The Jewish ghetto policemen were Jews who usually had little prior association  with the communities they oversaw (especially after the roundups and deportations to extermination camps began), and who could be relied upon to follow German orders.

The Polish-Jewish historian and the Warsaw Ghetto archivist Emanuel Ringelblum has described the cruelty of the ghetto police as "at times greater than that of the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Latvians."

Strange!

Wikipedia

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Rare Pictures From WW2: Part 2

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