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Request for Identication - Crashed Plane 1945 I need the following answers : (Body) German or British ? (Plane) German or British ? I have studied the photos for more than an hour and I am still wondering because the Cockpit looks like an AAF P-38's...

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Marty & Cindy : Unpublished Photos 17th A/B 1945 Another Wartime photos set and like the one before it's a really good one. Joe Summers Pontoon bridge over the Rhine River. Note signs : (left) seems to be a "one way - Red Ball Express",...

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Marty & Cindy : Unpublished Photos 17th A/B 1945 And here is the next set Wartime photos of the 17th Airborne Division. My Dad took a photo of the same concrete bunker from a distance. It had a Russian star on top of it when he took the photo....

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Marty & Cindy : Unpublished Photos 17th A/B 1945 Well, these new photos are fields photos and request from me some researches. This is exactly what I like to do, so it will take a little more time as usual to be posted. And once again thanks to Cindy...

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Marty & Cindy : Unpublished Photos 17th A/B 1945 Bombed out bridge along the Rhine River with a pontoon bridge in the background. This was taken near Duisburg, Germany or near the Krupps plant that the 17th guarded after the war ended. Kenny Cavanah...

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US Strategic Bombing Surveys Pacific (5)

Category : Army Air Forces, Strategic Bombing

USAAF

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report, Pacific

WASHINGTON DC 1 JULY 1946
FOREWORD
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was established by the Secretary of War on 3 November 1944, pursuant to a directive from the late President Roosevelt. It was established for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attacks on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense.
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Kay Summersby – Ike Was my Boss (12)

Category : Archive Stories, Kay Summersby

The rest of that day is history. Personally, I spent it praying for the invaders … and, like the rest of his official family, aching with sympathy for our apprehensive Boss.
Gen Eisenhower stood the appalling strain for another day. Then, in the early morning of June 7 it was 0720-H, just twenty-six hours after H-Hour he left for Normandy’s beaches. I fled to the lonely comfort of our trailer-headquarters. Working on the General’s “fan mail” never seemed so difficult, so unimportant; but it helped smother worries.
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Kay Summersby – Ike Was my Boss (11)

Category : Archive Stories, Kay Summersby

Suddenly the plane shot upward, roaring away from the airfield. We all smashed back against our seats. Maybe the wheels won’t come down, someone said in a small voice. Snuffy Nixon, the navigator, stuck his head in the cabin and broke the silence. Don’t worry, folks. I just got mixed up in my figuring and picked the wrong country. Not France ! we cried. No, said Snuffy, it’s not France. But it’s not England, either. He grinned over at me. This is Kay’s home. We almost landed in southern Ireland !
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Kay Summersby – Ike Was my Boss (10)

Category : Archive Stories, Kay Summersby

Returning from Cairo to Algiers, I began digging away at the minor mountain of paper accumulated on my desk. Memories of Egypt and Palestine faded completely as I worked late each night to reduce those piles of the General’s fan mail. Like everyone else at headquarters, however, I was still busier on unofficial duties… working overtime on the old rumor that Gen Marshall, not Gen Ike, would head the new American Expeditionary Force building in Britain, and that Ike would go to Washington to become Chief of Staff.
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WW-2 Conferences, Yalta February 1945

Category : War Conferences

YALTA (CRIMEA) CONFERENCE
February, 1945

Washington, March 24 – The text of the agreements reached at the Crimea (Yalta) Conference between President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Generalissimo Stalin, as released by the State Department today, follows :

PROTOCOL OF PROCEEDINGS OF CRIMEA CONFERENCE

The Crimea Conference of the heads of the Governments of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which took place from Feb. 4 to 11, came to the following conclusions :

I. WORLD ORGANIZATION

It was decided :

1. That a United Nations conference on the proposed world organization should be summoned for Wednesday, 25 April, 1945, and should be held in the United States of America.

2. The nations to be invited to this conference should be :

- (a) the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb., 1945;
- (b) Such of the Associated Nations as have declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945. (For this purpose, by the term “Associated Nations” was meant the eight Associated Nations and Turkey.) When the conference on world organization is held, the delegates of the United Kingdom and United State of America will support a proposal to admit to original membership two Soviet Socialist Republics, i.e., the Ukraine and White Russia
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WW-2 Conferences, Moscow Oct 1943

Category : War Conferences

JOINT FOUR-NATION DECLARATION

The governments of the United States of America, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China;

- United in their determination, in accordance with the declaration by the United Nations of January, 1942, and subsequent declarations, to continue hostilities against those Axis powers with which they respectively are at war until such powers have laid down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender;
- Conscious of their responsibility to secure the liberation of themselves and the peoples allied with them from the menace of aggression;
- Recognizing the necessity of insuring a rapid and orderly transition from war to peace and of establishing and maintaining international peace and security with the least diversion of the world’s human and economic resources for armaments;
Jointly declare :

  • 1. That their united action, pledged for the prosecution of the war against their respective enemies, will be continued for the organization and maintenance of peace and security.
  • 2. That those of them at war with a common enemy will act together in all matters relating to the surrender and disarmament of that enemy.
  • 3. That they will take all measures deemed by them to be necessary to provide against any violation of the terms imposed upon the enemy.
  • 4. That they recognize the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.
  • 5. That for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security pending the re-establishment of law and order and the inauguration of a system of general security they will consult with one another and as occasion requires with other members of the United Nations, with a view to joint action on behalf of the community of nations.
  • 6. That after the termination of hostilities they will not employ their military forces within the territories of other states except for the purposes envisaged in this declaration and after joint consultation.
  • 7. That they will confer and cooperate with one another and with other members of the United Nations to bring about a practicable general agreement with respect to the regulation of armaments in the post-war period.

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OSS – Nazi Capitulation in North Italy

Category : Italy, Northern Part

kriegsgefangeneMemoranda for the President : Sunrise
OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Intelligence cables covering the capitulation of the Nazi armies in northern Italy.
Among the William J. Donovan papers are five volumes entitled OSS Reports to the White House containing carbons of memorandum predominantly transmitting or paraphrasing intelligence reports for the President’s personal attention. They are characteristically introduced by a note to the President’s secretary, Miss Grace Tully :
“Dear Grace : Will you please hand the attached memorandum to the President ? I believe it will be of interest to him”.
They begin in modest quantity, the first volume covering a full two years and including some administrative matters such as requests for draft deferment; but those for the nine months beginning with July 1944 occupy three volumes, almost exclusively intelligence.
After President Roosevelt’s death and the end of the war in Europe they taper off in the fifth volume-bound, curiously, in reverse chronology-and again include non substantive material, particularly concerning the formation of a peacetime central intelligence agency.
The reports are for the most part not the finished intelligence that the President might now be expected to examine personally. They do include summaries of some Research and Analysis Branch estimates-of the age distribution of German casualties, for example, or the Soviet Union’s population in 1970 – but the bulk of them are unedited reporting from individual case officers on subjects of particular importance or of particular interest to President Roosevelt. For the historian this minute but choice fraction of the total of OSS raw reporting constitutes a pre-selected documentary source of considerable value.
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Wild Bill Donovan (OSS-NKVD)

Category : OSS & SOE

William J. Donovan’s voluminous memoranda to President Roosevelt (1) include half a dozen concerning collaboration between the US and Soviet intelligence services, and these are supplemented by a few addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one recording a conversation in the NKVD offices in Moscow.
Originally proposed as an exchange of representatives to each other’s headquarters, this liaison was reduced by political considerations to communication between heads of services through Gen J. R. Deane, chief of the US Military Mission in Moscow.
The documents are reproduced below.
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Kay Summersby – Ike Was my Boss (3)

Category : Archive Stories, Kay Summersby

Inevitably, I had heard of the impending North African invasion. Talk in the back seat of my staff car was more Top Secret than anything on paper. In general, I knew about as much about Torch Operation as most senior commanders in the early autumn of 1942. One month before the birthday party I had taken Gen Eisenhower out to Telegraph Cottage in a hurry. For once he seemed preoccupied. He obviously didn’t want to talk; I had long made it a habit not to ask questions, ever. As we sped through Kensington he mumbled something about ‘big doings for a colonel’. The rest of the ride was in heavy silence. But Generals, three-star Generals don’t usually get excited over colonels. I knew something big was up. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, the General said as he got out at the cottage.
Mickey will look after you.
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Kay Summersby – Ike Was my Boss (2)

Category : Archive Stories, Kay Summersby

Within a fortnight I was driving a new general, Carl (Tooey) Spaatz. The now-famous and retired Tooey Spaatz was, in early 1942, a grimly silent major general. As chief of the new Eighth Air Force, he had a gigantic job. And he spent every waking moment pondering over problems involved in the daring principle of daylight bombing. A rather unspectacular, balding man who would hardly stand out in a crowd, he called to mind that pensive statue : The Thinker. He concentrated so intensively that I often thought he was asleep. Naturally, he had no time for the ordinary little details of everyday life. He was, in fact, coldly impatient with them. That’s how I came to drive for General Spaatz. His temper had finally boiled over because his sergeant was late again in arriving at a conference. The Yank chauffeur was naturally bewildered like many other Americans by the maze of tangled little streets which history had forced upon London. When the General heard of my MTC experience, he requested that I be loaned out to his headquarters immediately.
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