Boy, do you know your WWII history. Nice reading your comments. Didn't know the bit about that GI with the Morse Code.
Most people don't realize what a risky operation D-Day was. A lot of things could have gone wrong, i.e, Hitler moving his Panzer division (forgot the #) to where the landings were happening.
Can you imagine keeping secret the breaking of the German and Japanese secret codes today? We'd have lost the damn war.
Another thing most Americans never knew was that Germany was getting uncomfortably close to developing the atom bomb,...I've read contradictory accounts of how close they were.
A number of years ago, I remember reading that 50-60 million people died in WWII, a stunning figure. Half of them were Russian. I'm not a big reader otherwise I would know more. Get most of my information via the History Channel, which in a couple of interviews had an old German soldier remembering how they were advancing on Stalingrad, and he realized how determined the Russians were when he saw one still firing a fixed machine gun. Both of his legs were gone from being shot off. Another one was 3 Russian soldiers firing from a position, in below freezing, and they froze in the firing position they were in.
My uncle was at Bastogne. He was a draftee, and never made much of serving- pretty even keel guy. Told me that he remembered lying pinned down in a field for a day or so, and eating a turnip that happened to be near him. His squad was taken prisoner at one point. The Germans loaded them on to the back of an open air truck, but it was so cold out, they didn't post a guard on the back of the truck; they rolled off the truck one by one. He and his squad were sleeping in a fox hole. They had a 'goofy' guy posted as a guard. A German soldier dressed in an American officers uniform got past this guard without the pass word. The guys slept with their rifles between their legs, pointed up and angled out. The German was just raising his machine gun to take out the whole foxhole, and the guy next to my uncle woke up, fired his rifle from the position it was in, and struck the German right under his chin. My uncle said, "The rest of the Germans started to storm the foxhole, but it was real easy to pick them off as they did."
Charles
