News

WWII: Lessons

Did you know?

By Times Staff
Published August 28, 2005

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	[Times photo: Michael Rondou]
	This purple heart was awarded to 1st Sgt. Robert Lee Kennedy Jr., of Fort Green Springs. He was wounded in North Africa, participated in the invasion of Sicily and Normandy, and was wounded again in France.
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	Medals of honor No African-American soldier was awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II. In 1993 the Army contracted Shaw University in North Carolina to study whether there was a racial disparity in the way Medal of Honor recipients were selected. Shaw's team researched the issue and, finding that there was disparity, recommended 10 soldiers for the medal.

The immediate cost of the war was $381-billion. Only about 44 percent of the bill was paid by direct taxation. The national debt rose from $50-billion to $260-billion. It was not until 1970 that the original cost of the war was paid off.

Sixteen women received the Purple Heart. The Bronze Star was awarded to 565 women for meritorious service overseas. Nurses received 1,619 medals, citations and commendations during the war. Sixty-seven Army nurses and 16 Navy nurses spent three years as prisoners of the Japanese.

On Feb. 8, 1945, the U.S. Army announced that there are 359,258 POWs interned in the United States. These include 305,873 Germans, 50,561 Italians and 2,820 Japanese. In all, 666 POW camps were set up in the United States during the war.

A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

In 1942, the S.S. Normandie, a luxury cruise ship being renovated as a troop carrier in New York City, was gutted in a suspicious fire. Fearing more sabotage on the New York docks, the Navy turned to Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Even though he was in prison, Luciano still had a strong influence on New York's syndicated crime families. He was able to persuade the syndicate, whose membership included the dockworkers' union, to halt sabotage on the docks. In 1943, when the Allies planned to invade Sicily, Navy intelligence again sought Luciano's help. In exchange for his release, Luciano would convince the Sicilian Mafia to join with the Allied forces during the invasion.

A MISSION OF MERCY

In 1945, the war's most unusual ship - a barge, actually - was commissioned: the world's first floating ice cream parlor. The barge crew pumped out around 1,500 gallons every hour. The concrete-hulled vessel had no engine of its own but was towed around by tugs and other ships.

THE LIMPING LADY

The French Resistance called her la dame que boite, or the Limping Lady. The Germans called her "Artemis" and put her on the Gestapo's most-wanted list of Allied spies. She was Virginia Hall, a native of Baltimore hired as a clerk by the U.S. Diplomatic Corps in 1930. She worked in embassies in Italy, Estonia and Turkey. During a hunting accident in Turkey, she was shot in the left leg and had to be fitted with a wooden leg.

When the war began, she tried to become a Foreign Service Officer, but was turned down because of the leg. In 1941, she joined the British Special Operations Executive. Her first operation was in Vichy, France, where she established a spy network with the French underground and helped prisoners of war escape. When Germany invaded France, Hall escaped back to Britain and joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services.

In March 1944, Hall strapped her wooden leg on her side and parachuted back into occupied France. She set up communications with the Allies, organized Free French Resistance operations and coordinated the rescue and evacuation of downed Allied pilots.

For her achievements, Hall received the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945. After the war, she served in the CIA until her retirement in 1966. She died in Maryland in 1982.

AN ARYAN PAST IN TIBET?

In 1935, Adolf Hitler authorized the creation of the Ahnenerbe or Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage and charged it with researching Germanic runes and the origins of the swastika and locating the ancient source of the Aryan race. For a variety of reasons, Tibet was the most promising candidate. The Ahnenerbe sponsored an expedition to Tibet in 1938-39 by Ernst Schaffer, a German hunter and biologist. One of the members of the expedition was anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was responsible for racial research. While in Tibet and Sikkim on the way, Beger measured the skulls of 300 Tibetans and Sikkimese and examined some of their other physical features and bodily marks. He concluded that the Tibetans occupied an intermediary position between the Mongol and European races, with the European racial element showing itself most pronouncedly among the aristocracy.

[Last modified August 22, 2005, 10:49:04]

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