Revealed after 70 years: Dambusters legend was shot down by BRITISH airman.

Pocket Battleships were a term to describe larger warships that were listed as light enough to qualify for the requirements under Versailles treaty. Of course, they exceeded the requirements. Bismarck was created after Germany officially tore up the treaty.

May they rest in peace. But it is a little strange that the article describes this as “one of the worst naval disasters of the second world war”. Numerous other ships went down with far more casualties.

all the best NATO military testing facilities

Canada should get an award for that. Most important thing ever!

Thanks!

That’s a remarkable story.

I suppose the British wanted to avoid even the slightest risk of compromising Irish neutrality - so if the Irish put someone in a camp and the British acknowledge their status as a neutral and non-belligerent country, then it follows that they would honor the laws and regulations of that country and return the escapee. But I don’t think they would have followed the same reasoning if Mr Wolfe would have been a British subject.

War creates a thousand heroes a day and almost no one ever hears about them. Vernon Buss  of Portland is a hero of the unsung variety, but he never cared about recognition or notice for his actions that day on Samar.

But Irving Saunders  did – and long ago, Buss realized that Saunders was “a stubborn man” and it was pointless to deter him.

At last, the stubbornness paid off. All Buss had to do was show up Tuesday morning at a state office building and accept the thanks of a grateful nation . . . and of a grateful Saunders.

It would not be far wrong to say that Saunders, 87, has thought about Buss, 84, almost daily since Jan. 24, 1945. He gets reminders when he looks in the mirror, when he celebrates a birthday, when he speaks of his wife, Pearl,  his children and grandchildren.

He should have died that day, at 22, but Buss saved his life. For decades, Saunders, then an aircraft ground crewman, never even knew the name of the fellow Marine who had pulled his burning body from the crashed F4-U Corsair  on the speck of an island in the Philippines.

“I wasn’t supposed to live,” Saunders said, “but the Marines had developed this new way to treat burns, and as soon as I could, I asked to go back to my unit, so I could find my rescuer.”

When Cpl. Vernon Buss, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic, saw the Corsair explode, he raced to the burning aircraft searching for survivors. He scooped up the unconscious Saunders, carried him to an ambulance and returned to the crash site to rescue others.

Nearly a year later, when his tour ended, Buss returned to his hometown of Portland, worked seven years in a rendering plant then joined the Fire Bureau, where he spent 31 years, retired as battalion chief and even had a fire boat named after him. He and Madge  have been married 63 years; they had four children and are great-grandparents.

“I wondered what had happened to him,” Buss said of Saunders. “But there were other things to do.”

Saunders finished his service – never finding his rescuer – and went back home to Southern California. His back, arms and legs carry the scars from third-degree burns he suffered in the aircraft fire. The back brace he wears daily is another reminder.

Saunders went to veterans’ reunions with the No. 1 aim of finding his rescuer. In 1996, he went to an event wearing a T-shirt silkscreened with an image of an F4-U. A woman approached him and complimented the T-shirt; she said her husband would love to see it.

A moment later, the husband appeared and said his name was Vernon Buss. He and Saunders engaged in the veterans’ eternal guessing game: Where did you serve?

In the Pacific – check. Through Guadalcanal  – check. In the Philippines – check. . . On the island of Samar  . . . Jan. 24, 1945 . . .

Saunders had found him. He gave Buss the T-shirt.

They stayed in touch. Saunders carved a plaque from solid basswood with the Marine Corps’ emblem and presented it to Bass. But that wasn’t thanks enough.

So Saunders got stubborn. Three times, he petitioned the Marine Corps to give Buss a medal. But few witnesses were alive to corroborate events. Finally, he contacted a staff member in the office of U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer  because Buss lived in that House district.

After much back and forth, with Saunders pushing hard, Blumenauer’s office worked out a plan for Rep. Darrell Issa,  R-Calif., who represents Saunders, to read a commendation into the Congressional Record on July 29:

“With total disregard for his own safety, Corporal Buss rushed to the side of Staff Sergeant Irving Saunders and carried him away from the burning aircraft, the burning pools of gasoline and the random detonations of .50 caliber ammunition as it ‘cooked off’ from the Corsair’s burning ammunition supply.”

The Marine Corps in Portland and Blumenauer’s staff arranged for the ceremony in Blumenauer’s district office to present Buss with a framed copy of the Congressional Record statement.

The day before the ceremony, Saunders said he wouldn’t make it. He is 87, after all. Then, “My daughter said, ‘Dad, this is what you’ve worked for! You have to be there! I’ve already bought the plane tickets.’ So, here I am.”

Buss never wanted the attention – Madge Buss said, “Vernon is a very, very modest man” – but he didn’t deter Saunders from his quest.

"I didn’t say, ‘Go to it, pal,’ but I didn’t say, ‘Let it rest,’ " Buss said. “It was obviously very important to him.”

Saunders’s son-in-law, Derek Barton, who accompanied Saunders to Portland, said Buss “literally saved Irv twice: One, in the wreckage; two, it kept him going. He had another will to live, to continue to find this man and to recognize him.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., two Marines in dress uniforms arrived. They invited Buss and Saunders to stand before them for the reading of the Congressional Record commendation.

The veterans stood side by side. Saunders put his arm around Buss’s waist.

When it was over, Buss said, “OK, pal.” Saunders said, “OK, pal.”

After the ceremony and handshakes, Saunders plopped down on a soft couch. Buss’s daughter, Jan, sat with him.

“It was so nice of you to persevere,” she said.

“I could not give up,” Saunders replied.

“Well, now you can rest.”

“Yeah,” he said, “now I can rest.”

By Anne Saker, The Oregonian
October 20, 2009, 7:51PM

British code crackers reunite, with pride unbroken

Mike Hillyard, one of the volunteers who rebuilt a replica of the Turing Bombe machine that played a crucial part in cracking the Nazi Enigma Code, stands by the machine at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, England, Tuesday, March 24, 2009. The original machine was destroyed after the war but volunteers rebuilt the replica that received a special Engineering Heritage Award on Tuesday to mark its place in history. (AP Photo/Akira Suemori)

By Gregory Katz, Associated Press Writer
BLETCHLEY PARK, England — During World War II, the best brains in Britain cracked Germany’s encrypted secrets but never broke their own code of silence.
Now gray-haired and using walking sticks and at least one wheelchair, the legendary code breakers returned for a reunion Tuesday at Bletchley Park, where they labored in the grim, blacked-out rooms and played a key role in defeating the Nazis.

The code breakers who worked here in anonymity helped alter history, frustrating Adolf Hitler’s ambitions by giving Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wartime Cabinet crucial advance knowledge of Germany’s invasion plans, defenses, and U-boat movements.

Age has not dimmed the code breakers’ fierce pride. They don’t boast – the British don’t do that – but they know they saved lives.

“Do you know what Churchill called us?” said Jean Valentine, 84, her blue eyes flashing. “He called us ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.’”

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Germany | London | Britain | Atlantic | Nazi | Adolf Hitler | Winston Churchill | Allied | Battle | Peggy | D-Day | U-boat | Alan Turing | Enigma | Jean Valentine | Bletchley Park | Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Tuesday’s event was to honor a rebuilt replica of the Turing Bombe, the machine invented by mathematician Alan Turing that was an outsized forerunner of the modern computer. That invention deciphered the Germans’ top-secret messages that were encoded by the Nazis’ typewriter-like Enigma machines.

“It was like getting a newspaper of German material every day,” said Andrew Hodges, author of a biography about Turing. “The war would have been very different without it.”

The real heroes were the hundreds of mathematicians, cryptographers, crossword puzzle aficionados, chess masters and other experts who spent their days and nights operating the machines at Bletchley Park, about 40 miles northwest of London.

They knew they would be targeted by waves of German bombers if word of their location leaked. That never happened, although three bombs did land nearby. It is believed the target was a nearby train station, not Bletchley Park itself.

Their work provided crucial information in the Battle of the Atlantic, the desert campaign against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the preparations for D-Day.

For decades after the war, they were prohibited from talking about their top-secret work. But those restrictions began being lifted in the 1970s, allowing them to tell their friends and family what they had really done during the war.

Finally, the geese could truly cackle – but traditional British reserve kept them from saying too much.

“We really didn’t know what we were doing other than breaking German codes,” said Valentine, a teenager during the war. “You weren’t supposed to ask questions. You weren’t supposed to know what was in the messages. No one knew anything about what anyone else was doing. It was strictly compartmentalized.”

The sense of accomplishment came, she said, when a supervisor would say “Job up.” That meant they had managed to decode another message for the military.

“That gave us enormous satisfaction,” Valentine said.

The pleasure was fleeting, however, because there was always another message waiting to be decrypted. The job was never finished – until the Nazi regime collapsed.

Ruth Bourne, 83, said the lifting of secrecy rules has allowed many of the code breakers to finally learn how important the operation truly was at a time when Britain’s very existence was threatened.

“We’ve researched and found out an enormous amount about how important this was,” she said. “Now I feel much more excited about it than I ever did when I was working on it.”

The secret activities at Bletchley Park provided the setting for the 2001 romantic thriller “Enigma,” which starred Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, as well as other movies and spy novels.

The focus Tuesday was on fact, not fiction, and on the real lives shaped within these walls. For many, the reunion and the rebuilt replica of the Turing Bombe brought back a flood of memories.

All the Turing Bombe machines were destroyed after the war on Churchill’s orders, because of security concerns, but the replica has been painstakingly rebuilt, a process that took 13 years. It was briefly switched on Tuesday, turning back the years.

“It’s a pleasure to see the machine because that is my wife’s legacy,” said retired Brig. Patrick Erskine-Tulloch, 90, remembering his wife, Peggy, who died six years ago. “She was an instructor and taught dozens of ladies how to use that machine. It was my wife’s big thing in life, even though she always played it down.”

He credits two people for the success of the code-breaking operation: Churchill, for his determination, and Turing, the early computer whiz.

Erskine-Tulloch endorses the widely held view that the success of the Bletchley Park code breakers saved an untold number of lives by hastening the Allied victory.

“The great thing is that the Germans never realized we’d broken their code,” he said. “Otherwise they would have done something about it. They thought it was unbreakable.”

Associated Press writer Dean Carson contributed to this report.