Spitfire plucked from peat bog reveals astonishing story of World War II

First, come up with a strategy for Germany, and then one for Japan-you control the respective powers from the start of the war, with these restrictions:

The Axis cannot not go to war with France, the Low Countries, and Britain.

The Axis cannot conclude a separate peace with China.

Other than that, you control all military forces (with no intervention from anyone), and you have the ability to declare war (or not) on the Soviet Union, the US, and all other countries. So how could the Axis have won the war? I’m looking forward to your thoughts!

HERE

Notice the machine gun on top and the men posted

Zeppelins

Maybe a movie about it will be made, similar to “War Horse”.

@Zooey72:

the topic went in a weird direction, to  bring it back I would like to see someone argue the point I made with how Germany could have won the war.

If in either sept 1939, or june 1941 the Sturmgwher were made standard issue to every German soldier how could any army have opposed them?  I think Dunkirk would not have succeeded in 40 and England would have no army, and in 41 Russia would have fallen before winter.  Even if it didn’t fall I am sure Moscow would have fallen, and the following spring offensive would have ended the war in the East.

The difference between this and other ‘miracle weapons’ is that an assault weapon is practical.  Jets and really big tanks take up too many resources even if they had been produced earlier or in greater numbers.  Ammunition would have been a factor, but that would have been it.

Imagine it, an army equipped with assault rifles opposed by armies who are equipped with what is basicaly now a hunting rifle.

Fortunately for the world Hitler didn’t like the concept until it was too late.Â

I found out, that it may have been allready implemented to German Soldiers way earlier, like 1942 as the Mkb-42.
It happend for tests that those Mkb`s 42 were sometimes dropped off for encircled infantry groups in russia to test run it. (weird)
but actually came to positive results of the Mkb-42 aka StGW '44.

Would had loved to use the Prinz Eugen and eight destroyers combined with a Luftflotte ,but it would have been hard to arrange it with the Prinz timewise…

Veltro !!! unfortunately it came 2 years too late.

November 06, 2009 
By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
Hugh Curthey was tired of working long hours for low pay in the gladiolus fields just south of Grants Pass in the spring of 1941 when he learned of a high-paying job overseas.

“My brother and I were working in those bulbs for a dollar and a half a day,” recalled the 93-year-old Medford resident. “That’s when we heard about this construction work on Wake Island.”

At that point, he couldn’t have told you where Wake Island was on the globe. What he did know was that he would be making at least $500 a month — good money in those days — as a construction worker for the Morrison-Knudsen Co. to help build a U.S. Navy base.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into but we sure found out soon enough,” he said during a recent visit with stepson and daughter-in-law Royce and Joyce Webber of Ruch.

“I still think about it every day,” he added. “I thank the good Lord I made it through.”

He and his brother, Robert “Bob” Curthey, were among some 1,200 civilians taken prisoner when Wake Island was captured by the Japanese on Dec. 23, 1941. Following a 16-day siege in which a 450-man Marine Corps garrison aided by civilians fought to repel the overwhelming Japanese invasion, they were held prisoner until the war ended nearly four years later. Both survived.

“It was rough on people like me because I’ve always like to eat,” said Curthey, a retired maintenance worker for the city of Grants Pass.

Meager meals were the least of his worries during an ordeal that included years of forced labor. More than 200 Americans with him died either during the battle or while in captivity.

Born May 3, 1916, in Kenosha, Wis., Curthey arrived with his family in southwestern Oregon a few years before the Great Depression gripped the nation. He attended first grade in Riddle, then went to schools in Grants Pass, a region where gladiolus were a popular cash crop in the late 1930s into the early 1950s.

Accompanied by brothers Bob and Charles, Curthey arrived on Wake Island in May 1941, although Charles returned to Grants Pass before the war erupted. They were among numerous residents from the region who had jumped at the chance for good jobs overseas.

For seven months, they helped build a naval base on the Pacific coral atoll located between Honolulu and Guam. But their balmy blue-sky world exploded nearly simultaneously with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Maj. James P.S. Devereux, the officer in charge of the Marines, told those on the island to hunker down and prepare for an assault. In addition to the Marines, there were 68 Navy personnel on the island.

During the next two weeks, the island was bombed eight times by Japanese aircraft. Many of the structures were leveled.

“There wasn’t enough rifles to go around so we didn’t have any,” Curthey said. “During the siege, Bob and I worked throughout the night changing gun positions and carrying ammunition and filling sandbags. During the day we stayed down in our dugouts that we had to dig. We didn’t have any protection. But we held out 16 days.”

He tells of a civilian who stood up on the edge of one dugout when a Japanese dive bomber swooped down. The man died instantly.

The defense was crushed by 9 a.m. Dec. 23 with 109 Americans — 62 military, 47 civilians — killed compared to an estimated 900 Japanese soldiers and sailors dead. Using their shore batteries, the Wake Island defenders sank at least two Japanese warships.

Following the surrender, the Americans were held under guard in their barracks. But one man continued to sneak out at night to dig up booze that had been buried before the Japanese invasion, Curthey said.

“He was a big man with a bull neck,” he said. “They told him if he got drunk one more time, off comes the head. He went out and got drunk again. They laid him on a block and off went his head.”

When the prison ship Nita Maru arrived to take the prisoners off the island, Curthey, by then a powerhouse operator, was supposed to stay with 98 other prisoners of war to teach the Japanese how to operate the powerhouse and other facilities.

“I told my brother I wasn’t going to stay so I went with the other POWs getting on the Nita Maru,” he said, noting that Bob was a truck driver on the island. “If I had stayed, I would have been history.”

Indeed, the 98 people left behind were executed on Oct. 7, 1943. They included David F. Chambers of Grants Pass and Wesley W. Stringer of Lakeview.

“I knew both of them,” he said quietly.

The Curthey brothers were placed in the stifling-hot hold of the ship with most of the other prisoners.

“We stayed down in that ship for 12 days — never saw the light of day,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room for us all to sleep so some people took their belts off and tied themselves to those big timbers down in the ship so they could stand there and sleep. The sweat just puddled beneath us.”

They were eventually taken to Shanghai, where they were marched a half dozen miles to the first of two POW camps where they would be held. They were given three scant meals a day.

“They confiscated all the food from the Chinese farmers,” he said. “It was a cup of white rice with a piece of meat in it once in a while. That and a cup of soup. And if we did anything wrong, they’d cut us down to two meals a day. I got a little thin.”

Each group also had a loaf of bread to divide once a week. Normally weighing about 185 pounds, Curthey dropped 50 pounds on the POW diet.

When hunger gnawed at his gut, he would pretend he was chewing gum and crack jokes to keep his mind off food.

“I’ve always had the ability to laugh at myself,” he said. “We (he and Bob) always figured we were gonna make it.”

Knowing his survival depended on it, he ate everything he was given.

“One guy when we first got there said he wasn’t going to eat their garbage,” he said. "Well, after about two weeks he decided he would eat it. But he couldn’t hold it down. He died.

“I’ve always said rice is like a drug to me — I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “Every so often you’d get burned rice. Tasted like toast.”

But they worked hard for what little food they were given.

“When I was a prisoner, I got down to about 135 pounds and carried 220-pound bean sacks,” he said. “The last time I had my back X-rayed, the doc asked me what I did for work. I told him about the bean sacks. He said, ‘That’s the answer. You have about five or six vertebras that are crushed. You will live in pain the rest of your life.’ Well, he ain’t been far off.”

As POWs in Japanese-occupied China, they served as slave labor, doing everything from hauling beans to moving dirt to building a rifle range, he recalled.

“And twice a day we had to stand at rigid attention and they’d come along and count us off,” he said. "One time, a group next to us weren’t ready for inspection on time. The Japanese sergeant came along and banged them all on the head with the clipboard.

“Well, the clipboard broke, so he beat them on the head with the pieces. All 36 men had blood dripping off their foreheads.”

When the war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, the POWs were placed on a ship and sent back to the states. Curthey returned to Grants Pass but not to the gladiolus fields.

“Never again, not for a dollar and a half a day,” he said. “I was ready for something else.”

August 23, 2009 
By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
His large hands, which once gripped wrenches to dismantle and repair engines on patrol torpedo boats during World War II, are losing their battle to arthritis.

But Navy veteran Ollie J. Talley, 88, of Talent, can still maneuver his stiff and swollen fingers enough to gently open the envelope containing an invitation to attend a memorial Sept. 14 in Arlington National Cemetery at the nation’s Capitol.

Related Stories
Friendly-fire survivor hailed from OklahomaTwo accounts of the incident
Two powerful accounts of the friendly fire incident involving the three PT boats are now in print and online.

“Enemy in the Mirror,” a 136-page, self-published book by Jo Frkovich, daughter-in-law of Navy corpsman John Frkovich, who was aboard PT 346, was published earlier this year. Her story can be read online at www.mailtribune.com/enemyinthemirror.

“Tragedy at Sea,” by Dan Williams, the youngest son of Lt. Robert Williams, who commanded PT 347, is available at www.danwilliamsgraphics.com.

“I got this invite to attend the memorial for my skipper,” he says as he displays the letter. “Our skipper, he was just like a brother to me. He was a prince of a guy.”

The memorial at Arlington will honor Lt. James R. Burk, one of 14 American PT boat crewmen killed by friendly fire on April 29, 1944, in the South Pacific.

Talley is the last surviving member of PT 346, one of three PT boats sunk by a squadron of Marine Corps fighters and bomber planes that mistook the U.S. Navy boats for Japanese gunboats.

When the smoke cleared late that day, of the 50 aboard the boats, 14 were dead and 17 wounded, including Talley.

Two Marine pilots also died, the result of defensive gunfire from the PT boat crews.

Burk was fatally wounded while holding up an 8-foot American flag in an attempt to save his crew by alerting the pilots that they were attacking an American vessel. As he lay dying on the deck, his last order was for Navy corpsman John Frkovich to take his life jacket. The medic reluctantly pulled on the Mae West and lived to help save other wounded sailors that day.

“I’d like to go to the ceremony for the skipper but I can’t,” Talley says. “My hands don’t open and close like they should anymore. And I can’t stand up without hanging onto something. I’ve lost my equilibrium. I don’t know why.”

“It might be because you are 88 years old,” offers Dottie, his wife of nearly 65 years, causing them both to chuckle.

The invitation coming in the autumn of their lives has brought back memories of a time when they were young lovers caught up in a world at war. Like countless other young couples of that era, they would know firsthand separation and sadness.

The crew of PT 346, which Burk had dubbed the “Betty Bee” in honor of his wife, suffered the most with nine killed and nine wounded. Only two sailors on board were physically uninjured in what the U.S. Department of Defense lists as the worst friendly-fire incident involving PT boats.

Talley has a box of paperwork containing Uncle Sam’s investigation of the incident. The reports conclude the catastrophe was caused by pilot error due to miscommunications and misidentification in the turmoil of war.

The old sailor reared in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma puts it another way.

“The Marines sank my boat — that’s what happened,” he says. “But I don’t hold any grudges against nobody. We was all on the same side.”

Talley joined the Navy in 1942 and later was sent to the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn, where PT 346 was being completed. Like others of its line, the craft was 80 feet long and powered by three V-12 Packard gasoline engines. It held 3,000 gallons of high octane aviation fuel, which the three engines could gobble at the rate of 300 gallons an hour when the craft hit speeds that could exceed 40 knots. Its firepower included torpedoes and twin .50-caliber machine guns.

The crew broke in the boat as it traveled down the Eastern seaboard, heading to the Panama Canal. En route, they stopped at New Orleans, where they adopted a feral Irish terrier they named Chopper.

“That was a real buddy of ours, that dog was,” Talley says. "Any stranger tried to stick a foot on that PT boat, he wouldn’t have it.

“When we went through the canal, the natives there came around with a pig and wanted to trade,” he adds. “They wanted to eat that dog. We didn’t trade.”

By summer 1943, his boat, which had been carried piggyback by a Dutch freighter across the vast Pacific Ocean, began patrolling among the array of islands dotting the South Pacific.

“We was just like family,” he says. “You get to living with these guys on an 80-foot boat and you get to know each one real well.”

April 29, 1944
The harrowing incident began when PT 347 became stuck on a reef off Japanese-held Rabaul during a nighttime patrol. PT 350 soon arrived to try to pull the boat off the reef.

At 7 a.m., two high-flying Marine Corps Corsair fighter planes attacked, mistaking the PT boats for Japanese gunboats. The PT 350 crew fired back, believing they were being attacked by enemy aircraft. One Corsair was shot down, killing the pilot.

Talley’s PT 346 powered in to help.

“When we arrived (about 12:30 p.m.) we saw 350 and they was all shot up,” Talley says, noting that PT 347 remained on the reef. “You could see the (Japanese soldiers) on the beach from there. We were ordered to blow up 347 if we couldn’t free the boat.”

PT 346 backed up to the stranded craft so the crew could tie a heavy rope around it.

About 2 p.m., the men spotted a squadron of planes on the horizon.

“We recognized them,” Talley says of the arrival of 22 Marine Corps fighters and bombers. “We knew they were Corsairs, Hellcats and Dauntlesses. We thought it was our air cover. So we went back to trying to get the boat off the reef.”

After all, the PT 346 crew had contacted its headquarters about the earlier attack, asking for aerial protection from the Southwest Pacific Command headed by Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The problem, Talley explains, is that the squadron was from the adjacent South Pacific Command, whose top military boss was Adm. Chester Nimitz. The general and admiral had no use for each other, resulting in limited communication between the two commands.

“Today, we have Republicans and Democrats against each other,” Talley says. “Back then, we had that in MacArthur and Nimitz. They had a problem with each other.”

The pilots, looking for Japanese gunboats, believed they had found their prey. The squadron included four Corsair fighters, six Avenger dive-bombers, four Hellcat fighters and eight Dauntless dive-bombers.

“The first bomb went right under my engine room and blew my engines and batteries all out of whack,” Talley recalls. “When I climbed up out of there, I saw the skipper had been mowed down.”

The boat, made of plywood and mahogany, was sinking when the last bomber came around, he says. Their radio was knocked out.

“We had no guns left,” he says. “I’m still on the boat, trying to get this cork life raft off when he comes in. He dropped his flaps and put a 1,000-pound bomb right in the middle of our boat. When it blew, it knocked me right out of my shoes.”

Nightmare in the water
Chopper, who had been wounded in the face by shrapnel, came swimming up to Talley, who shared his life preserver with him. But their nightmare was just beginning.

“That’s when the planes started strafing us,” Talley says. "It seems like every plane that came was lining up with me. I’m sure the other guys must have had the same feeling.

“I’d see the smoke go out of the guns up there, then the bullets would start hitting the water ahead of me,” he says.

Each time, Talley would dive under water to the point where the .50-caliber bullets’ velocity would be spent. One bullet hit his pants, but didn’t puncture the cloth. Miraculously, Chopper was not hit by a bullet.

The ordeal went on for at least an hour and a half, possibly two hours, he says. The bodies of eight members of PT 346, including an Army officer who came along as an observer, sank below the waves as Talley fought to survive.

“Up until then, I was never afraid of being shot — I was always afraid of sharks,” Talley says. “But I never thought of sharks during that time I was in the water.”

Baptism by bullets
Talley says he was not a religious man before that day, but he became converted during the baptism of bullets.

"I remember I said, ‘Lord, if it would only rain they wouldn’t be able to see us,’ " he says. “Well, it rained and they went away. I wasn’t a believer until that day.”

At 5:30 p.m., a Navy seaplane looking for a second Hellcat pilot who was shot down came flying in low and discovered the victims of the friendly fire.

Talley was among the crew members initially picked up late that day and taken to a hospital on Green Island. Although he had a shrapnel wound behind his left ear and his left leg had been blown forward at the knee during the explosion, causing his knee to swell up like a water balloon, he refused aid, insisting the doctors help those in worse shape.

Other survivors were not rescued until after 10 p.m., when two PT boats arrived.

‘I don’t hold any grudges’
After Talley recovered, he took a leave to his parents’ home in California with Chopper. His crewmates had decided he should adopt the dog.

“I hate to tell you what happened to him, after him being a survivor of what happened to us,” Talley says. “About a month after I left him, he was chasing a rabbit in a grape vineyard and some kid shot him with a .22 (caliber) rifle. My dad rushed him to the veterinarian but he passed away.”

Talley was discharged Sept. 6, 1945, as a motor machinist mate first class.

Looking back on the most horrific day of his life, Talley says he has no animosity toward the Marine pilots. He recalls being visited in the hospital by the pilot who had dropped the 1,000-pound bomb on PT 346.

"He said, ‘If you ever need anything a’tall, here’s my name and my folks’ address in Kansas,’ " Talley says. "I had that about a week and I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I tore it up.

“We was all out there for the same purpose,” Talley says. “It was a mistake. I don’t hold any grudges.”