Airforce
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Who is Seymour Zimmerman? To be honest I don’t know. All I know he died for my freedom and his name is on a memorial stone in the American War Cemetery of Margraten in the Netherlands.8,3001heroes who sacrificed their lives are buried there. Unfortunately Seymour’s body was never found. This is all I know of him.…
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During the night of 17 September 1940, a gale tore loose several British barrage balloons, sweeping them across the North Sea to Scandinavia. The balloons’ trailing steel cables caught up in power lines, shorting them out. They also brought down the antenna for the Swedish International radio station. When complaints about the incident reached London,…
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Although Switzerland remained neutral throughout World War II, it had to deal with numerous violations of its airspace by combatants from both sides – initially by German aircraft, especially during their invasion of France in 1940. Zealous Swiss pilots attacked and shot down eleven German aircraft, losing two of their own, before a threatening memorandum…
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Returning from a bombing raid of Germany’s Ruhr Valley in 1944, American pilot James M. Hansen’s fighter plane ran into trouble and crashed. James was killed instantly. The Allies, who buried him in the temporary American military cemetery in the village of Molenhoek near the Dutch city of Nijmegen, placed this wooden cross on…
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During WWII there were several incidents where civilians were killed by friendly fire by allied forces, like the 5 Oct 1942 air raid on Geleen. https://dirkdeklein.net/2016/01/20/forgotten-history/ Or by accident like the Freckleton Air Disaster. On 23 August 1944, an American United States Army Air Forces Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber crashed into the centre of…
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Considering the title and the picture above one could be forgiven to think that this incident was a dare fueled by alcoholic beverages, which were consumed in a pub. But nothing could be further from the truth the “ye olde oub incident” or AKA “The Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident” was in fact one of…
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For decades I have been enjoying his stories from ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’ and ‘BfG’ to the creepy ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ stories. In all those years I never realized that Roald Dahl had actively been involved in WWII,it was only because of the release of the new movie ‘BfG’ I looked into Roald…
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Most people will know the name ‘Enola Gay’ the plane that dropped the 1st Atomic bomb on Hiroshima but surprisingly not that many people will have heard of the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, some even think that Enola Gay dropped both. Bockscar, sometimes called Bock’s Car, is the name of the United…
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Most of us will have heard of the Rock band Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl’s(from former Nirvana fame) musical ensemble. But that is not the Foo Fighters I am talking about, although Dave Grohl did take his name from this WWII phenomenon. Ever since mankind figured out that the world isn’t a flat plate but a…
History of Sorts 
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