it actually annoys the shit out if me when people act like ww2 isn't something that you need to learn about anymore. like no actually that's all still very important sorry

like yes the guys who just salivate over which weapons killed the most people are fucking weird, no argument there, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know about the various war crimes committed by literally every country involved. it's all still very much relevant, the 1940s wasn't really that long ago, all things considered.

“Female railroad workers employed during wartime eat in the break room of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in Clinton, Iowa.” Photographed by Jack Delano in June 1943.

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The Army of Poland employed a brown bear as part of an artillery team in the Second World War. His name was Wojtek (pronounced "voytek") and he worked in the 22nd Artillery Company.

In spring of 1942, after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, thousands of Polish citizens and elements of the Polish military were deported from Soviet territory. They journeyed through Iran to British Palestine.

Along the way, they encountered an Iranian boy with an orphaned bear cub. According to the boy, the cub's mother had been killed by hunters. The teenage neice of a Polish general convinced an officer to buy the bear cub, which they nursed back to health and eventually made their mascot.

The bear was trained to perform a military salute, cuddle with soldiers on cold nights, and even march with them by standing on his back legs. He copied the soldiers in every way, even attempting to smoke cigarettes (he usually just ate them).

When the Polish army finally reunited with allied forces, they were assigned to join the invasion of Italy alongside the British 8th Army. However, the transport ships banned all pets and mascot animals.

The Poles refused to leave Wojtek, and got around the rule by drafting the bear into the army as a legally recognized soldier. He had his own personal records files, his own paycheck, his own dogtag ID number, and even held the rank of Private.

It wasn't symbolic, either. Private Wojtek actually participated in combat at the Battle of Monte Casino by carrying 100-pound crates full of artillery shells. It was a job that normal required four men, but Wojtek did it alone and perfectly, never dropping a single shell. His actions kept the artillery barrage well supplied until Allied forces finally seized the fortified mountaintop from Nazi paratroopers.

In recognition of his excellent performance, Private Wojtek was promoted to Corporal Wojtek and the 22nd Artillery Company made their flag the image of a bear lifting an artillery shell. They still use that flag today.

After the war, Corporal Wojtek retired to the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he was frequently visited by fellow Polish veterans, who game him cigarettes just like old times. He enjoyed a long and happy life, weighing over 1,000 pounds as any successful brown bear should. There are several memorials in his honor, both in Poland and Scotland.

I want to meet the legendary balls-to-the-wall WW2 Veteran who first said "Lēte Prívātə Bëªr McBèąrfæçe Cárřý Tħē Fûckínğ Éxpløsivės"

What’s funny is that this actually happened. 

I’m unfamiliar with this story please elaborate

Finnish soldier gets separated from the rest of his unit but he’s the only one carrying the emergency amphetamines for the unit, takes too many and goes on a one man rampage for like 2 weeks straight giving the opposing Soviet soldiers nightmares for decades. Oh and he did it all on skis. 

Did he survive?

Yes, during his methed up 2-3 week rampage he got injured by a land mine, travelled 400km on skis, and only ate pine buds and a Siberian Jay that he caught which he ate raw. When he made it back to Finnish lines he was taken to a hospital where it was found his heart rate was nearly 200 beats per minute and his weight had dropped to 43kg (94.7lbs).

His name was Aimo Koivunen if you want to look him up

Those are the eyes of a man who has seen god and laughed

Important distinction, it wasn’t “amphetamines” like Adderall or Vyvanse or something, it was Pervitin, prescription grade methamphetamine.

This is fucking fantastic. The Edelweiss Pirates.

Ok i need a whole ass mini series about them

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

I have another story from the Holocaust.  

Two, actually.

One is long, and one is brief.

The first story is about my grandfather.

He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.

He was also a smuggler.  If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration.  But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge.  Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.

But that’s not the story.

The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.

My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.  

And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.  Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.  

So it’s pandemonium.  They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…

And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save.  It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.

So he tells the boy to come with him.

And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.

But it wasn’t a couple of days.

It was six weeks.

Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.  

So they rose up… and were slaughtered.  Because they got nothing from the Russians.  Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller.  They smuggled food to him…  If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.

Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.

And in the chaos… 

My grandfather lost track of the boy.

Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.

So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy.  Did he live?  Did he die?  Did he find his mother and sisters?

He doesn’t know.

Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah.  Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich.  You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.

So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc.  And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”

“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.

So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.  

And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?”  Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.

“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.

“You were in Częstochowa?  My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”

“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”

“When he gets home, you’ll see.  Everyone there knew Teddy.”  Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.

So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”

And when my grandfather got home from work…

…sitting there at his kitchen table…

…was the boy he had saved.

…

(I’m not crying…)

That’s the first story.

The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.

It is short.

He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin.  He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist.  My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”

Two brothers. 

One saved over a hundred lives.

The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.  

Your choices define you.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.– Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

Ffgfdthffghh just found out my great-grandma was engaged to like 11 men during ww2 because rando guys about town kept proposing to her before enlisting and she kept saying yes because ‘well I can’t say no, they’re going to war after all’ and only wound up getting hitched to great-grandpa cause he came back to cash it in

Him: “will you marry me?”

Her, internally: will /you/?

Her: yes

This is the most grandma things ever ‘well i dont want to be RUDE’

AU where the entire war was won by all 11 guys teaming up so they could come back to share her illustrious hand

admiring the stockings. 1940’s.

#[40S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER VOICE] WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? GALS BEING PALS

Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”

“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’

“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’

“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’

“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’

- The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.

So, when someone sits down to write a fiction about Women commandos, and a Dudebro steps in to say “Huh, that is so unrealistic huh.” 

Harold… oh, Harold…sit down, shut up, and stay out of our way.

History is infinitely gayer than a lot of people want to admit <3

You know you're European when:

They have to defuse a WW2 bomb in your city and nobody is really concerned because that happens from time to time. 

WHAT #noteuropean 

dude there’s entire fields in the west part of Belgium that just has a small “Watch out, mine field” on it, and sometimes farmers don’t know and put cows on it and they get blown up. Shit happens. #WW2

Happens because of WW1 (WW2 too but there’s less stuff left) in northern France too. 

Almost walked on a non explosed pair of shells while looking for mushrooms. 

I was born in a small town in south Hungary… they didn’t just find one WW2 bomb somewhere around the town… they found 1200 bombs right outside the town in 2014.

Yes, around 1200 German SD-1 fragmentation bombs… only found in 2014!

I love those radio announcements. This part of the city, along with this highway and also, all trains going through, are going to be shut down on Saturday afternoon because bomb.

And all anyone bitches about is the detour they’re forced to take because if it didn’t blow up the past 71 years, they could have waited another week to defuse it, couldn’t they? Eugh.

there’s a flood? oh hello forgotten WWII ammunition in large quantities you go take a walk in the forest? oh hey WWII mine! kids play football in a field? good thing they didn’t kick that mine they found. someone actually looks through the old metal parts in a salvage yard? anti-aircraft mines! tbh nobody usually makes a great fuss because it very rarely actually hurts someone. but yeah until now I was always like ‘lol another one’ and never thought about it much XD

There’s a roadblock in the middle of the city? Oh no worries it’s just a bomb. A whole block gets evacuated? Oh no worries. Bomb.  #LifeinGermany

same in czech… we literally have closed forests where no one can go, because mines everywhere and lol, our neighbor was building water well on his garden last year and he is digging and digging and then he hits something solid, surprise it’s a wwii bomb…

Here’s one being detonated in Yorkshire in 2009 (from WW2)

Wtf are you guys ok

Yeah it’s fine, this shit is essentially gossip material and nothing more

We had one in our city recently(ish). If I recall right they evacuated a student accommodation or something, and they watched it get detonated.

It was more like a social event than trouble.

You all sound so surprised that we still have some bombs around from being LITERALLY IN THE MIDDLE OF TWO WORLD WARS. 

I feel like the US - and fair enough - don’t quite get how present and clear the effect of the world wars is in Europe.

Like I was in TK Maxx in Balham today failing to find any decent bras. As I went in I glanced around and noted not for the first time how there’s this really distinct break in the style of buildings along that road. This is why:

At 8.02pm on 14th October 1940 a German bomb was dropped directly on Balham Underground station. The torn-off shopfronts are where the TK Maxx is now.

My other stop before getting home was at the Lidl on the corner of my street. Why was there space to build a supermarket there in the first place? Because it was a bombsite.

London was a bombsite.

That’s every explosion in London during the Blitz.Around 10% of dropped bombs are estimated not to have exploded. They’re still digging them up all the time. Last year London City airport had to be closed down while two unexploded V2s were dealt with

There are areas in northeastern France which are still off-limits to humans because of the huge number of unexploded shells and mines the toxicity of the soil from World War One, called Red Zones.

War really fucks a place up.

I feel like people really don’t understand the difference between a war some county is waging somewhere else and a war that happen right on top of you.

Any bit of grassland or field you dig in Europe or in my example Poland will yield you some ammo or a piece of a bomb within first 15 min of digging.

There was this American show about treasure hunters working with metal detectors that wanted to shoot an episode here looking for some meteorites. They gave in after the first day because the detectors kept wailing non stop. They found a lot of ammo and rusted out guns.

It’s not just bombs, it’s also things like : oh, bus fell into a hole!

The hole turned out to be a secret ww2 bunker that nobody knew existed that caved in.

Well also fun fact: In Kraków Poland, the New road can’t be finished for three months bc first they found a bomb under the surface and now they found like very old part of the wall that was around Krakow hundreds years ago. So yea

Also, parts of the country that were bombed heavily will laugh at parts of the country that were bombed less heavily. Couple of years ago there was a 250kg bomb blown up in Munich and they were making a loooooot of fuss (they also had to call in the bomb disposal unit from somewhere else because they don’t have local ones). That bomb was all over the media, especially the media based in Munich. Meanwhile, I’m from a more heavily bombed part of Germany (because we’re more northern, so closer to the UK where they sent the bombers from), and here a 500kg bomb being blown up only makes the local news. It happens literally often enough that it’s not seen as something that’s overly newsworthy, apart from informing possibly affected people about when it either gets diffused or blown up (or carted off). So you can imagine how we all laughed about those Southerners that were losing their shit over something as mundane as an unexploded bomb.

I live in a building that has a visible crack right through the middle. A WW2 bomb went into the courtyard and got stuck in the basement, though it didn’t explode. And yeah, some cities were almost completely annihilated during the war.

Virginia Hall (1906-1982): The Most Dangerous Spy of All 

Book 2 available here. Full entry on the website - with footnotes and citations  - available right here. Art notes after the cut.

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Punch a Nazi for her.

That’s how she looked

I adore her. She poisoned their soup (she was working in the cantine and was forced to serve the occupying nazis) and ATE the same soup to proove her innocence. Then she rushed home to her grandma who gave her a whole jar of milk to drink and throw up.