WW2-era comic book covers featuring various bizarre Nazi villains - art by (clockwise from upper left) Mac Raboy, Alex Schomburg, Harry Lucey & Al Gabrielle
TRUFAX
This is one of the few surviving photos of “Pooh”, the culmination of Britain’s Project TUBE ALLOYS - a vastly expensive and ultimately fruitless attempt to harness Kramers-Heisenberg probability fields to displace personnel or ordnance in both time and space. After initial success with the tabletop model code-named “Winnie”, the decision was made to construct a full-scale device in the remote Scottish highlands. Unfortunately, “Pooh” labored under the same limitations as Germany’s smaller Zeitverzerrung Rohr 1.
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stukablr
Waffen-SS volunteers with Sonderversuch Kader 17 are seen here in 1943 firing a Rheinmetall 37mm antiaircraft gun into Doctor Werner Heisenberg’s Zeitverzerrung Rohr 1, which used powerful electromagnets to create a Kramers-Heisenberg probability transition and thus displacing the fired 37mm projectile in both space and time. As Albert Speer recorded in his diary: ”AH now dreams of blasting the infant Sir Winston to pieces in his nursery!”
Thousands of test shots made it clear that the displacement in space corresponded exactly to the physical length of what the men of SK17 informally dubbed die Zeittunnel (”the time tunnel”). Meanwhile, passage into the past was measured in mere fractions of a second, being, as it turned out, the precise flight time of the shells down the length of ZR1.
Despite the Führer’s fevered visions of altering the outcome of a battle (or the entire war) by striking back into the past and at any point on the globe, ZR1 remained a mere scientific curiosity.
Hermann Göring’s considerable power as Reichsmarschall extended beyond the Luftwaffe, even into the halls of Kriegsmarine Naval Staff HQ. Göring and the newly air-minded naval architects at Wilhelmshaven soon conceived of a full-deck aircraft carrier but one still capable of ship-to-ship combat. It was decided that of the fast ‘P’-class commerce raiding cruisers being laid down, one was to be converted to Germany's first "real" CV. Christened in 1938 and classified as a Korsarträger ("Corsair Carrier"), Pommern was designed with many medium-caliber guns for surface raiding and high speed to outrun any escorts stronger than she. Two small elevators and a single hangar deck could handle a reasonable number of the then-standard Arado 196T Seepferd ("Seahorse") dive bombers. Large bunker capacity meant long-range independent cruising was possible, unlike many of the newer ships being built for the Kriegsmarine. However, her cramped hangar space and small elevators (designed for the diminutive Arados) meant that newer, larger aircraft couldn't be accommodated without considerable modification to the ship and a drastic reduction in air complement. Pommern and her all-gun sister ship Posen sailed out of Kiel Harbor just days before the war started and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to begin hunting merchantmen. She eluded detection by Allied forces, but was unlucky and unable to disrupt shipping to any great extent. Her next mission was to ferry modern German carrier aircraft, destined ultimately for land bases in the Marshall Islands for co-operative training with the Japanese, from Diego Suarez to Bangkok. With this uneventful mission accomplished, Pommern was sailing back toward the Andaman Islands when the Japanese started their conquest of Southeast Asia. Discovering the French seaplane carrier Commandante Teste limping toward Ceylon, Pommern's aircraft sank her but alerted the powerful British battlegroup in the area. Luckily an IJN Striking Force met up with Pommern in the Indian Ocean and transferred the newly promoted Admiral Minoru Genda on board to direct flight operations as a liaison officer. Pommern's aircraft found and, in a series of “daisy chain” attacks, sank the already-damaged British battlecruiser Hood, but fighters from the nearby carrier HMS Venerable took their toll. Her air group decimated, Pommern detached from the Japanese fleet with hopes of making a dash for Diego Suarez to resupply and refit. Encountering an Allied convoy in poor weather, Pommern started shelling ships with her 5.9" guns when large shell splashes suddenly announced the presence of a battleship. The small USN BB Rhode Island was just on the far side of the convoy and soon was hitting Pommern in the engine rooms with 14" shells from close range. No match for Rhode Island’s guns, Pommern was badly damaged and couldn't run. Her entire crew were able to safely abandon ship but not before scuttling the Kriegsmarine’s only “corsair carrier”.
The Alt-Historian gratefully acknowledges the research efforts of those magnificent sea dogs at combinedfleet.com
Junkwaffel - Sole Survivor (1973) by Vaughn Bodē
Set the controls of the TRUFAX Time Machine for the heart of the Seventies -
"I have in my possession a map of undoubted authenticity made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it… This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself -" Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his nationally broadcast Navy Day radio address October 1941.
With this bombshell revelation of German intentions towards - per the century old Monroe Doctrine - "America's backyard", the last vestiges of American isolationist sentiment were swept away. Considering the slim possibility of successfully prosecuting a two ocean war against the burgeoning Japanese Empire and in defense of a besieged Great Britain, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull quickly hammered out a non-aggression pact with Japan as part of the Midway Accords. Beginning in 1937 with the Battle of Shanghai, forces of the Third Reich had been providing assistance to the Republic of China in their struggle against the invading Japanese; consequently, securing co-operation from Minister of Foreign Affairs Shigenori Tōgō was "easy as falling off a log. After Shanghai, the Japs were happy to hold Uncle Sam's coat while we busted Adolf's jaw, I'll tell you what." *
* from the journals of Vice Admiral Wm. "Bull" Halsey, commander of Task Force Eager aboard USS Enterprise (CV-6), which transported Hull and his Department of State team to the remote Pacific atoll chosen as the site for the negotiations.
image via
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In August 1943, Turkey’s ‘National Chief’ Konya Uşak İnönü finally succumbed to Nazi Germany’s incessant pressure to expand the Treaty of Friendship signed by the two nations in June 1941. The first order of business was the formation of the 1st Khanjar Mountain Brigade. This photo dated August 1944 shows the brigade’s imam bestowing a blessing prior to Operation Hackfleisch - an anti-partisan campaign centred on the hill country of the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska trans. Independent State of Croatia). For all the lavish matériel support provided by the Germans, the unit’s vague status as ‘co-belligerents’ rather than allies, the cultural and language barriers hampering co-ordination with their Wehrmacht counterparts and the adoption of the battle cry “The Turks have returned!” by both the Partisans and Chetniks meant that, unfortunately for the Khanjars, Operation Hackfleisch was bloodily and aptly named.
Booklet published by the Canadian Jewish Congress and given away for free in 1944 - via savedfromthepaperdrive
With a tip of the Xenophone hat to gentlemanlosergentlemanjunkie, this TRUFAX post goes out to schnappbacks, original proprietor of The Alt-Historian. Happy New Year, pal!
The topmost image* shows the grounds of the Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club, where Royal Navy WRNS and RAF Regiment personnel prepare to launch a flight of hydrogen-filled balloons as part of the secret aerial harassment campaign against Nazi-occupied Europe called Operation OUTWARD. The seeds were sown by a 1937 study of the damage an errant barrage balloon's steel cables could cause to Britain's own electrical grid. Then came the gale of September 18 1940 which blew loose a swarm of barrage balloons and sent them across the North Sea, their dangling mooring cables shorting power lines in Sweden and Denmark. A report on the havoc soon reached the British War Cabinet and Winston Churchill himself ordered further study into the use of unmanned free-flying balloons as an economical means to take the fight to Germany. With the Air Ministry dismissing the notion as ineffective and a waste of resources, the Royal Navy took the lead. Extensive research by Captain C.G. Banister, director of Boom Defense (the Admiralty group responsible for laying anti-ship and anti-torpedo booms to protect harbors), led the Admiralty to propose Operation OUTWARD.
The final 'system' consisted of an 8-foot latex balloon worth 35 shillings using a slowly dripping can of mineral oil to maintain altitude. A long burning fuse lit before launch would eventually (and hopefully when over German or German-occupied territory) burn through a restraining cord and release OUTWARD's original payload: 300 feet of piano wire dangling from a 700 foot hemp tether. It was hoped that while being carried along by the wind, the balloon would eventually drag its wire 'weapon' across a high-voltage power line and cause a short circuit.
With the aim of knocking out portions of the Reich's electrical grid or alternatively starting fires in the German countryside with firebombs, Operation OUTWARD began launching in March 1942. Maximum tempo was reached in August of that year, with 1,000 balloons a day being sent aloft from Felixstowe and a second launch site established at Oldstairs Bay near Dover. By September 1944 when the flights were halted, over 99,000 balloons had been sent on their way with just over half carrying firebombs. Despite the larger proportion of balloons carrying incendiaries, OUTWARD's greatest success came on 12 July 1942, when a wire-carrying balloon struck a 110,000-volt power line near Leipzig. A failure in the nearby Böhlen power station's circuit breakers (a known and closely studied weakness of the German power grid) caused a fire that destroyed the facility.
In addition to concerns over OUTWARD missions possibly interfering with flight ops - which led to the RAF insisting on launch times far from ideal for the balloons' eventual arrival over the target areas - some members of the air arm vigorously objected that “attacks of this nature should not be originated from a cricketing country"...
* the second image is of a wartime German document detailing a recovered OUTWARD balloon and payload
For more info, read this incredibly detailed article (pdf) on Operation OUTWARD courtesy of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. (images via & via)
This TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian has left Xenophone feeling a little light-headed...
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While the USSR was never directly involved in the Second Great War, they sort of “played both sides” by providing material and logistic assistance to “anyone who asked nicely” in the words of Lavrenty Beria.
Here we see two soldiers of the British Eighth Army examining their T-34/85 in a wheatfield outside Alexandria, Egypt, 1944. While it doesn’t seem like you should be able to grow anything in a desert, the “wheatfields of Alexandria” have existed for hundreds of years; Omar Khayyam wrote of them and Ibrahim al-Kefhir painted them.
A good explanation for why these fields exist is available in Dr. Joseph Steiner’s Blooming the Desert: How Egypt’s Wheat Fields Helped Hitler Win the War.
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Two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor Anthony ‘Doc’ Savage reprised his role in the US Third Army’s 1946 conquest of the Alpine Redoubt on the silver screen, playing himself in director Fritz Lang’s Festung Europa (1952). He is seen here in art director William Cameron Menzies’s depiction of the Thule Society ‘temple’ which was the setting for the film’s climactic battle. While there were in fact highly placed members of the Society sequestered within the Redoubt, there was no ornate and elaborate temple complex and according to ‘Doc’ himself 'They (the Thule Society "priesthood") were just a buncha cringing whackos. Hell, the nuns I had in parochial school were scarier!'
In a G-load disaster from the rate of climb Sometimes I'd faint and be lost to our side But there's no reward for failure, but death So watch me in mirrors, keep me on the glidepath
Get me through these fighters, no, I cannot fail While my great silver slugs are eager to feed I can't fail - No, not now ! When twenty-five bombers wait ripe
They hang there dependent from the sky Like some heavy metal fruit These bombers are ripe and ready to tilt (? trans.) Must these Englishmen live that I might die? Must they live that I might die?
M-E two-sixty-two prince of turbojets Junkers Jumo 004 Blasts from clustered R4M quartets in my snout And see these English planes go burn !
Will you be my witness, how red were the skies? When the Fortresses flew for the very last time It was dark over Westphalia In April of '45...
Translation of a drinking song popular in the mess hall of Jagdverband 44, the elite squadron of Luftwaffe experten hand-picked by Adolf Galland and based at Brandenburg-Briest. The lyrics are attributed to one of the squadron's line chiefs, Oberwerkmeister Erick Bloom. from Appendix X in Luft '46: Endgame Over Fortress Europe by William Green
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Hauptmann Wilhelm Leibniz poses with the flight and ground crew of his ME110 Nachtjaeger, Gusti III, on the occasion of him being awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, 1943.
On 7 October of that year, it was discovered by the Abwehr that Winston Churchill would be making a visit to Alexandria, to award medals to the victorious Desert Rats and soldiers of the LRDG. Jagdgeschwader 6, Leibniz’s, was the only one in position to make the interception, which would have to take place as Churchill’s Skytrain rounded the coast of occupied France, headed for a layover at Gibraltar.
When Leibniz’s squadron engaged Churchill’s escorts, it was Leibniz who threaded the needle between two Spitfires and pumped fifty cannon rounds into the PM’s airplane.
When asked about it later, he said “it was like God’s hand guided my aircraft. I don’t even recall moving the steering column”.
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Well before the 1996 declassification of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops’ deception activities, the missions and tactics of the so-called “Ghost Army” were being fancifully fictionalized and recounted by one of its former members: Sergeant Jacob Kurtzberg, better known to comic fans as artist and writer Jack ‘King’ Kirby.
Designer Graham demonstrates Winston Churchill's personal pressure chamber, created to enable him to make high-altitude flights safely
To protect the precious bulk of Winston Churchill in wartime a special one-man pressure chamber was built for the personal plane which carried him many times across the Atlantic and to Casablanca, Moscow and Yalta. Churchill...was warned by his doctors that it was dangerous for a man of his age and physical condition to fly above 8,000 feet. Much higher altitudes sometimes were necessary, however, because of weather and the enemy. The solution was a pressure chamber complete with ash trays, telephone and an air-circulation system good enough to prevent smoke from the ubiquitous cigar from fogging the atmosphere. While pressures within the chamber were kept at the equivalent of 5,000 feet, the prime ministerial figure could loll comfortably like an outsized pearl within a gigantic oyster shell. LIFE Magazine Feb. 10 1947 (via io9)
The cabin pressure of this Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian has been adjusted for your comfort and safety.
The Nakajima G9A (天の雷 "Heavenly Thunder") was a 4 engine long-range bomber designed for use by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The IJN designation was "Type 20 land-based attack aircraft" ( 二十八試陸上攻撃機 ) with the Allied code name "Wanda". Reverse-engineered from the wreckage of US Army Air Corps B-17D Flying Fortresses destroyed at Clark Field in the Philippines, Nakajima's personnel were greatly aided in their efforts by the recovery of multiple complete sets of the aircraft's instruction manuals. Due to dwindling fuel reserves, the G9A saw little combat service and most were destroyed on the ground by strafing runs from marauding US Navy fighters.