In the mid-1930s, an Australian journalist visited Germany to report on the rise of fascism and interview Adolf Hitler. The atrocities she saw there, which included the public beating of Jews, forever changed the course of her young life. Nancy Wake, who died Sunday at age 98, would spend World War II fighting Nazism tooth and nail, saving thousands of Allied lives, winding up at the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list and ultimately receiving more decorations than any other servicewoman.

Wake made her way from Spain to Britain, where she convinced special agents to train her as a spy and guerilla operative. In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters. In order to earn the esteem of the men under her command, she reportedly challenged them to drinking contests and would inevitably drink them under the table. But her fierceness alone may have won her enough respect: During the violent months preceding the liberation of Paris, Wake killed a German guard with a single karate chop to the neck, executed a women who had been spying for the Germans, shot her way out of roadblocks and biked 70 hours through perilous Nazi checkpoints to deliver radio codes for the Allies. (via)

In 1940, knowing that France was falling into the hands of the Germans, the workers of the Louvre took action. All 400,000 works were evacuated and sent to the south of France. In secret they transported the priceless paintings and statues, and held by wealthy families in Vichy,where they would remain for five years, only returning at the end of the war.The quick action of the workers without a doubt saved the masterpieces from becoming part of the over 5 million works that were looted by the Nazis during the war.

In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered the removal of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the west coast. Osama Nakata was incarcerated at Poston Relocation Camp in remote western Arizona, behind barbed wire and watched by armed guards. He was required to fill out a four-page form about his relatives, the newspapers and magazines he read, and his ability to read, write, and speak Japanese. He marked “poor” for all three. This signed statement is his answer to one of the last questions, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?”

(via the “Making Their Mark: Stories Through Signatures” eGuide)

Mr. Nakata’s statement is among the featured items at the “Making Their Mark: Stories Through Signatures" exhibit now on display at the National Archives Museum.

I was talking to some friends - by all accounts well-educated, fact-seeking, smart people - and not a one of them had any idea that this happened.

Countries like to gloss over the parts of their own history that make them look bad.

wrathofprawn:

how the fuck is this not taught in every single history class ever

pilots (◡‿◡✿) 

girl pilots (◕‿◕✿)

girl pilots killing nazis ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* \(◕ヮ◕✿)/ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

But, remember, women never did anything in history.

This is laughably incorrect.

Fact 1: Although technologically obsolete as of WWII, the Polikarpov Po-2 “Kukuruznik” biplanes flown by the 588th Night Bomber Regiment were in no way ” the oldest, noisiest, crappest planes in the entire world.” The Po-2 was first flown in 1929 and remained in production until 1953 due to its low cost and extreme reliability. It is, in fact, the second most produced aircraft in history, and the most produced biplane in history. The night bombers flew brand new, specially modified Po-2s fitted with bomb racks and machine guns.

Fact 2: The Po-2 was extremely quiet; Germans nicknamed it the Nähmaschine (“sewing machine”) due to the muted rattling sound its tiny little 99-horsepower radial engine made. The night bombers would fly these quiet little planes just a few meters off the ground, then climb to higher altitude, cut the engine, and glide to the attack point so that the Germans would have no warning of an incoming attack other than wind whistling through the wing bracing-wires. It wasn’t because the engines were unreliable, it was a planned attack pattern.

Fact 3: Saying “their leader flew over 200 missions” is both inaccurate and damning with faint praise. Whereas most combat pilots fly only one or two sorties per day, all of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment pilots flew multiple missions every night, with the record being eighteen missions flown back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a single night. By the end of the war, most of the “Night Witches” had around a thousand combat sorties under their belts.

The Night Witches were THAT fucking badass, and it pisses me off when people get it all wrong because they’re too damn lazy to do their homework.

And this is one of the rare times the correction makes things more badass.

Wow, I now totally want to write the Temeraire-universe story of this regiment.

NIGHT WITCHES <3 <3 <3  

Love it when history posts update.

fun fact: national doughnut day was started on june 7, 1938 (1938!) by a military doctor named morgan pett and the salvation army as a way to distribute free doughnuts to wounded soldiers and the needy and to celebrate the women volunteers of the salvation army that distributed doughnuts to wounded soldiers during world war I. (ww1!)

fun fact: doughnut day ALWAYS falls on the first friday of june every year and honors those women volunteers as well as all of the soldiers that were wounded in battle. 

fun fact: D-Day occurred on june 6, 1944 (1944!) in Normandy with ~12,000 casualties.

fun fact: D-Day refers to the invasion of Normandy, code named Operation Neptune (because it was an amphibious assault), that eventually allowed the Allies access to Europe.

fun fact: the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

tumblr people, please stop saying that doughnut day is “appropriating” D-Day or that it’s disrespectful because it literally has nothing to do with D-Day and has actually been going on since before D-Day even occurred. it’s just a coincidence that the two fall on the same day this year.

Got A Girl Crush Obsession On: The Forgotten Lumberjills of WWII

Like the many other amazing heroines of their time, the ladies of the Women’s Timber Corps, aka the Lumberjills, stepped into unconventional britches in order to keep the industry, and country, moving while the men were off at war. Of course, there were also some major stereotypes which had to chopped down along the way:

Seriously, though. When someone inevitably makes a movie out of this, will someone please get a hold of me? I’ll need to raid the wardrobe.

Read more about the Lumberjills here!

Sarla Thakral was first Indian woman to fly. Born in 1914, she earned an aviation pilot license in 1936 at the age of 21. After obtaining the initial license, she completed one thousand hours of flying. While she was working towards a commercial pilot license, World War II broke out and civil training was suspended. Later, her husband, the first Indian to earn an airmail pilot’s license, died in a crash. She abandoned her plans to become a commercial pilot and joined the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, where she trained in the Bengal school of painting and obtained a diploma in fine arts. (Wiki)

Encouragement of not spreading sensitive information during WWII - Camp Hood, Texas 1943

Subtle.

February 22, 1943: Members of the White Rose are executed.

The White Rose (die Weiße Rose) was one of the most famous anti-Nazi resistance groups working within the borders of the Third Reich; their defiant opposition against Adolf Hitler and the atrocities and oppression of his government was and is especially remarkable when juxtaposed with the traditional image of the apathetic German citizen, oblivious to or unwilling to speak out against the crimes of their own leaders and military. The principal members of the organization were students from the University of Munich - Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf, Lilo Berndl, Jürgen Wittenstein, Falk Harnack, Christoph Probst, Traute Lafrenz, Katharina Schueddekopf, and Marie-Luise Jahn. Several had refused to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls ,(membership was, at that point in the war, compulsory), and most were motivated by moral reasons; some, as medical students, had witnessed the horrors of the war on the Eastern Front, atrocities committed by Germans against civilians, and the conditions of the Jewish ghettos in Warsaw and other cities. 

The White Rose’s main activity was spreading awareness through leaflets and pamphlets heavily influenced by religious texts, ancient philosophy, and traditional German writers, while avoiding detection by the Gestapo. The second of the six eventual leaflets (and a seventh draft) read:

Shortly after the total surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad (and on the same day as Joseph Goebbels’ “total war” speech), a custodian at the university witnessed the Scholl siblings distributing pamphlets at the school, and the two were soon taken into custody by the Gestapo to be interrogated. Hans and Sophie Scholl, along with Christoph Probst, were tried by the People’s Court in a hasty show trial, found guilty, and executed by guillotine all on the same day - February 22,1943. More members were executed in July and October of that year, and others connected to the organization were sentenced to prison terms; however, it was the Scholls, more than any other members of the White Rose, who became symbols of selfless resistance and martyrs in postwar Germany. 

- Leaflet Four

Portrait of Frieda Belinfante, reportedly dressed in men’s clothing to disguise herself from Nazi informers, 1943 Frieda Belinfante was a half-Jewish lesbian member of a gay resistance group called the CKC. She participated in the planning of the destruction of the Amsterdam Population Registry in March 1943, and was also active in falsifying identity cards and arranging hiding places for Jews and others sought by the Nazis. In December 1943, Belinfante escaped to Switzerland via Belgium and France. After the war, she returned briefly to Amsterdam and then emigrated to the United States.

February 28, 1933: The Reichstag Fire Decree is issued.

The February 27 arson attack on the Reichstag Building (the house of the Weimar-era parliament) took place just weeks after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The fire was pinned on communist subversives, and, while the actual motives of the arsonists remain a subject of debate to this day, the event indubitably benefited Hitler and his party and facilitated the process of their shift in power from simple domination to total control. 

The first step in this process following Hitler’s appointment and the Reichstag Fire was the Reichstag Fire Decree, which was promulgated immediately after the fire took place. As stated in the opening text of the decree, this act suspended “until further notice” entire articles of the Weimar Constitution using a different portion of the constitution (Article 48), which stated that the President could potentially suspend civil rights in cases of emergency. So it was done - the Fire Decree imposed

Shortly after the decree went into effect, the new regime arrested thousands of communists and suspected communists (including some party leaders), suppressed publications, and concentrated power into the hands of the central government - all for the sake of preventing an imagined Bolshevist takeover. After the Nazi Party failed to capture an absolute majority in parliament in the March 1933 election, Hitler used the March 23 Enabling Act to further tighten the Nazis’ grip on Germany through ostensibly constitutional means; the act granted the Chancellor and cabinet ministers the power to enact legislation over the Reichstag. These two acts, neither of which were abolished throughout Hitler’s rule, formed the basis for the Nazi totalitarian state. 

Pat Jennings Hitchcock of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, served as a “clubmobile girl” for the American Red Cross during World War II.

Intended to improve morale and provide a connection home, clubmobiles were converted buses staffed by women who prepared and served coffee and donuts to American soldiers stationed in Europe. In 2012, the volunteer service of Red Cross women who operated Clubmobiles during World War II was recognized by the US Senate. 

read more: letters home from Pat to her family, 1945; David Medaris, “Pat Hitchcock: Land Lover,” Isthmus, May 29, 2008

via: World War II Veterans of Mount Horeb, Mt. Horeb Public Library by way of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections

January 14, 1943: The Casablanca Conference begins.

Codenamed “SYMBOL”, this Allied conference was conducted in a hotel in Casablanca two months after the British-American invasion of French North Africa. Originally intended to be the first meeting of the war between the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin), the conference ended up settling with the Big Two plus the French - Churchill, Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud were the only leaders in attendance; the Russian leader was, reportedly, too occupied with his own nation’s ongoing efforts to drive out German forces. Notably, in attending the conference, Franklin Roosevelt became the first sitting American president to visit Africa and the first to leave the country during wartime. Among the issues discussed was a plan to invade the “soft underbelly of the Axis” - Italy, which would open up another front on continental Europe and hopefully relieve pressure off the Soviets. Another product of the conference was the Casablanca directive, plans for the bombing of strategic targets in Germany to be launched from Britain. 

But by far the single most significant product of this conference was the Casablanca Declaration, which announced to the world that the Allies would accept nothing less from the Axis powers than unconditional surrender, a phrase Roosevelt had lifted from the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. He assured that although this policy would ideally mean the end of the Axis threat forever, it was not aimed at the people of each respective nation but rather “the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people”.

Churchill and Stalin both disapproved of the policy, and it ended up serving as motivation for the Axis powers, now presented with two options by the Allies (total, crushing defeat and victory) to fight even harder. The Allied policy of “unconditional surrender” may have even prolonged the war in this way, and also because it was a useful propaganda tool in Axis countries. Late in the war, the Japanese made this statement, probably representative of many Axis attitudes toward unconditional surrender, to Soviet officials:

Rare Photo of the Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima Discovered in a Japanese Elementary School

From TIME.com’s series: (WARNING: Graphic content.)

The Nanjing Massacre: Scenes from a Hideous Slaughter 75 Years Ago

75 years ago, on Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of the Chinese republic led by Chiang Kai-shek and went on a six-week campaign of carnage and slaughter that would be forever remembered as the “Rape of Nanjing.” Reports document widespread rape and the indiscriminate killing of civilians; some death tolls estimate over a quarter of a million people were killed. The incident, though, still rankles Sino-Japanese relations. Japanese nationalists contend that the death tolls are inflated and the majority killed were resisting Japanese occupation. To this day, pages in Japanese school history textbooks can incite heated protests on the streets in China. Then and now, the Nanjing massacre remains one of the darkest events of the last century. — Ishaan Tharoor

Obit of the Day: “The Only Woman in the Room”

Beate (pronounced “bay-AH-tay”) Sirota Gordon was trying to find her parents. That was her goal. And while successful, Mrs. Gordon had a far greater influence on women’s rights in Japan, while helping to write its post-World War II constitution - at age of 22.

Mrs. Gordon was born in Vienna and moved to Japan when her father, noted pianist Leo Sirota, was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Moving there when she was five, Mrs. Gordon would stay in Japan for over a decade before leaving for Mills College in California when she was just sixteen.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, contact with Japan became impossible and Mrs. Gordon had no idea whether he parents were safe. While she continued to worry, Mrs. Gordon volunteered for the war effort. Fluent in Japanese, she was assigned to the United States War Information Office in San Francisco to listen in on Japanese radio communications. (Mills College allowed her to skip classes and simply take exams.)

In May 1945, Mrs. Gordon became a U.S. citizen and also graduated from college. Her parents still unaccounted for, Mrs. Gordon flew to Washington, D.C. to volunteer as an interpreter. She was assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s staff.

Setting foot in Japan for the first time in four years, Mrs. Gordon immediately set out to find her mother and father. They were being held in an internment camp and she was able to have them released and brought them back to Tokyo to nurse them back to health.

In February 1946, Mrs. Gordon and the rest of General MacArthur’s staff were ordered to write a new constitution for Japan. They had seven days.  Even with no experience in law or politics Mrs. Gordon was asked to handle the sections dealing with women’s rights.  Mrs. Gordon found herself wandering through the ruins of Tokyo looking for libraries with copies of constitutions from around the world.

When the constitution was finished she had written two articles:

Article 14

All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.

and

Article 24

Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of the both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equalities of the sexes.

These two passages gave women an equality not seen in Japan’s history.

When the constitution was formally published in March 1946, Mrs. Gordon and the other Americans who wrote the document went unacknowledged. It was important for the new Japanese government that they be given the credit for the constitution. Later Mrs. Gordon felt that he age and gender would only fan flames as conservatives in Japan attacked aspects of the document.

She took her rightful place in Japanese history with the publication of her memoir, The Only Woman in the Room, in 1995. (It was published in the U.S. in 1997.) Mrs. Gordon detailed her involvement in the formation of the constitution and instead of outrage she was fêted and praised. The Japanese government awarded The Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1998 and she was the subject of a play and a documentary.

Beate Sirota Gordon passed away on December 30, 2012 at the age of 89. She was the last surviving member of the American group who wrote the constitution.

Sources: New York Times, Japan Times, and The Gift from Beate

(Image of Mrs. Gordon’s War Department identification is courtesy of www.shinyawatanabe.net)