Western front-interesting bits of information

"On May 17 or 18, 1940 Hitler named Seyss-Inquart as executive for the Netherlands. His first order was to arrest German refugees who had come to the Netherlands since 1933;after ten days in a concentration camp they would be sent to Poland."

From " The architect of genocide " by Richard Breitman

 

Oberst Friemel was captured at Ypenburg May 10th 1940 and was shipped to England via the Dutch port of Scheveningen on 14 May. He was the highest ranking German prisoner of war until Generalmajor Johannes von Ravenstein was captured in North Africa 29 November 1941.( promotion to Generalmajor 1 January 1941. )

Generalmajor Georg Friemel

 

WOW! Very interesting by the way i never knew that the jagdpanther had a 88mm i thought it was a 85mm.

 

From Kampfgeschwader "Edelweiss" By Wolfgang Dierich:

On November 17th, 1939, the weather-men reckoned conditions were particularly favourable for a long-range leaflet raid by day. Twelve He 111´s from the Geschwader were used. Among the targets were Marseilles,Bordeaux,Nantes and Brest.

 

Some German West front pics...

 

Great thread K-P. Thanks.

 

About the generals
The French were doing things differently :starting with 2 stars (général de brigade) and finishing with 5 (full general),a Marshall of France (the last died in 1967:Juin,but Koenig was appointed posthumously in 1981) has 7;there is a story (maybe a myth that the military governor of Paris has 6)
The British are starting with 1 star(for a brigadier,but a brigadier is no general)
The Germans were starting with 2 (for a major general)(there was no brigadier general)and ending with 5 (for a colonel general);the Oberfuhrer of the WSS (some brigadier) also was no general),a german 4 star general was general of the infantry,cavalry (one in WWII :Westphal),artillery ,etc .
Till (? I forgot,maybe WWI) the highest rang in the US was lieutenant general (Grant was appointed general of the armies,but,was this a rang,or a function ?)
And in Spain there were (are ?) captain generals,but these were no rang ,but a function :commander of a military district .

 

Saw about this in a document about the resistance:

Battle of Marseille - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Marseille´s Roundup took place in the Old Port of Marseille, under the Vichy regime, on 22, 23 and 24 January 1943. Assisted by the French police, which was directed by René Bousquet, the Nazis organized a raid to arrest Jewish people. The police controlled the identity of 40,000 people, and the operation succeeded in sending 2,000 Marseillese people first to Fréjus, then to the camp of Royallieu near Compiègne, in the Northern Zone of France, and then to Drancy internment camp, last stop before the extermination camps. The operation also encompassed the expulsion of an entire neighborhood (30,000 persons) before its destruction. Located in the Old Port, the 1st arrondissement was considered by the Germans as a "terrorist nest" because of its small, windy and curvy streets.1,500 buildings were destroyed. For this occasion, SS Karl Oberg, in charge of the German Police in France, made the trip from Paris, and transmitted to Bousquet orders directly received from Himmler himself.

 

"Monsters" Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary could make three transatlantic trips a month, carrying around 15,000 troops. Between them they carried some 425,000 US troops to the United Kigdom, nearly one quarter of the total. The troops brought by these two ships allegedly shortened the war by a year.

" Britain´s war machine" by David Edgerton

 

" The Chain Home and Chain Home Low radars for fighter defence cost about £5m to December 1940, out of a total cost of RAF radar for reseach,equipment and operation of £10m.The army radar programme cost another £10m over the same dates, most of it concerned with air defence. By December 1940 very little was spent on naval radar. To put it another way, the total radar equipment installed by the end of 1940 cost about the same as a battleship (£10m) and was divided between the equipment to be used with fighters and that to be used with guns."

Britain´s war machine by David Edgerton

 

" Mulberry A was in operation for only three days when it was severely damaged by a storm on 19 June, so much so that it was not completed or repaired. Yet the Americans were able to continue to land huge quantities of material using landing craft and DUKW amphibious trucks on the Omaha beaches. In fact they landed more than the British did through Mulberry B, "Port Winston". The latter was used to land a prodigious quantity of stuff: from four days after D-day until the 31 October 1944, 628,000 tons of supplies, 40,000 vehicles and 220,000 troops were put ashore. An impressive total to be sure, but only 35% of British stores,17% of British vehicles and 23% of British personnel.It is telling also that the most effective part of the Mulberry system was the least innovative and best-known - the old-fashioned sunken ships, the Gooseberries, were more effective than anticipated. The Bombardon floating breakwaters, which Bernal was particularly keen on, were the least effective part."

From "Britain´s war machine" by David Edgerton

 

Kangaroo Raid Symbols ( of course ).

Noticed this for the first time in " The defence of the Reich" where a Lancaster bomber is down and several raid symbols are in one photo. The name of the last mission Mannheim was written in, but the Kangaroo symbol was never to be painted. p 39. Wonder if they did not think it brought bad luck to write in the target before the mission was over?

One example of the kangaroo Raid symbols:

Photo of unidentified Lancaster Bomber No.35 Sqdn and AirCrew, England, World War 2 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

 

"The 21st Army group had around 300 Fireflies at the beginning of the Normandy campaign, one for every three Shermans. The proportion of Fireflies increased to 50:50 as new HE ammunition for the 17-pounder became available."

"Britain´s war machine" by David Edgerton

 

Duplicate

 

Some corrections:

In Waffen-SS Oberführer was a general rank before rank of Brigadeführer (und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS) was introduced in 1932 as a first General rank.

In Heer Generalmajor, equivalent of UK/US Brigadier (General), had no stars.
Generalleutnant, equivalent of UK/US Major General, had one star.
General der Infanterie etc., equivalent of UK/US Lieutenant General, had two stars.
Generaloberst (Colonel General), equivalent of UK/US General, had three stars.
Generalfeldmarschall, equivalent of UK/US Field Marshal/General of the Army, had crossed batons of marshal.

Usually the rank of Brigadier (General) is considered to be a General rank.

 

When the battles in the west were coming towards the German border there was need to prepare the Siegfrid line ready. However the Germans had a big starting problem. Nobody knew where the keys to the bunkers were...

 

In 1942 Luftwaffe pilots had 210 hours of flying experience when joining their operational unit. By 1943 this had fallen to 136 hours.
From "To win the Winter sky" By Danny Parker
Sorry not hours for 1944 mentioned.

 

The most direct consequence of the Anglo-American air campaign to the forces in the East was its impact on the Luftwaffe. German AA artillery and related ammunition represented about a quarter of German artillery and munitions output by 1944, due to the demands of Reich defence. This had a direct impact on the ability of the industry to supply the artillery demands of the German army.

Bagration 1944, by Steven J Zaloga

 

In the Belton Y Cooper´s "Death traps" on tanks that would be repaired for new battles after their original crews had died in battle.They cleaned the tank inside of the remains and blood. It seems that the tank would be good as long as the electic circuits were ok in the turret but even if the tank was very little damaged but the electric circuits were burnt then the tank was no good anymore. But the smell of "death" could never be removed.

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Thinking about getting a tank whose crew had died inside and even if it had been cleaned supernice I´d especially hate to going to battle in one.

 

Just how fragile the situation in the western camp was during invasion:

The issuance of invasion currency to Allied troops: Like many other French civil affairs questions this had been discussed by French and Allied representatives since 1943, and had bogged down. on the issue of the sovereignty of the French Committee. In an effort to avoid depreciating French currency by issuing yellow-seal dollars and British Military Authority notes to the troops, as in Italy, the British and U.S. authorities arranged in December 1943 to print special invasion money in Washington for the use of the armies. Before this could be done, the British Ambassador "unexpectedly" notified the State Department that his government preferred a French national currency issued by the French Committee of National Liberation. The immediate effect was to delay any decision on the issue for a number of weeks. To bring the matter to a head, the British Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, appealed to General Eisenhower at the end of January 1944, reminding him that currency was "a vital if uninteresting necessity to successful operations."2 If General Eisenhower had ever doubted the necessity of settling such problems promptly, he had sufficient reason to change his mind when they continued to reappear in the spring and summer of 1944.

In early May, General Eisenhower forwarded to Washington proposals based on preliminary discussions with the French Military Mission in London regarding the whole financial situation in France. After a period of three weeks, having received no direction on the problem, he proposed as "a solution of desperation" to issue a proclamation declaring the supplemental francs legal tender. The Supreme Commander and his chief of staff doubted their legal right to issue such a proclamation and feared it would be considered a flagrant violation of French sovereignty, but they felt they would have to take such action unless they received other instructions by 28 May.

No agreement had been reached with the French by the time General de Gaulle reached London shortly before D Day. He was dissatisfied when he found that limited quantities of supplemental francs in small denominations had actually been given to British and U.S. soldiers in the assault units, and that larger quantities were ready when needed to supplement the five and one-half billion metropolitan francs put at the disposal of Allied forces by the War Office. His anger at this assumption of what he considered to be a prerogative of the French Committee of National Liberation apparently influenced him to forbid the 180 French liaison officers trained for civil affairs duties to sail with the assault units on D Day. He finally relented sufficiently to permit twenty liaison officers to accompany Allied troops. ( ON Collins-Lapierre "Is Paris burning?" the total number was 500 liaison officers with 20 to sail on D-day...)

HyperWar: US Army in WWII: The Supreme Command (ETO) [Chapter 13]