World War I & II topic

Cool, I'll check that out sometime. We are just there for a long weekend and will not be heading to Denver, but I am guessing I will get there at some point
 
I'll try to post a reminder next year, but since you live in Dallas, in April is an annual Air show in the West Houston Airport. It is a display of WW II aircraft from both the Allies and Axis. Also I have met vets from WWII there who have their own photographs. One of them showed me a photo he took of Hiroshima. There is also a cool small (very small) museum of WWII with uniforms, artifacts, magazines, etc.
If you want to pay a few hundred, you can ride in the aircraft.
 
1.300 illegal WWII newspapers will be disclosed via Wikipedia.

Presentation at the SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries), an annual conference focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations done in Bonn, last November.

Abstract: During the second World War some 1.300 illegal newspapers were issued by the Dutch resistance. Right after the war as many of these newspapers as possible were physically preserved by Dutch memory institutions. They were described in formal library catalogues that were digitized and brought online in the ‘90s. In 2010 the national collection of underground newspapers – some 200.000 pages – was full-text digitized in Delpher, the national aggregator for historical full-texts. Having created online metadata and full-texts for these publications, the third pillar ''context'' was still missing, making it hard for people to understand the historic background of the newspapers. We are currently running a project to tackle this contextual problem. We started by extracting contextual entries from a hard-copy standard work on Dutch illegal press and combined these with data from the library catalogue and Delpher into a central LOD triple store. We then created links between historically related newspapers and used Named Entity Recognition to find persons, organisations and places related to the newspapers. We further semantically enriched the data using DBPedia. Next, using an article template to ensure uniformity and consistency, we generated 1.300 Wikipedia article stubs from the database. Finally, we sought collaboration with the Dutch Wikipedia volunteer community to extend these stubs into full encyclopedic articles. In this way we can give every newspaper its own Wikipedia article, making these WW2 materials much more visible to the Dutch public, over 80% of whom uses Wikipedia. At the same time the triple store can serve as a source for alternative applications, like data visualizations. This will enable us to visualize connections and networks between underground newspapers, as they developed over time between 1940 and 1945.
 
I was in Oklahoma City last week and visited the 45th Infantry Division Museum, very impressive. The museum itself is in what used to be the Officer's Club for the division.

Highlights included the collection of Bill Mauldin Collection, he was a famous cartoonist during the war, very popular. They have his original drawings complete with correction marks. An extensive weapons collection from the Revolutionary War up to today. An exhibit on the liberation of Dachau, items "liberated" from Hitler's apartment in Munich (clothes, plates, silver, etc), and a collection of tanks, planes, heavy weapons outside .. which I did not see much of (it was very cold, windy, and dumping snow). The collection was displayed very nicely from the Revolutionary War through today with a main emphasis on WWII and Korea.

Admission was free, former members of the division make up the volunteer staff.

The non-impressive website

http://45thdivisionmuseum.com/
 
Clare Hollingworth (105) died. Obituary

Clare Hollingworth was the war correspondent who broke the news that German troops were poised to invade Poland at the start of World War Two.

... her depth of technical, tactical and strategic insight set her apart.
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And, even as she approached her 11th decade, she still kept her passport by her bed in case she should be called to another assignment. ...

... While driving back to Poland, having bought wine, torches and as much film as possible, she passed through a valley in which huge hessian screens had been erected. As the wind blew one of the screens back, it revealed thousands of troops, together with tanks and artillery, all facing the Polish border. Her report featured on the front page of the Daily Telegraph on 29 August, 1939. Less than a week after becoming a full-time journalist, she had scooped one of the biggest stories of the 20th Century. Three days later, Hollingworth saw the German tanks rolling into Poland. But when she phoned the secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw, he told her it could not be true as negotiations between Britain and Germany were still continuing.


"So I hung the telephone receiver out of the window," Hollingworth later recalled, "So he could listen to the Germans invading."

Working on her own, often behind enemy lines, with nothing more than a toothbrush and a typewriter, she witnessed the collapse of Poland before moving to Bucharest, where she realised that her marriage was over.
"I thought that for me - and in a different kind of way for him - my career was more important than trying to rush back home," she reflected later. ...


 
Watching The Pacific. Very well done HBO mini-series by Spieldberg and Hanks (like Band of Brothers) about the Marines in the Pacific during WWII. I did not know anything about Peleliu. Pacific version of D-Day as far as the bloody toll to not only take the beach, but then the rest of the island as well! The highest casualty rate on the US side of any amphibious operation in the Pacific during the war.
 
Brunhilde Pomsel, the personal stenographer of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during the last three years of World War II and one of the last surviving members of Adolf Hitler’s retinue in his final days in a Berlin bunker, died on Friday at her home in Munich. She was 106.

Her death was confirmed on Sunday by Christian Kroenes, a director and producer of the documentary film “A German Life,” in which Ms. Pomsel was interviewed, The Associated Press reported.

A trusted Nazi Party loyalist, Ms. Pomsel was the private secretary of Goebbels from 1942 until the war’s end in 1945, taking his dictation and transcribing documents, letters, diary entries and other business of that virulently anti-Semitic propaganda chief, who rigidly controlled the news media, the arts, radio broadcasting and films in Nazi Germany

Rest here

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...fall-dies-at-106/ar-AAmoFhA?OCID=ansmsnnews11

Not enough people named Brunhilde any more
 
Poland puts Auschwitz-Birkenau staff database online

Poland has published the first online database featuring the names and personal details of nearly 10,000 staff who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.

The database, which the IPN said contained 9,686 names, is part of a wide-ranging project that will cover the staff of other death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland during the second world war, the IPN chairman, Jarosław Szarek, told reporters in Kraków.

The work of historian Aleksander Lasik, the institute and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, it is based on a list that Lasik built during more than 30 years of archival research.

“The world justice system has failed and I’m doing what a historian should do: expose the responsible individuals as war criminals,” Lasik said.

Up to 200 former guards at the German death camp could still be living, he claimed.

The online list of Auschwitz guards and commanders is available in Polish, English and German. Most entries include date and place of birth, nationality, education, military service and party affiliation. Some have a photograph attached. Judicial documents are included when the person stood trial in Poland.
 
Today, the USS Indianapolis wreck was located by Paul Allen's 'USS Indianapolis Project, at a depth of 5,500 m below sea level. This flagship carried (parts for) the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Sunk by Japanese torpedoes on July 30th 1945.

Her sinking led to the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. On 30 July 1945, after a high-speed trip to deliver parts for Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used in combat, to the United States air base at Tinian, the ship was torpedoed by the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-58 while on her way to the Philippines, sinking in 12 minutes. Of 1,196 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 900 faced exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks while floating with few lifeboats and almost no food or water. The Navy learned of the sinking when survivors were spotted four days later by the crew of a PBY Catalina on routine patrol. Only 317 survived.

Sites about today's news:
http://www.wgal.com/article/uss-indianapolis-discovered-18-000-feet-below-pacific-surface/12037363

&

https://news.usni.org/2017/08/19/uss-indianapolis-wreckage-found

Anchor and ship's bell seen here:
https://twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/898946312451653632/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=http://www.wgal.com/article/uss-indianapolis-discovered-18-000-feet-below-pacific-surface/12037363


Off Mare Island, on 10 July 1945:
1280px-USS_Indianapolis_%28CA-35%29_off_the_Mare_Island_Naval_Shipyard_on_10_July_1945_%2819-N-86911%29.jpg



In Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1937:
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Still wrong. It should look like this:

normandy-beach-dday-plan-map-570x374.jpg


It's surprisingly hard to find a map that gets the flags right - both the US and the Canadian ones. Sure, it's a detail, but if you're going to put the flags in, do it right.
 
It's surprisingly hard to find a map that gets the flags right - both the US and the Canadian ones. Sure, it's a detail, but if you're going to put the flags in, do it right.
48 stars! Red Ensign! At least the UK hasn't changed.
 
But the flags will be done wrong after Scotland leaves the UK. Fortunately, I haven't seen a D-Day map that has the black/red/gold one for Germany, although that would be exactly as inaccurate.
 
I went to the Hungarian Military Museum this morning, very cool. Excellent exhibits, the place was pretty massive, I saw the World War I, interwar, and WW II , and Cold War parts in depth, I somewhat skimmed past the rest. Very nicely put together to tell those periods of history.
 
...and it was a treaty cruiser. Boats of same classes commissioned in WW2 were even 10-15% thicker.
 
Peter Jackson, best known for directing The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is developing a new film using original footage from Imperial War Museums’ extensive archive, much of it previously unseen, alongside BBC interviews with servicemen who fought in the conflict.
 
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