Mike’s Comments (group member since Feb 18, 2012)

Mike’s comments from the THE WORLD WAR TWO GROUP group.

Now:$1.99
. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison E. Salisbury

All great posts AR. I admire the Luftwaffe pilot skill and expertise but not sad at the losses. Every loss of a high victory ace meant many USAAF, RAF, French, Canadian, Polish, etc aircrew would survive.

Liz V. wrote: "Diary of Chinese officer observing D-Day
https://apnews.com/article/dday-hong-..."

Great story Liz, thanks.

Today:

$2.99:

The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Bob Drury

A couple today:

$0.99:

Swift Sword: The True Story of the Marines of MIKE 3/5 in Vietnam, 4 September 1967 by Doyle D. Glass I've been looking for this one for awhile

$1.99:

Their Finest Hour by Winston S. Churchill


$2.99:

Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre
Peiper's War: The Wartime Years of SS Leader Jochen Peiper, 1941–44 by Danny S. Parker
The Blue Water War: The Maritime Struggle in the Mediterranean and Middle East, 1940–1945 by Brian Walter

'Aussie Rick' wrote: "where the airfield workshop there set about installing a 3.7 cm Flak 43 light anti-aircraft gun in the Messerschmitt. This weapon promised a higher rate of fire (240 rounds per minute) than the same calibre Flak 18 (60 rounds per minute). ..."

I bet that aircraft shook like heck when they fired the gun.

Corsica had advantages...a one slightly major problem:

Corsica…would soon be known to the Americans stationed there as “USS Corsica.” But in their location in the central Mediterranean, the crew of that unsinkable aircraft carrier was in dangerous waters. The “bomb line” on the Italian mainland—the point at which Allied bombing posed no danger to Allied troops on the ground—was far south of the island. German occupied airfields were less than thirty minutes’ flying time away. The Allied bombers flying from Corsica were in effect operating behind enemy lines.

Around 2200 hours on the night of May 13….Ninety Junkers Ju-88 bombers of the first and second Gruppen of the famous Lehrgeschwader I, led by Oberst Joachim Helbig, a veteran of 460 missions since September 1939, had crossed out of northern Italy at sea level, thus avoiding Allied radar on Corsica. Their target was Borgo Poreta, home of the 1st, 52nd, and 324th Fighter Groups. The German bombers dropped fragmentation bombs and incendiaries from six thousand feet. The resultant damage was extensive, with over fifty Spitfires of the 52nd Fighter Group destroyed as well as many P-38s from the 1st Fighter Group and more than half of the P-47s of the 324th.

Alesani airdrome was roused at 0230 hours by the sounds of explosions on the field. The German bombers had returned to their base, rearmed and refueled, and flown back to do more damage. Again led by Helbig, they had returned to Corsica accompanied by sixty additional Ju-88s of Kampfgeschwader 76. Surprise was complete, and the Germans lost no bombers. Twenty-two Americans were killed and another 219 wounded in the attacks on the two airfields. These two raids were the last major bombing attacks made by the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations.

Sixty-five B-25s had been destroyed.

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing

Today's entrees:
$1.99

Slaughter at Sea: The Story of Japan's Naval War Crimes by Mark Felton

$2.99
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis by Suzanne Cope Looks like a newly published account.

French Corsica was not on the list of places to be liberated until a partisan uprising began. The fascist Italian army had occupied the island when Germany took over all the Vichy French areas after November 42. The Maquis uprising was reinforced with a small French army force. Many of the Italian forces switched sides to fight with the partisans, bringing the German army in. The Allies now saw Corsica as an “aircraft carrier” close to the action and supported the liberation:

This action (French troop landing) prompted the Germans to attack the Italian troops as well as the French. The Corsican partisans and French troops, with the Italian 44th Infantry Division Cremona and 20th Infantry Division Friuli, engaged in heavy combat with the Waffen-SS troops of the Sturmbrigade Reichsftihrer SS and the Wehrmacht’s 90 Panzergrenadier division. The situation was further confused by the fact that the German units were supported by the Italian 12th Parachute Battalion of the 184th Parachute Regiment, whose troops came from Sardinia and were loyal to the Fascist cause. The Axis force retreated through Corsica from Bonifacio towards the northern harbor of Bastia. On September 13, elements of the Free French 4th Moroccan Mountain Division landed in the port of Ajaccio to block the 30,000 retreating Axis troops. During the night of October 3-4, 1943, the last German units evacuated Bastia, leaving behind 700 dead and 350 prisoners of war.

Shortly after the island was liberated, the French began construction of four airfields that they planned to use for operations by the Free French Armée de l’Air over southern France. The USAAF soon offered to assist in developing and expanding these airfields in return for permission to base aircraft on the island. It was obvious that Corsica was a strategic location: targets in southern France and Austria as well as all of northern Italy and even Yugoslavia across the Adriatic Sea would be within range of bombers based there.

Corsica would become a primary operating location for the USAAF forces.

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

'Aussie Rick' wrote: ""Additionally, the pilot's seat was fortified by five-millimetre steel plates and a 12 mm head protection panel.
..."

I'd have appreciated the extra protection if my job was to fly into a formation of bombers bristling with 50 cal machine guns!

The 88 B-25's of the 340th Bomb Wing were damaged beyond repair by the falling ash and debris from the volcano:

But now rocks as big as grapefruits were falling from the sky and smashing cockpit canopies, plastic gun turrets and bombardier “greenhouses.” The bombers were covered with hot ash, which burned away the fabric-covered control surfaces and glazed, melted, or cracked the Plexiglas turrets, canopies, and bombardier’s greenhouses. Volcanic ash and tephra seeped through openings and filled the aircraft. The weight tipped them on their tails.

All the aircraft were replaced within a week by brand-new B-25Js. What an industrial powerhouse we had.

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing

This book is a collection of accounts from several bombing formations and not strictly an account of Heller's unit. An interesting account of the impact of Mt Vesuvius's eruption:

“Never had we seen such. As we watched the streams, like giant fingers flowing down the sides, we could see a glow in the sky.”

The next morning, on the other side of the airfield, First Lieutenant Dana Craig from the 486th Bomb Squadron sat next to the ruin of what had been his barracks and wrote of the damage wrought the previous night in the first eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a hundred and fifty years,

About midnight, I went out of my billet to answer the call of nature. While outside, in a mild drizzle, I was hit on the head by what I thought was a small rock. Suspecting some sort of joke, I went inside for a flashlight. When I returned, the light revealed a layer of damp cinders on the ground. We began to feel the earth shake as though a bomb had gone off. ....About daylight, the rear of our building started to cave in. We then began to see the larger rocks coming down. By this time everyone was wearing his steel helmet and heavy sheepskin flying jacket for protection from the falling rocks.

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

On Sale:

$1.99:
War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott
Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty-two Days That Decided World War II by David Downing

'Aussie Rick' wrote: "I've just downloaded two Kindle books by Jack Bowsher covering armoured warfare in Burma during WW2.

[book:Forgotten Armour: Tank Warfa..."

I'm tempted to download the Thunder Run ebook. Maybe even before you read and review it AR. Nice series of acquisitions.

At all the ebook sites for:

$2.99

The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II by Antony Beevor

Paul wrote: "Good books as usual, Mike! Thanks for taking the time! (And I do like audio books, so I might check those out as well!)"

You are welcome. I wish I could get into audio books but I just can't seem to focus for more than a few minutes before I start to have to rewind.

The mission for the BridgeBusters, cost 46 aircraft and over 500 KIA/WIA from the start to the end:

On November 1, 1944, the Allied Fifth and Eighth Armies halted their offensive in northern Italy, unable to break the German defenses on the Gothic Line after sixty continuous days of bloody fighting. That same day, the quartermaster general of the German Army Group C, which manned the Gothic Line with the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies, reported the army was receiving 24,000 tons of supplies daily through the Brenner Pass—600 percent of daily minimum needs—with trains taking eight to twelve hours to travel from Munich and Augsburg in Germany, arriving every 30 minutes at the Bologna marshalling yard, the center of the Webrmacht’s supply system for the Italian front. So long as this level of supply could be maintained, he stated, the armies should be able to hold out indefinitely in the war of attrition they had forced on the Allies in Italy.

On November 6, 1944, the three bomb groups of the 57th Bomb Wing based on the island of Corsica flew their first missions of “Operation Bingo” against the electrical transformers of the rail line that powered the electric trains. Within a week, supplies were reduced to 10,000 tons per day....

On March 31, 1945, Army Group C’s quartermaster general reported that an average of 1,800 tons of supplies had arrived daily during the previous month, only 45 percent of minimum needs, with each shipment taking four to six days to make the journey through the blasted rail line, which was completely closed for over half those days.

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

If you like audiobooks, Chirp has some deals:

Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany
No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan’s Last Chance to Avert Armageddon


Between $1.99 to $3.99

A few today:

$1.99:

The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest[author:Stephen E. Ambrose Rescue of World War II|1094635] by Judith M. Heimann
Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper by Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany by

Still the best passage about fighting in a war:

YOSSARIAN Is Orr crazy?

DOC DANEEKA Of course he is. He has to be crazy to keep flying after all the close
calls he’s had.

YOSSARIAN Why can’t you ground him?

DOC DANEEKA I can, but first he has to ask me.

YOSSARIAN That’s all he’s gotta do to be grounded?

DOC DANEEKA That’s all.

YOSSARIAN Then you can ground him?

DOC DANEEKA No, Then I cannot ground him.

YOSSARIAN Aah!

DOC DANEEKA There's a catch.

YOSSARIAN A catch?

DOC DANEEKA Sure. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn’t really
crazy, so I can’t ground him.

YOSSARIAN OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.

DOC DANEEKA You got it, that’s Catch-22.

YOSSARIAN Whoo... That’s some Catch, that Catch-22.,

DOC DANEEKA It’s the best there is.

—Catch-22 screenplay by Buck Henry adapted from the novel by Joseph Heller

The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver