Military journal edition 8 2017

M AG A Z I N E

FREE DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION -INDEPENDENT AND MUCH APPRECIATED With historical and contemporary Military issues

BIMONTHLY EDITION

Issue 08 2017

Juli-September

Military Journal

CONTENT Editors note / 3

CHANCE VOUGHT F4U CORSAIR - DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT: / 60

The battles of Ligny / 4 A6M ZERO - DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT / 63 The heydrich equation / 11 COLOFON / 67 Inside the secret world of Russia’s Cold War mapmakers / 23

Advertisement Annual Convention IMOS 2017 / 68

Internment of British sailor/soldiers of

Other Advertisements onwards from page / 69

The(63rd)Royal Naval Division in Groningen / 35 Back Page information / 72 The Forgotten Irish Volunteers / 42 Abandoned bases of the RAF’s Martime Arm / 49 Lithuania vs U.S.S.R / 54

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EDITORS NOTE: ON THE VISOR

EDITOR IN CHIEF: ROB VANEKER

ISRAEL;THE SIXDAY WAR

In mid-1967, Israel’s enemy was formidable: the Syrians and Egyptians were then in a military pact and had just been joined by Jordan and Iraq.

Syrian troops were preparing for battle along the Golan Heights. Egypt was moving troops into the Sinai, ordering the United Nations troops out of the Sinai, and then closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel had put its troops on the alert, and waited. Something had to give. The decisive move, however, did came not come from a foreign army. It came, instead, from inside the Israeli cabinet when, on June 1st, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol surrendered the Defense Portfolio to Israel's legendary one-eyed warrior, Moshe Dayan. This, Ben-Gurion saw, was the answer to the "grave national peril"Ben-Gurion's prediction was spot-on. The Israeli cabinet, having determined on June 4th "that the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan are deployed for a multifront attack that threatens Israel's existence,” resolved to put an end to the period of waiting and to initiate, instead, strategic strikes "aimed at liberating Israel from encirclement and preventing the impending assault by the United Arab Command."Thus, in a surprise attack just after dawn on June 5th, Israel struck. Just 2 hours and 50 minutes later, the Egyptian Air Force was utterly destroyed, smoldering on the ground; four other Arab air forces likewise fell within the next 36 hours.

50 years ago,1967

With their dominating victory over three powerful Arab States in the Six-Day-War, Israel changed the world. It moved the Arab world from pan-Arab nationalism to every country for its-self, it established that underdog Israel was no longer the underdog, and she was going to be around for a long time.

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By:Peter Marinus & Robert Wilbrink

THE BATTLES OF LIGNY

Command of the left wing was given to Marshal Michel Ney, a very brave and inspiring leader, but unsuited to independent command. Emmanuel de Grouchy, a fine cavalry commander with little experience of infantry, was promoted to Marshal after the battle of Ligny on 16 June and put in command of the right wing. Marshal LouisNicholas Davout, Napoleon’s best Marshal, was left in Paris as its Governor and Minister of War. Davout on the right and Soult on the left were Napoleon’s best options for wing commanders.The Emperor also declined to employ Joachim Murat commander of the Napoleonic Wars. He had good reasons to do so: Murat had defected to the enemy in 1814 and then attacked the Austrians in Italy too soon in 1815. His consequent rout at Tolentino on 2-3 May allowed the Austrians to redeploy troops from Italy to France. Grouchy would have been a good alternative, but Napoleon did not appoint an overall cavalry commander.

And Quatre Bras 16 june 1815 The first stage of Napoleon’s 1815 campaign was to concentrate the 123,000 men of his Armée du Nord just south of the junction of the Duke of Wellington’s 112,000 Anglo-Dutch Army and Prince Gerbhard von Blücher’s 130,000 Prussians.

Napoleon’s plan was to position his army between his two enemies, preventing them uniting. He would then defeat one of them, making it retreat along its line of supply and leaving it unable to support its ally, which Napoleon could then turn on.The Emperor had an experienced army with high morale. but he made a number of ‘unsuitable appointments’ to high command.[His long serving chief of staff, Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, had fallen from a window to his death on 1 June: whether this was an accident, murder or suicide has never been resolved. However, Napoleon had already given this job to Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, an experienced battlefield commander who had never held such a position. The best choice would have been Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet, who was instead commanding the Army of the Alps.

JOACHIM MURAT King of Naples,best cavalry Commander of the Napoleonic Wars

TOP LEFT: LOUIS-ALEXANDRE BERTHIER, PRINCE DE WAGRAM MARSHAL OF FRANCE

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officers were attending the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels on the evening of 15 June.

WELLINGTONS ARMY

About 2 pm on 15 June General Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque, the Prince of Orange’s chief of staff, authorised General Count PerponcherSedlnitzberg, commander of the 2nd DutchBelgian Division, to move Prince Bernhard of SaxeWeimar’s brigade of Nassauers to the crossroads at Quatre-Bras, a vital junction on the road from Charleroi.

WELLINGTON’S ARMY WAS A MULTINATIONAL ONE. They included Dutch and Belgians from the Netherlands army and a large number of Germans, including men from Brunswick, Hannover and Nassau, plus the King’s German Legion, who were Germans in British service. The quality of Wellington’s troops was mixed. Some were veterans, whilst others were inexperienced conscripts. Many of the veteran British troops and commanders had been sent to North America to fight in the War of 1812. Major-General John Lambert, who had taken over command at New Orleans after his superiors were killed or wounded, returned home in time to also fight at Waterloo, but many others were still in or on the way home from North America. The veteran Dutch-Belgians had obtained their experience fighting for Napoleon.

Ney had sent 2,000 cavalrymen under General Charles Lefebvre-Desnouëttes to reconnoitre ahead of the main body of the left wing of the Armée du Nord. They encountered Bernhard’s advance guard, which retired on the rest of his brigade.

At 8 pm Rebecque authorised the other brigade of Perponcher’s division, Dutch-Belgians commanded by the Count of Bylandt, to move from Nivelle to Quatre Bras. Soon afterwards Rebecque received an order sent by Wellington in the afternoon that stated that all of Perponcher’s division should move to Nivelle. Rebecque showed it to Perponcher, saying nothing, and the latter decided to ignore it. David Chandler quotes the British general and military historian J. T. Fuller as saying that ‘this act of intelligent insubordination saved Blücher’, adding that it also ‘saved Wellington’s reputation.’Geoffrey Wootten argues that Perponcher and Bernhard showed ‘the benefits of their French training at Quatre Bras where bold initiative and intelligence – the hallmark of the French approach – were to be critical to Wellington’s survival and eventual success.’[ However, Perponcher’s 8,000 infantry, 16 guns and 50 cavalry were faced by Ney’s 25,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 60 guns, with 20,000 more French close behind and another French corps and the Imperial Guard expected.

One of Wellington’s corps commanders was the very experienced British General Sir Rowland Hill but the other was the very inexperienced 22 year old Prince of Orange. His second in command and cavalry commander was the Earl of Uxbridge. He was a much better cavalry general than Wellington had had for most of the Peninsular War, but their personal relations were poor, since Uxbridge had eloped with Wellington’s sister-in-law. The army did have good division commanders, both British and Germans who had gained their experience fighting against Napoleon and Dutch and Belgians who had fought for him.Over half of Blücher’s army consisted of Landwehr, who were inexperienced and poorly equipped but often highly patriotic. There were also a number of men from parts of Germany that only became Prussian in 1814, many of whom had fought for Napoleon until then. They included 14,000 Saxons and Silesians who mutinied and had to be disarmed before the campaign even began.

Reports of the French advance reached Wellington during the ball. He realised that a move by Napoleon towards Mons was a feint to draw his army west in order to protect its line of supply. He told the Duke of Richmond that Napoleon had ‘humbugged me…He has gained 24 hours’ march on me…I have ordered the army to concentrate at Quatre Bras; but we shall not stop him there, and if so, I must fight him here’, pointing to Waterloo on the map.

The French began to move at 2:30 am on 15 June, taking Blücher and ‘especially’ Wellington by surprise. The Duke and many of his senior

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Left: Honoré Charles Michel Joseph, conte Reille, generale

Fall back Napoleon expected Wellington to fall back and had therefore planned to attack him before he could concentrate his army. He told Ney of this verbally, but the exhausted Emperor did not dictate his written orders until 6 am, four hours later than his usual practice.

There was a further two hour delay before they left his HQ, and Ney did not receive his written orders until 10:30 am. They told him to ‘hold yourself in readiness for an immediate advance towards Brussels once the Reserve reaches you’ so he issued no orders until 11 am and did not attack until 2 pm, by when Wellington reinforcements were arriving. Wellington reached Quatre Bras at 9:30 am, saw that the French were cooking food and headed to Ligny to meet Blücher.The attack

by General Honoré Charles Reille’s II Corps began at 2 pm. It was initially successful and had broken through the thin defensive line by 3 pm. However, Sir Thomas Picton’s 5th Division then arrived and stabilised the situation. Wootten notes that if ‘Reille had started just a short while earlier…the battle would now have been over almost before it had started.’ The arrival of Picton’s 8,000 men meant that 25,000 French troops were now facing 17,000 defenders.About 4 pm Ney received a message sent at 2 pm ordering him to attack and drive back whatever force he was facing, before turning to envelop Blücher. However, he did not

realise that his sector was now the secondary one: Blücher’s forward disposition had made Napoleon to make the Prussians at Ligny rather than the Anglo-Dutch at Quatre Bras the main target.

Ney sent an aide to hurry the advance of the 20,000 men of the Comte D’Erlon’s I Corps to Quatre Bras. However, the Comte de la Bedoyère, carrying orders to Ney to send I Corps against the Prussian flank encountered I Corps before he met Ney. De la Bedoyère sent it towards Ligny, but an error meant that it headed for the French rather the Prussian flank. Ney was furious when he discovered this; soon afterwards the appearance of another of Wellington’s divisions led him to send a message ordering I Corps back to Quatre Bras. It had nearly reached Ligny when the message arrived; it ended up fighting in neither battle.

Continued on page 8

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Orginal map 1815

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BRITISH SQUARES At 4:15 pm British squares beat off an attack by French lancers at the expense of heavy casualties More reinforcements were arriving, giving Wellington 26,000 men and 42 guns. At 5 pm Ney ordered General François Étienne de Kellermann to attack with his heavy cavalry, although only one of his four brigades had arrived. The charge almost succeeded, catching two British infantry battalions in line, but it lacked infantry and light cavalry support and was thrown back by fire from a King’s German Legion gun battery and two British infantry battalions.

By 6:30 pm Wellington had 36,000 men and 70 guns, outnumbering Ney. He counter-attacked and by 9 pm had regained almost all the ground lost earlier in the day. Total casualties (dead, wounded, captured and missing) were 4,100 French and 4,850 Coalition, 250 of the latter in the retreat the next day.The main French attack, however, had been made against the Prussians at Ligny. The Prussian defence was based along the Ligny, a marshy stream that was hard to cross other than at its four bridges. A defensive line based on ten villages and hamlets covered them. The ground rose to the rear. However, the defensive line was vulnerable to flanking fire and troops on the forward slope could be bombarded by artillery. Napoleon intended to demonstrate with cavalry on the Prussian left whilst attacking their right and centre. When Ney appeared on their right the Guard would destroy the Prussian centre.

PORTRAIT OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON ARTIST Fransisco Goya: Year : 1812-14

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Left: Napoleon at Ligny.Potograph source Public Domain

The Prussians had 84,000 men, including 8,000 cavalry, and 224 guns to defend seven miles.

Despite the favourable terrain, this was too few to defend that distance: 20,000 men per mile were then believed to be needed in defence. The Prussians hoped that a further 31,000 of their troops plus Wellington’s force would support them, but the former were too far away and the latter too heavily engaged. The French had 68,000 infantry, 12,500 cavalry and 210 guns, but could choose where to concentrate their attack and expected support from Ney. The attack began at 2:30 pm. Napoleon assumed that Ney had taken Quatre Bras and was heading for Ligny, since no gunfire had been heard from that direction.Grouchy’s cavalry on the French right pinned the Prussian left. A fierce battles for the Ligny stream and the villages beside it took place in the centre and on the Prussian right, French left. The Prussian reserve infantry was drawn up close enough to the line to be bombarded by French artillery, but too far away to use their muskets to support their front line.

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At 3:15 pm Napoleon sent an order telling Ney to envelop the Prussian right and rear. Almost immediately, he received news of Quatre Bras, so ordered that only D’Erlon’s I Corps should move to Ligny. Shortly afterwards, he realised that he had left the 10,000 men of the Comte de Lobau’s VI Corps near Charleroi without any orders, so ordered them to Ligny.

By 5 pm Blücher had been forced to commit virtually all his reserves, but Napoleon still had 10,000 fresh troops. He intended to launch his Imperial Guard at 6 pm to strike the decisive blow, but about 20,000 men then appeared on the French left flank, causing the French troops there to waver. At first they were assumed to be hostile, but by 6:30 pm it was apparent that they were the French I Corps in the wrong place.

D’Erlon had failed to follow the normal practice of sending officers ahead of his force. Napoleon ordered him to the correct place on the Prussian right flank, but by the time that the messenger arrived I Corps was on its way back to Quatre Bras.

LED NOW BY BLÜCHER Blücher now led personally a counter attack by six battalions, which briefly retook the village of St Amand, but the French rallied and recaptured it. The Guard finally attacked at 7:30 pm in heavy rain. The infantry was supported by 60 guns on their right and heavy cavalry.

Blücher then led another counter attack, this time by 32 squadrons of cavalry. It was repulsed and his horse was killed. French cavalry rode over him without recognising him, and he was eventually rescued by an aide. The Prussian centre had been crushed, but both wings were able to withdraw under cover of darkness.

Total dead, wounded, missing and captured at Ligny were 13,700 French and 18,800 Prussians, with another 120 French and 10,000 Prussians being lost in the retreat the next day.

Marchal of the Empire Michel Ney

ATTACK WRONG APPOINTMENTS Napoleon had defeated Blücher at Ligny, but the Prussians had escaped to fight again.

Wellington and Ney had drawn at Quatre Bras, but the Anglo-Dutch army was forced to retreat because of the result of Ligny. If D’Erlon’s corps had fought at either battle, it would have been a decisive French victory. If Reille had attacked earlier, Ney could have won Quatre Bras soon enough to arrive on Blücher’s flank and make Ligny a decisive victory. These mistakes were Napoleon’s fault for making the wrong appointments.

Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher

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By: Andrew Curry & Rob Vaneker

THE HEYDRICH EQUATION If it weren’t for a pair of Czech paratroopers, Reinhard Heydrich’s name might rank closer to the top of a long list of World War II villains. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and as cold and unrelenting as Russian winter, Heydrich now seems almost a caricature of the perfect Nazi. One postwar biographer called him “Hitler’s most evil henchman,” a title for which there was stiff competition; Heinrich Himmler, the infamous head of the SS, eulogized him as “an ideal always to be emulated, but perhaps never again to be achieved.”

Jan Kubiš (1913) - soldier, one of a team of Czechoslovak paratroopers, top picture

Indeed, Heydrich was the go-to guy for the Nazi leadership’s most sensitive and dif?cult tasks. His fingerprints are all over some of the most significant moments of the Third Reich. In 1934, in preparation for the Night of the Long Knives, Heydrich—then head of the Gestapo—drew up lists of rivals to the SS in the Nazi party to be arrested and executed. He helped coordinate the nationwide night of anti-Semitic attacks in 1938 known as Kristallnacht. In 1939, he engineered the fake attack on a German radio station near the Polish border that the Nazis used as an excuse to invade Poland.

Sergeant Josef Gabcik,picture bottum

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Two years later, at age 37, Heydrich was put in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, one of the Third Reich’s most important industrial centers. Not long after, he returned to Berlin to take care of some unfinished business.

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich sealed his reputation as Hitler’s ultimate acolyte in a pleasant villa in Wannsee, a wealthy suburb on the city’s outskirts. In a long morning of meetings, he presided over a group of high-level bureaucrats and hashed out the Final Solution to the Reich’s “Jewish question.” And then, on a sunny morning in May 1942, he was assassinated by undercover commandos in one of the war’s most daring missions.The plot to kill Heydrich was hatched in London, painstakingly prepared in top-secret training camps in the English countryside, and executed by a select group of Czech commandos. Its success shocked Hitler and other top Nazis. “It was a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazis if they lost the war,” historian Callum MacDonald wrote in The Killing of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.

But Heydrich’s death came at a terrible cost. His assassination spurred an orgy of revenge, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people.

Instead of inspiring a wider uprising or encouraging the Czech resistance movement, the reprisals cowed the occupied country. Historians still debate whether it was worth it: Did the assassination’s symbolic value outweigh that of the lives lost?

Born near Leipzig in 1904, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was the son of a second-rate German composer and opera singer who kept a nationalist, antiSemitic household. As a young man, Heydrich was a talented violinist and athlete, competing in swimming and fencing competitions. He joined the German navy in 1922, rose to the rank of ensign, and was dismissed in a cloud of scandal over a woman. In 1931, Heinrich Himmler recruited Heydrich, then just 27, as head of counterintelligence for the fledgling SS. As the SS grew in importance, so did Heydrich’s role in the Nazi party. He was Himmler’s right-hand man, helping him and the party maneuver for power. In 1934, Heydrich was made head of the Gestapo, the feared secret police division of the SS.

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THE SS OFFICERS ARROGANCE AND COMPETITIVE STREAK

-a trait that often surfaced as an addiction to risk taking — would prove to be fatal flaws. Himmler, no softy, was known to angrily refer to his headstrong subordinate as “Genghis Khan.” Outwardly portraying himself as a devoted family man and father, Heydrich was also a devoted womanizer, frequently dragging subordinates with him on benders in Berlin’s red-light district.

For all his faults, Heydrich had what it took to go far in Nazi Germany. He was a personal favorite of Hitler’s and, like his patron, knew how to manipulate those around him to get ahead. “Heydrich had an incredibly acute perception of the moral, human, professional, and political weaknesses of others,” his close friend Walter Schellenberg wrote after his death. “It seemed, as if in a pack of ferocious wolves, he must always prove himself the strongest and assume the leadership.”

Restoring order to the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—an area roughly corresponding to today’s Czech Republic—was an important steppingstone for Heydrich.

Controlled by Germany since 1939, a year after the Munich Agreement had ceded Czechoslovakia’s western borders to Germany, the protectorate was a key source of coal for the war effort and one of Europe’s top arms manufacturing centers.

REINHARDT

Heydrich

PICTURE BY: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-054-16

2017 JULY

In 1939, Edvard Benes —the pre-protectorate president of Czechoslovakia—set up a government in exile in London. In a strange turn of international law, the Munich Agreement signed by Italy, Britain, France, and Germany remained in force: If Germany lost the war, things would go back to the post-Munich borders and it would keep nearly five million people and 16,000 square miles of Czechoslovakia.

Benes was determined to prevent this. But to overturn the agreement, he had to prove to the Allies that the Czech people were contributing to the fight against Nazi Germany. Besides spreading propaganda, Benes often pointed to the thousands of Czech soldiers who had fled the country after the annexation, fought in France during the invasion, then retreated with other Allied forces. Czech pilots fought in the Battle of Britain, shooting down dozens of German aircraft.

France and made their way to England at the beginning of the war. Kubis was a sergeant who felt humiliated by his country’s surrender to the Nazis, and earned the Czech War Cross for his part in fighting Germans in France. Gabcík’s last post before the German invasion was in a military chemical warehouse; before leaving, he poured acid over the stocks of mustard gas to keep the dangerous chemical out of German hands. At secret training bases in Britain, Kubis and Gabcík practiced using explosives and parachutes.

Neither man was a natural-born killer—their British trainers gave them mediocre marks on their evaluations—but they were trustworthy, and unlikely to question their orders once on the ground.As the situation in the Czech protectorate deteriorated by fall 1941, Himmler and Hitler decided to send the 37-year-old Heydrich in to clean things up. His mission was clear. “We will Germanize the Czech vermin,” he told his subordinates after his arrival in Prague. Privately, the SS officer saw the post as a way to escape Himmler’s shadow and further his own career.

Working with Britain’s elite Special Operations Executive, Benes began training the best of the Czech army in exile as parachutists who could be dropped into the occupied Czech territory to help the local opposition or conduct sabotage operations. The drops, which commenced in October 1941, were often hasty affairs, and not well thought out. “There was no escape plan,” MacDonald wrote. “The agents would remain underground until they were either killed or captured or Czechoslovakia was liberated by an Allied victory.”The president in exile had no shortage of volunteers for the secret missions.

Two men stood out: Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcík, both veterans in their late 20s who had fought in

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under the code name Anthropoid. The exiled Czech leader felt tremendous pressure; the currents of war were shifting. That December, with the overextended German army bogging down in the Soviet Union and the Americans on board after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he began to fear not just a continuation of the Munich Agreement, but the possibility of a compromise peace agreement between Nazi Germany and the Allies that would sacri?ce the Czechs.

HEYDRICH’S EXPERIENCE

Heydrich’s experience running the Nazi secret police force served him well when it came to cracking down on the already weak Czech opposition. He turned the protectorate into an SS fiefdom, appointing fellow SS officers to important positions in the government. On his watch, the Gestapo seized radio equipment brought in by parachute commandos, followed leads provided by collaborators to members of the resistance, and executed thousands of intellectuals and suspected members of the underground. Czech Jews were rounded up and put in ghettos, the first step to the gas chambers. Fear was omnipresent.

“The terror…is powerful, and for everyone politically active there is a permanent Gestapo agent,” one parachutist messaged London not long after dropping into the country. “Work is exceptionally difficult in spite of our contacts.”

While Benes hoped the assassination would spark a Czech uprising that would reassure the other Allied leaders, it’s possible he had another motive: reprisals, which were sure to come, might outrage the Czechs enough to push them into action. “In this situation,” he told the resistance via coded radio messages from his safe perch in London, “a proof of strength in our own country—rebellion, open action, acts of sabotage and demonstrations —may become desirable…even if it has to be paid for with a great many sacrifices.”

Kubis and Gabcík were airdropped into this tense situation on December 29. The Halifax bomber that delivered them was off course thanks to the snow blanketing the Czech countryside, and they landed nearly 50 miles from their planned drop zone. Still, they made contact with local resistance groups, and were smuggled into the capital, given false papers, and set up in a series of safe houses.Not long after their arrival, the two Operation Anthropoid commandos began preparing for the assassination. The young veterans weren’t interested in a suicide mission—in their months in Prague they both found girlfriends they hoped to marry after the war. One of the women was even pregnant.

Though Benes’s government in exile labeled Heydrich “the Butcher of Prague,” his tactics were subtle and effective. Unlike the Poles, Czechs had been far more divided about Germany before the war began, and many were Nazi sympathizers.

Even as he brutally cracked down on the resistance, Jews, and intellectuals, Heydrich increased rations and wages for workers, reduced their hours, and worked to suppress the black market, a wartime institution most ordinary Czechs resented. “I must have peace of mind that every Czech worker works at his maximum for the German war effort,” he told subordinates not long after he arrived in Prague. “This includes feeding the Czech worker—to put it frankly—so that he can do his work.”Heydrich’s tactics soon turned the situation in Prague around completely, putting Czech manufacturing back on track, and making Heydrich a hero back in Berlin. “He plays cat-andmouse with the Czechs, and they swallow everything he places before them,” Hitler’s propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, noted in his diary in February 1942. “As a result the Protectorate is now in the best of spirits, quite in contrast to other occupied or annexed areas.”

Czechs working in Prague Castle, a massive edifice overlooking the city that was the headquarters of the Nazi regime, fed the two men intelligence on Heydrich’s security and schedule.

They quickly eliminated the heavily guarded castle as an assassination site.

Heydrich’s successes in Prague persuaded Benes it was time to take drastic action. In October 1941, plans were drawn up to assassinate Heydrich

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OCTOBER 30,1947

A Czech woman is sworn in as a witness in the RuSHA Trial. She is testifying about the German massacre of the inhabitants of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. Nuremberg, Germany.

eating a leisurely breakfast and playing in the palace gardens with his three children and pregnant wife, filled his briefcase with papers he needed for his meeting with Hitler, and climbed into his dark green open-topped Mercedes staff car.

HEYDRICH’S SUBURBAN ESTATE

Heydrich’s suburban estate, a sprawling villa seized from a Jewish sugar magnate, was also too secure. But Heydrich had to travel from home to office—and the overconfident Nazi chief did so with no escort, taking the same winding road down from the hills outside Prague to the city center each day. Kubis and Gabcík spent weeks watching him come and go, and finally picked a hairpin curve on a steep hill a few miles from the commandant’s residence.For weeks, rumors had been flying within the tight-knit underground about the mysterious mission Gabcík and Kubis were on. The two men were clearly planning something big, but they refused to answer to local commanders. Finally, an astonishingly frank transmission was directed to Benes in London.

“From the preparations that Ota and Zdenek [Kubis and Gabcík’s code names] are working on and the place where it is happening, we guess, despite their silence, that they’re preparing to assassinate H,” the resistance leadership messaged. “This assassination would not help the Allies and would bring immense consequences upon our nation.”

A few miles away, the assassins were waiting. They had ridden borrowed bicycles to a hillside tram stop, their weapons hidden in briefcases strapped to the handlebars. To conceal his Sten gun once it was assembled, Gabcík wore a raincoat, despite the warm weather and cloudless sky. A third conspirator, one of the dozen or so parachutists on missions in Prague, was recruited as a lookout to flash a signal when Heydrich approached.At 10:32, the signal came and Heydrich’s car topped the hill just as a tram full of passengers approached from below. Kubis and Gabcík readied their weapons. As the car slowed to take the sharp corner, Gabcík stepped into the road and leveled his gun at Heydrich. But when he pulled the trigger, the Sten jammed. Heydrich, enraged, made a fatal mistake. Instead of ordering his driver to step on the gas and accelerate out of the ambush, the SS commander stopped the car, stood up, and pulled his sidearm to deal with what he thought was a lone gunman.

Benes disregarded the warning, and the message was intercepted by the Gestapo on May 12.

Heydrich was urged to take more security measures, like traveling with an escort and installing armor in his official car. He paid no heed to these remonstrations, frustrating his subordinates. “Heydrich approved the general measures but categorically refused a personal escort, on the grounds that it would damage German prestige,” the Gestapo commander who investigated the assassination later wrote. “A certain arrogant pride and his sporting outlook probably prompted his attitude. He really believed that no Czech would harm him.”

On the morning of Tuesday, May 26, 1942, Reich Protector Heydrich was in a fine mood. He was flying to meet with Hitler later that day, hoping to persuade the führer to promote him, perhaps to head of security for all of the occupied territories.

The night before, he had staged a recital of some of his father’s chamber music, even writing the program notes himself. He spent the morning

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At that moment, Kubis ran up from his hiding spot on the other side of the road and hurled one of his specially-designed bombs at the car. Bad luck struck again: instead of landing inside the convertible, the bomb hit the side of the Mercedes, just in front of one of the car’s rear wheels. The blast damaged the car and sent shrapnel flying into Kubis’s face. Heydrich and his driver, stunned, lurched out of the car and split up, chasing after the fleeing commandos.Ears still ringing from the misdirected explosion, Kubis plunged into the crowd at the tram stop, firing his .

38 Colt automatic in the air to scatter the bystanders. Heydrich’s driver, a hulking SS officer named Johannes Klein, gave chase—but now his gun jammed. Half blinded by the blood covering his face, Kubis managed to mount his bicycle and ride off down the hill, leaving Klein behind.

GABCÍK

isolated in posts far from home. As Goebbels remarked a few days later after a conversation with Hitler, “The führer…foresees the possibility of a rise in assassination attempts if we do not proceed with energetic and ruthless measures.”

Gabcík wasn’t so lucky. As the dust cleared, he faced the feared Obergruppenführer of the Czech protectorate, who lurched toward him, pointing a 7.65mm automatic. Gabcík dropped his useless submachine gun, pulled his own pistol and ducked behind a pole. Heydrich began shooting from behind the stopped tram, then suddenly doubled over in pain.Kubis’s bomb, it turned out, had not been a total failure. A fragment of metal from the explosion had torn through the back seat of the unarmored staff car and hit Heydrich in the back. Overcome with pain, the SS officer stumbled back to the Mercedes and collapsed, giving Gabcik a chance to escape.

Remarkably, the Nazis stationed in Prague, wary of inspiring a popular uprising, urged restraint.

Evidence gathered at the scene of the crime— including Gabcík’s British-made Sten gun, and British explosives, fuses, and bullet casings—made it clear the perpetrators were commandos parachuted in from abroad, rather than the product of a homegrown resistance movement.

Flying to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, argued for a more measured response of directing propaganda against the government in exile, and conducting random searches.In the meantime, Heydrich lay in the hospital, surrounded by guards and attended by Himmler’s personal physician. An operation hours after the attack had removed the metal from his abdomen, and the surgeons reluctantly removed his spleen as well. Within days, it was clear Heydrich’s wound was badly infected. On June 2, he lost consciousness. Two days later, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, 38, was dead.

BAD LUCK

Klein, running back up the street to check on his injured commander, found him sprawled across the hood of the car, blood spreading across his dress uniform. “Get that bastard,” Heydrich told him. Klein—his gun still jammed—managed to corner Gabcík in a butcher shop, where the increasingly desperate Czech commando shot Klein in the legs and disappeared down a side street.Meanwhile, bystanders at the tram stop flagged down a passing van full of floor polish and loaded the SS commander in the back. Jolting over the cobbled street, the van drove to the nearest hospital, where an x-ray revealed the extent of Heydrich’s injuries. The metal from the explosion had shattered Heydrich’s 11th rib, punctured his stomach, and driven bits of wire and horsehair from the car’s cushion into his spleen.The news reached Hitler less than two hours later. His first reaction was to order dramatic reprisals. Ten thousand Czechs were to be arrested, and any political prisoners in custody— including prominent politicians, like the prime minister—were to be shot. To smoke out the perpetrators, a reward of one million reichsmarks was posted, along with a promise to execute anyone caught helping the assassins, including their families.

The führer’s dramatic reaction was part outrage, part nerves. The hit on Heydrich was the first assassination attempt on a top-ranking Nazi. As the masters of occupied Europe, Germans were high-profile targets, vastly outnumbered and

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Privately, Hitler was furious at Heydrich. “Such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the country not one whit,” he fumed. Publicly, Heydrich’s death was treated as a national tragedy. His body was displayed with an honor guard in Prague Castle for two days before it was sent to Berlin for a state funeral. Himmler delivered the eulogy; Hitler presented the German Order decoration.

As the Gestapo began to hunt for the perpetrators in Prague, retaliation began in earnest. As usual, Jews were the first targets. On June 9, 3,000 Jews from the Terezín ghetto were shipped to death camps in Poland on special trains marked “Assassination of Heydrich.” Hitler decided to go a step further.

Remember Lidice

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managed to swallow a cyanide pill; her son, Vlastimil, and husband were arrested and tortured. Vlastimil held out most of the day.

Finally, his interrogators got him drunk and then brought in his mother’s head, floating in a ?sh tank. Vlastimil cracked and blurted out the name of the church where he had been told to hide if there was ever trouble.It was the break the Nazis needed. Within hours, 700 elite Waffen SS soldiers had surrounded the downtown church. Just after 4:10 in the morning, a janitor let them into the nave, where they were greeted by a grenade tossed by one of the three commandos hiding in the choir loft. Determined to take the assassins alive, the SS spent two hours exchanging ?re with the defenders. Down to their last bullets, three men—including Kubis—finally swallowed cyanide and then shot themselves.

LIDICE

A SMALL VILLAGE IN BOHEMIA Lidice, a small village in Bohemia, was selected for annihilation. On the day of Heydrich’s funeral, the village was surrounded and all the men over 15 were rounded up and shot in groups of 10, a task that took all night and most of the next day. (The executioners were police brought in from Heydrich’s hometown in Germany.) The women of Lidice were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 53 died by the end of the war. A few of Lidice’s 104 children were given to SS families for “proper upbringing”; 82 of them were gassed.

The SS then torched the town, dynamited its houses, school, and small church, excavated the town’s cemetery, and even re-routed the small stream that ran through it. By early July, there was literally nothing left.

Gabcík and three other parachutists were hiding in the church catacomb. Still hoping to take prisoners—proving the plot was an English import rather than homegrown would be a propaganda coup for Himmler—the Gestapo commanders on the ground brought Curda in to encourage his former conspirators to surrender. Yelling into a low grate that opened into the catacomb, he was greeted with gunfire.Next, the fire department was called in to flood the catacomb. Their hoses were pushed out and cut by the trapped men, who also threw German tear gas grenades back out of the crypt. Even an assault squad of Waffen SS soldiers sent down into the crypt to overpower the parachutists was ambushed in the dark, flooded chamber and had to pull back.

Meanwhile, Heydrich’s killers had gone to ground in the center of Prague, hidden by a local priest in the basement of a Czech Orthodox church just a few hundred yards from the river. In addition to the three men on the scene, four other parachutists who had helped plan the attack took refuge in the catacomb; one, Karel Curda, managed to slip out of the city and hid in his mother’s barn in the countryside.As days turned into weeks, the commandos sank into depression verging on panic. Heydrich was dead, but the men felt personally responsible for the increasingly brutal reprisals against civilians. Isolated and alone, they even considered committing suicide in a public park after hanging signs around their necks claiming responsibility.

Finally, after more than six hours of fighting, the SS overruled the Gestapo and blew open the main entrance to the catacomb with explosives. Before they could storm in, four shots rang out. Like Kubis, Gabcík and his comrades had chosen suicide over capture or surrender.The battle was over, but retaliations continued. Hundreds of underground activists and their family members— including the families of some the men in the crypt—were rounded up and executed, along with the priests who sheltered the men.When the war ended, many of the Czechs who collaborated with the Nazis—including Curda, the traitorous paratrooper—were convicted of treason by the postwar Czech government and executed.

In the end, their fate was sealed by betrayal. On June 13, with no leads in the case, Nazi officials announced an amnesty for anyone who stepped forward with information on the assassins’ identities, plus a million-mark bounty. A few days later, Curda—separated from his comrades and under heavy pressure from his family—took a train to Prague and turned himself in. Within hours, he had given up the identity of his fellow parachutists and the addresses of several safe houses in Prague.

The Gestapo swung into action. At one of the safe houses, the Moravec family was arrested at 5 in the morning on June 17. Maria Moravcova

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ALOIS KUBIŠ (1932)BIOGRAPHY The first time I saw Jan Kubiš was only when they showed me his severed head.

Alois Kubiš was born in 1932 in the village of Černá Hora.

He is a distant relative of Jan Kubiš, who carried out the assassination on the German Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. In August 1942, when he was only ten years old, he was arrested together with his parents and sister. His parents were interned in the Little Fortress in Terezín and his sister was held in Prague.

WHILE IN PRAGUE, HE WAS FORCED TO IDENTIFY HEYDRICH'S ASSASSINS WHEN HE WAS SHOWN THEIR SEVERED HEADS IN GLASS CONTAINERS.

After this, he was briefly interned in Terezín and then for half a year in Masaryk's Institute in Prague, where Germans conducted tests with vaccines on him and other children.

After the war he served in the army for several years. At present he lives in Šumperk.

Why Lidice? Lidice before destruction

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Left: Members of the Schutzpolizei after liquidation of Lidice 1942 Bottom: Lidice town after the massacre in 1942

Soviet-Dominated (Asked during his trial why he betrayed his comrades, Curda shrugged. “I think you would have done the same for a million marks,” he told the judge.) Because the mission was sponsored by and coordinated from Britain, Soviet-dominated, communist-era Czechoslovakia played down its importance. But since the end of communism in 1989, Gabcík and Kubis have been transformed into national heroes.

The crypt of the church in downtown Prague where they made their last stand is now a museum and memorial; a 30-foot-tall monument marks the spot where they gunned down the Butcher of Prague.Historians, though, are still debating whether Operation Anthropoid should be celebrated or condemned. Despite the hopes of Benes and the other members of Czechoslovakia’s government in exile, the assassination failed to inspire a mass uprising. “Far from rallying the Czech people around the home resistance, as Benes expected, it shattered the remnants of an organization already weakened by the terror of October 1941,” Callum MacDonald wrote.

rallying cry of the resistance mainly because the Nazis spoke out about this reprisal,” Mario Dederichs wrote in his biography Heydrich: The Face of Evil.

But perhaps the assassination’s most important impact was psychological. Nazi leaders would never feel safe again. And at a low point in the war, the sacrifce of Kubis and Gabcík—along with thousands of others—showed the Allies that the Nazi hold on Europe was far from unbreakable.

Nonetheless, the brutality of the Nazi retaliation did persuade the Allies to tear up the Munich Agreement and officially recognize Benes as president. Though it may have suppressed the Czech resistance, it turned the suffering of the Czechs into a cause célèbre internationally, more infamous at the time than the far larger massacres at Babi Yar or Rumbula. “Lidice became the

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INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF RUSSIA’S COLD WAR MAPMAKERS By: Greg Miller

A MILITARY HELICOPTER was on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around. With guns.

UNTOLD SECRETS

Picture top:John Davies, a retired British software developer, has been studying the Soviet maps for a decade

The Soviet Military secretly mapped the entire world, but few outsiders have seen the maps—until now.

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“I’m guessing we bought a million sheets,” Guy says. “Maybe more.University libraries at places like Stanford, Oxford, and the University of Texas in Austin have drawers stuffed with Cold War Soviet maps, acquired from Guy and other dealers, but the maps have languished in obscurity. Very few academics have seen them, let alone studied them. Whatever stories they have to tell are hidden in plain sight.But one unlikely scholar, a retired British software developer named John Davies, has been working to change that. For the past 10 years he’s been investigating the Soviet maps, especially the ones of British and American cities. He’s had some help, from a military map librarian, a retired surgeon, and a young geographer, all of whom discovered the maps independently. They’ve been trying to piece together how they were made and how, exactly, they were intended to be used. The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan. Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia, built from paper.

THE YEAR WAS 1989

The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces. By the time Guy arrived at the helipad, most of the goods had already been off-loaded from the chopper and spirited away.

The crates he’d come for were all that was left. As he pried the lid off one to inspect the goods, he got a powerful whiff of pine. It was a box inside a box, and the space in between was packed with juniper needles. Guy figured the guys who packed it were used to handling cargo that had to get past drug-sniffing dogs, but it wasn’t drugs he was there for.Inside the crates were maps, thousands of them. In the top right corner of each one, printed in red, was the Russian word секрет.

Secret.

The maps were part of one of the most ambitious cartographic enterprises ever undertaken. During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the loadbearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories. They’re the kinds of things that would come in handy if you’re planning a tank invasion.

Or an occupation. Things that would be virtually impossible to find out without eyes on the ground.Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

DAVIES HAS PROBABLY spent more time studying the Soviet maps than anyone else. An energetic widower in his early 70s, he has hundreds of paper maps and thousands of digital copies at his house in northeast London, and he maintains a comprehensive website about them.

“I was one of those kids who at 4 is drawing maps of the house and garden,” he told me when we spoke for the first time, last year. “Anywhere I go I just hoover up all the maps I can find.”It was on a consulting trip to Latvia in the early 2000s that he stumbled on a trove of Soviet maps in a shop near the center of the capital city, Riga. Davies struck up a friendship with one of the owners, a tall, athletic man named Aivars Beldavs, and bought an armload of Soviet maps from him every time he was in town.

Guy’s company, omnimap was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West. But he wasn’t alone. Like the military officials charged with guarding the maps, map dealers around the world saw an opportunity. Maps that were once so secret that an officer who lost one could be sent to prison (or worse) were bought by the ton and resold for a profit to governments, telecommunications companies, and others.

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Top: A 1980 Soviet map of San Francisco, California. Bottom: Soviet maps stacked up in Aivars Beldavs’ map shop in Latvia

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BACK HOME Back home he’d compare the Soviet maps to the maps made around the same time by the Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency, and other British government sources. He soon spotted some intriguing discrepancies.In Chatham, a river town in the far southeast, a Soviet map from 1984 showed the dockyards where the Royal Navy built submarines during the Cold War— a region occupied by blank space on contemporary British maps. The Soviet map of Chatham also includes the dimensions, carrying capacity, clearance, and even the construction materials of bridges over the River Medway. In Cambridge, Soviet maps from the ’80s include a scientific research center that didn’t appear on Ordnance Survey maps till years later. Davies started compiling lists of these differences, and on his trips to Latvia, he started asking Beldavs more questions.Beldavs, it turns out, had served in the Soviet Army in the mid-’80s, and he used the secret military maps in training exercises in East Germany. A signature was required before a map could be checked out for an exercise, and the army made sure every last one got returned. “Even if it gets destroyed, you need to bring back the pieces,” Beldavs says.

A few years after he got out of the army, Beldavs helped start the map shop, Jana Seta, which sold maps mainly to tourists and hikers. As he tells it, officers at the military cartographic factories in Latvia were instructed to destroy or recycle all the maps as the Soviet Union dissolved in the early ’90s. “But some clever officers found our company,” he says. An offer was made, a deal was struck, and Beldavs estimates the shop acquired enough maps to fill 13 rail cars. At first they didn’t have enough space to store them all. One time, some local kids tried to set fire to a pallet load of maps they’d left outside.But the vast majority of them survived unscathed.“These maps were very interesting for the local people,” Beldavs says. “We suddenly had very detailed maps like nothing we had before.”

were next to useless. In a remarkable 2002 paper in a cartographic journal, the eminent Russian cartographer and historian of science, Alexey Postnikov, explains why this was so. “Large-scale maps for ordinary consumers had to be compiled using the 1:2,500,000 map of the Soviet Union, with the relevant parts enlarged to the needed scale,” he wrote. That’s like taking a road map of Texas and using a photocopier to enlarge the region around Dallas. You can blow it up all you want, but the street-level details you need to find your way around the city will never be there.

Worse, the maps for the masses were deliberately distorted with a special projection that introduced random variations. “The main goal was to crush the contents of maps so it would be impossible to recreate the real geography of a place from the map,” Postnikov tells me. Well-known landmarks like rivers and towns were depicted, but the coordinates, directions, and distances were all off, making them useless for navigation or military planning, should they fall into enemy hands. The cartographer who devised this devious scheme was awarded the State Prize by Stalin.While the newly available Soviet military maps had practical value for people inside the former republics, for Davies they brought back a bit of Cold War chill.

Anyone old enough to have lived through those paranoid days of mutually assured destruction will find it a bit disturbing to see familiar hometown streets and landmarks labeled in Cyrillic script.

The maps are a rare glimpse into the military machine on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The Soviet maps were just a casual hobby for Davies until he met David Watt, a map librarian for the British Ministry of Defence, in 2004. Watt, it turns out, had encountered Beldavs years earlier and done some investigations of his own. At a cartography conference in Cologne, Germany, in 1993, Watt had picked up a pamphlet from Beldavs’ shop advertising Soviet military topographic maps and city plans. He was stunned.“If they really were Soviet military city plans, then these were items which four years before were so highly classified that even squaddies in the Red Army were not allowed to see them,” he later recalled . Watt placed an order.

Indeed, not all maps were created equal in the USSR. While the military maps were extremely accurate, the maps available to ordinary citizens

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of foreign cities. At this scale, city streets and individual buildings are visible.

A FEW WEEKS LATER WAITING A PACKAGE

A few weeks later a package was waiting for him at the airport. Inside were the maps he’d ordered— and a bunch more Beldavs had thrown in. Over the next few years, Watt pored over these maps and picked up others from various dealers. The scope of the Soviet military’s cartographic mission began to dawn on him.They had mapped nearly the entire world at three scales. The most detailed of these three sets of maps, at a scale of 1:200,000, consisted of regional maps. A single sheet might cover the New York metropolitan area, for example.But they didn’t stop there. The Soviets made far more detailed maps of some parts of the world. They mapped all of Europe, nearly all of Asia, as well as large parts of North America and northern Africa at 1:100,000 and 1:50,000 scales, which show even more features and fine-grained topography. Another series of still more zoomed-in maps, at 1:25,000 scale, covers all of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as hundreds or perhaps thousands

And even that wasn’t the end of it. The Soviets produced hundreds of remarkably detailed 1:10,000 maps of foreign cities, mostly in Europe, and they may have mapped the entire USSR at this scale, which Watt estimated would take 440,000 sheets.All in all, Watt estimated that the Soviet military produced more than 1.1 million different maps.In 2004 he presented some of his research at a meeting of the Charles Close Society, a group devoted to the study of Ordnance Survey maps.

Davies was in the audience. The two men spoke, and Watt encouraged Davies to study them more seriously.Around the same time, Watt and Davies met two other men who’d also become intrigued by the Soviet maps: John Cruickshank, a retired surgeon from Leeds, and Alex Kent, a geography graduate student at Canterbury Christ Church University.“It really all snowballed from there,” Watt says. “The four of us got together as a kind of private study group.”

A 1980 Soviet map of San Diego naval facilities (left) compared with a US Geological Survey map of the same area, from 1978 (revised from 1967)

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NEW FRIENDS

In post-war Russia, men died in the pursuit of better maps. After World War II, Stalin ordered a complete survey of the Soviet Union. Though aerial photography had reduced the need for fieldwork by then, it didn’t eliminate it entirely, according to the 2002 paper by Alexey Postnikov, the Russian cartographer. Survey teams endured brutal conditions as they traversed Siberian wilderness and rugged mountains to establish networks of control points.

For Davies, the new friends and their shared interest came as a welcome distraction in an emotionally difficult time: His wife of nearly four decades was dying of cancer. In 2006, Davies organized a research trip to Latvia. The group spent several days in Riga, poring over Soviet military maps at Beldavs’ shop and visiting a cartographic factory that had made civilian maps during the Soviet era. Not that the trip was all work —it coincided with the Latvian midsummer festival, an all-night affair involving folk songs and dancing, fueled by copious helpings of beer and wild boar sausage. “It was an absolute hoot,” Watt recalls.IT’S EASY NOW, in an age when anybody can whip out a smartphone and call up a street map or high-res satellite image of any point on Earth with a few taps, to forget how hard it once was to come by geospatial knowledge.

A surveyor himself, Postnikov writes that on a survey expedition to remote southern Yakutiya in the 1960s he found a grim note scrawled on a tree trunk by one of his predecessors. It’s dated November 20, 1948. “All my reindeer have perished,” it begins. “The food stores became bears’ prey. I am left with a very sick junior surveyor on my hands.Ihave no transportation or means of subsistence.” The stranded surveyor says he will attempt to force his way to the River Gynym, a sparsely populated area at least 200 kilometers away. Given that temperatures in Yakutiya rarely rise above –4 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, Postnikov doubts they made it.It was after the death of Stalin in 1953 that the Soviet military, which had to that point focused its cartographic efforts on Soviet territory and nearby regions like the Balkans and Eastern Europe, started to take on global ambitions.

THE PROGRAM INVOLVED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF SURVEYOR AND TOPOGRAPHERS, AND HUNDERS OF CARTOGRAPHERS

Soviet Map of Berlin 1983

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maps for engineers and planners. These maps were far better than the bogus ones produced for the proletariat, accurate enough to be used for building roads and other infrastructure, but stripped of any strategic details that could aid the enemy if they were captured. The civilian cartographers were well aware that the military was busily mapping foreign territories, Postnikov says. “We knew each other personally, and we knew about their main task.” How many maps did the military cartographers make? “Millions and millions,” is what Postnikov says when I ask, but he quickly adds: “It’s absolutely impossible to say, for me, at least.”

STALIN’S SUCCESSOR NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

,saw fertile ground for the spread of communism in a world in which former European colonies were quickly gaining their independence, says Nick Baron, a historian at the University of Nottingham. “Khrushchev was exhilarated by the prospect of winning over these newly liberated countries in Africa, South Asia, and so on,” Baron says. “It was around that time that the military first began to undertake foreign mapping, including sending their own cartographers abroad to conduct their own surveys in many of these developing countries.” Postnikov estimates that the military mapping program involved tens of thousands of surveyors and topographers, the people who go out into the field and gather data on relief and other features, and hundreds of cartographers who compiled these data to make the maps. During the Cold War he served in a parallel civilian cartographic corps that made

For San Diego, the Russians included sites of military interest, but also notes on transit, communications, and the height of buildings.The US military made maps during the Cold War too, of course, but the two superpowers had different mapping strategies that reflected their different military strengths, says Geoff Forbes, who served in the US Army as a Russian voice interceptor during the Cold War and is now director of mapping at Land Info, a Colorado company that stocks Soviet military maps.

A detail of a 1975 map showing the Pentagon

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AIR SUPERIORITY MAPPING AT MEDIUM SCALES

“The US military’s air superiority made mapping at medium scales adequate for most areas of the globe,” Forbes says. As a result, he says, the US military rarely made maps more detailed than 1:250,000, and generally only did so for areas of special strategic interest. “The Soviets, on the other hand, were the global leaders in tank technology,” Forbes says. After suffering horrific losses during the Nazi ground invasion in WWII, the Soviets had built up the world’s most powerful army. Maneuvering that army required large-scale maps, and lots of them, to cover smaller areas in more detail. “One to 50,000 scale is globally considered among the military to be the tactical scale for ground forces,” Forbes says. “These maps were created so that if and when the Soviet military was on the ground in any given place, they would have the info they needed to get from point A to point B.”A manual produced by the Russian Army,translated and published in 2005 by East

View, a Minnesota company with a large inventory of Soviet maps, gives some insight into how the topographic maps could be used in planning or executing combat operations. It includes tables on the range of audibility of various sounds (a snapping twig can be heard up to 80 meters away; troop movements on foot, up to 300 meters on a dirt road or 600 meters on a highway; an idling tank, up to 1,000 meters; a rifle shot, up to 4,000 meters).Other tables give the distances for visual objects (a lit cigarette can be visible up to 8,000 meters away at night, but you’d have to get within 100 meters to make out details of a soldier’s weaponry in daylight). Still more tables estimate the speed at which troops can move depending on the slope of the terrain, the width and condition of the roadway, and whether they are on foot, in trucks, or in tanks.The maps themselves include copious text with detailed descriptions of the area they depict, everything from the materials and conditions of the roads to the diameter and spacing of the trees in a forest to the typical weather at different times of year. The map for Altan Emel, a remote region of China near the border of Mongolia and Russia, includes these details, according to a translation on Omnimap’s website.

A tourist map (left) of Tallinn produced for the 1980 Olympics is short on detail and accuracy compared to a Soviet military map of the same area made in 1976

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Despite the Ordnance Survey’s copyright claim, Davies argues that the Soviet maps aren’t mere copies. In many places, they show new construction—roads, bridges, housing developments, and other features that don’t appear on contemporary Ordnance Survey maps.

Many of these details, Davies argues, came from aerial or satellite reconnaissance (the first Soviet spy satellite, Zenit, was launched into orbit in 1962). Other details, such as notes on the construction materials and conditions of roadways and bridges, seemingly had to come from agents on the ground (or, according toone account from a Swedish counterintelligence officer, by picnicking Soviet diplomats with a preference for sites near objects of strategic interest).

THE DESCRIPTION

THE LAKES ARE USUALLY NOT LARGE; 0.5-2 KM2 (MAXIMUM UP TO 7 KM2), WITH THE DEPTH UP TO 1 METER. THE BANKS ARE LOW, GENTLE, AND PARTIALLY SWAMPED. THE BOTTOM IS SLIMY AND VICIOUS [SIC]. SOME OF LAKES HAVE SALTED OR ALKALINE WATER. It goes on (and on) from there.

The description of San Diego, translated and published in English here for the first time, points out objects of obvious strategic interest—including a submarine base, a naval airbase, ammunition depots, factories that make aircraft and weapons— but also includes notes on public transportation, communications systems, and the height and architecture of buildings in various parts of town.

Not that the Soviet maps are infallible. There are curious mistakes here and there: Earthworks for a new pipeline in Teesside in the UK are mistaken for a road under construction, a nonexistent subway line connects the Angel and Barbican stations in London. The town of Alexandria appears (correctly) in northern Virginia, but a town of the same name also appears (incorrectly) outside of Baltimore. Defunct railways and ferry routes persist on editions of the Soviet maps for years after they’ve been discontinued.There are other puzzles too. The Soviets mapped a handful of American cities at a scale of 1:10,000. These are detailed street-level maps, but they don’t focus on places of obvious strategic importance. The list of known maps at this scale includes:

To make these maps of foreign territory, the Soviets started with official, publicly available maps from sources like the Ordnance Survey or the US Geological Survey. John Davies has found, for example, that elevation markers on maps of Britain often appear at exactly the same points and work out to be exact metric equivalents of the British units. (Because of such similarities, the Ordnance Survey has long maintained that the Soviet maps violate their copyright.)

Pontiac, MI

The Soviets appear to have done the same thing with maps made by the US Geological Survey, but those maps are in the public domain, and anyone —including someone from the Soviet embassy— could have bought them easily.“When I joined the USGS in 1976, I heard the then commonly-told story about a representative from the Soviet embassy in Washington obtaining the initial copy of the paper-print National Atlas, prepared by the USGS in cooperation with a number of other agencies, when it was offered for public sale in 1970,” USGS geologist and historian Clifford Nelson told me in an email. Nelson added that it seems logical that Soviet representatives would have acquired 1:24,000-scale topographic maps from the US as they were printed, but he says he knows of no paper trail that could confirm that.

Galveston, TX Bristol, PA Scranton, PA Syracuse, NY Tonawanda, and North Tonawanda, NY Watertown, NY Niagara Falls, NY

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of Russia. “Cartographic culture is to Russia as wine culture is to France,” Lee says.

MILITARY OBJECTIVES THE SOVIETS TO MAP

Economic rather than military objectives may have motivated the Soviets to map these cities in detail, suggests Steven Seegel, an expert on Russian political and intellectual history at the University of Northern Colorado. The Soviets admired US postwar economic prosperity and wanted to understand how it worked, Seegel says.

“These cities might have been on their radar for their reputation for heavy industry, shipping, or logistics,” Seegel says. Pontiac had a General Motors plant, for instance, and Galveston was a major port. Scranton had a huge coal mine. Other towns were close to hydropower plants. “There was an obsession in the Soviet era over power grids and infrastructure” that went beyond their military implications, Seegel says.John Davies has found scores of features on the Soviet maps that don’t seem to have immediate military relevance, things like factories, police stations, and transportation hubs. “If it’s an invasion map, you wouldn’t show the bus stations,” Davies says. “It’s a map for when you’re in charge.”

That’s probably true, but there may be even more to it than that, says Alex Kent, who’s now a senior lecturer in geography at Canterbury Christ Church University. Kent thinks the Soviets used the maps more broadly. “It’s almost like a repository of intelligence, a database where you can put everything you know about a place in the days before computers,” he says.“They managed to turn so much information into something that’s so clear and well-presented,” Kent says. “There are layers of visual hierarchy. What is important stands out.

What isn’t recedes. There’s a lot that modern cartographers could learn from the way these maps were made.”

Aesthetically, the maps are striking, if not beautiful. The cartographers who made them took tremendous pride in their work, down to the last details, says Kent Lee, the CEO of EastView Geospatial, a Minnesota company that was once Russell Guy’s main competition in the Soviet map import business and now claims to have the largest collection of Soviet military maps outside

RUSSELL GUY DOESN’T sell many Soviet maps these days. But for a while there in the ’90s, he says, business was booming. Telecommunications companies bought them up as they were building cell phone networks across Africa or Asia. If you’re building cell phone towers, Guy explains, you need to know the terrain, and the Soviet topographic maps were often the best source available in less developed parts of the world. He says he could tell which countries were soliciting bids at any given time because as soon as one company ordered a set of Soviet topo maps, three or four others would call up to order the same thing.The US government was another big buyer.

Intelligence analysts used the Soviet maps in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, says Ray Milefsky, a former geographer and geospatial analyst at the US military’s Defense Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency). Milefsky later moved to the State Department, where he specialized in determining where international boundaries should be drawn on official government maps. The Soviet maps were—and continue to be—one of the best sources, says Milefsky, who retired in 2013. The boundary lines on the Soviet maps are so accurate because the cartographers went back to the original treaties and reconciled the landmarks mentioned there with survey reports and boundary markers on the ground. “When we first got them it was a gold mine, especially for aligning the boundaries of the former Soviet republics,” Milefsky says.

But with the proliferation of satellite mapping in recent years, the Soviet maps aren’t selling like they used to, Guy and other dealers say. Once in a while a telecom or avionics company will order a set. Sometimes an adventure travel company will buy a few. Geologists and other academics sometimes use them. A team of archaeologists recently used the Soviet maps to study the destruction of prehistoric earthen mounds by encroaching agriculture in Central Asia.

Even so, military maps are still a touchy topic in Russia. As recently as 2012, a former military topographic officer was sentenced to 12 years in prison for allegedly leaking classified maps to the West.

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Top: A close-up of part of the Soviet map of New York City from 1982, with Lower Manhattan in the upper right corner. The details include dimensions and building materials of the bridges.

Bottom: Map scholars, from left: Alexander Kent, Martin Davis, John Davies, David Watt, and John Cruickshank

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A PRESENTATION John Davies and Alex Kent gave a presentation of their research at an international cartography meeting in Moscow in 2011, hoping to meet Russian cartographers or scholars who knew about the maps or perhaps had even worked on them. They thought maybe someone might come up after their talk or approach them at happy hour. No one did.“The silence was quite disconcerting,” Kent says. “This was a subject you just don’t talk about.”Davies and Kent have written a book about the Soviet military maps, but their publisher, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, recently backed out, citing copyright concerns, Davies says.

Detail of San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood

FINAL REMINDER OF TIMES For Guy, the maps are a reminder of a time when a map dealer from a small company in North Carolina got a tiny taste of the 007 lifestyle. He and other dealers who brought the maps to the West still have vivid memories of clandestine meetings in dark Moscow bars, being trailed by KGB agents (who else could it be?), and worrying about who was listening in on their phone calls. They still dodge questions about their old military connections. They don’t want to stir up trouble. Even now, the paranoia is hard to shake.

Naval Station Treasure Island

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INTERNMENT OF BRITISH SAILOR/ SOLDIERS OF THE(63RD)ROYAL NAVAL By: Lars Sanders DIVISION IN GRONINGEN

INTRODUCTION The Royal Naval Division was a remarkable division in the British Armed Forces during the Great War. Originally, this division was part of the Royal Navy. In 1916, the Royal Naval Division and its sailors and marines was incorporated in the 63rd Division of the Land Army.The Royal Naval Division was a remarkable division in the British Armed Forces during the First World War. Originating in the Royal Navy, and manned by sailors and marines, the division was incorporated into the Army in 1916.

Illustrious figures served in it, such as the poet Rupert Brooke, Bernard Freyberg (the future governor-general of New Zealand) and the author and later parliamentarian Alan Herbert, but also Edwin Dyett, later executed for cowardice. Two locations along the Western Front feature monuments to the division, and the one at Gavrelle, near Arras, is as extra-ordinary as the division was.

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composed of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Royal Naval Brigade that was under the command of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the then English government. They were mainly reservists and volunteers of the British Navy who had been conscripted on 2 August 1914 due to the threat of war. Churchill was so enthusiastically involved with this Royal Naval Brigade that it was known as 'Churchill’s Little Army'. In the training camp they heard that they were retrained to be infantrymen.

At Winston Churchill's command they were, hardly prepared and badly equipped, put to defend the fortified city of Antwerp. Together with the Belgian army they had to defend the city against German.

The Germans threatened to surround the FrenchBritish army in order to march unhindered to northern France. To gain time was therefore the most important aim with the defence of Antwerp.

When it became obvious on 8 October that the fortified city of Antwerp could not be defended any longer against the German heavy guns, the Belgian and British troops decided to retreat by way of the river Scheldt. Due to a number of mistakes and miscommunications the battalions did not receive the order for retreat in time.

Therefore they did not arrive in time at the place agreed on and consequently missed the train out.

But they could not turn back either as the Germans were advancing on them. This is why commodore Henderson, commander of the 1st Brigade, had no other option than to proceed to the neutral Netherlands.

TIMBERTOWN 1914-1918

On 11th October 1914, 1,500 men of the First Royal Naval Brigade arrived in Groningen. They had been deployed in early October to assist the Belgian army against German troops attacking Antwerp. During their retreat in Belgium, their escape route was cut off. Commodore Wilfred Henderson was determined for his men not to be taken prisoner of war by the Germans, so he crossed the frontier into Holland with three of his batallions. On arrival in Holland, they were interned (in accordance with International Law), in Groningen, a city in northern Holland. Behind the present-day Mesdagkliniek (the former city jail) a complete encampment was erected on the paradeground of the Rabenhauptkazerne (the local military barracks, situated opposite this prison). The camp had many facilities for sports, housing, healthcare, security and relaxation. This camp quickly acquired the local nickname of “Engelse Kamp” (English Camp). The British themselves called the camp 'Timbertown' or 'HMS Timbertown' Het Engelse Kamp [English Camp] is well known in the city of Groningen: for years after the Second World War up until the 1960's young men from the provinces Groningen and Drenthe were examined there for military service. It is less well known that this place was an internment camp for British militaries during the First World War.Those 'English soldiers' turned out to be men from the First Royal Naval Brigade, originally marine men, who were interned in Groningen 'for the duration of the hostilities'. They were accommodated in the wooden barracks of the English Camp, which they themselves called 'Timbertown' or 'HMS Timbertown'.Obviously this raises questions: "How did these Brits end up in The Netherlands, why were they there and how was their stay in the English Camp in Groningen during the First World War?" The answers turn out to be an interesting history on the connection between the English Camp, the British First Royal Naval Brigade, The Netherlands, the city of Groningen and the First World War. These British militaries were men of the Collingwood-, Benbow- and Hawke Battalion of the First Royal Naval Brigade. This Brigade was part of the Royal Naval Division that was

Here the British troops were interned according to the international rules of law. In the end the British, over 1,500 men, were 'for the duration of the hostilities' interned in Groningen. They were accommodated in wooden huts; the Dutch people called it the Engelse Kamp [English Camp]. This 'English Camp' was situated behind the prison at that time (currently the Van Mesdag Clinic) at the Hereweg. They called it 'Timbertown' or 'HMS Timbertown' themselves.

Continued on page 38

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Top: Barracks to the east of the camp (the 'Sterrebos' to the right, the prison on the left and the water tower at the centre).

Bottom: The barracks to the west of the camp.

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more and more contacts with the people of Groningen were established. A lot of 'Tommies' (as they were called by the Dutch people) became regular family friends of families from Groningen and there were courtships and marriages with Dutch girls. Already at an early stage the interned were asked to become involved in the daily labour process, on a voluntary basis and as much as possible in the area of their original civilian profession. Next to getting out of the rut of military existence, this offered possibilities for more social activities and more pay. For hiring these interned the Dutch government gave out special permits to prevent them from taking up Dutch jobs. In 1915 the British were put to work at, among others, machine factories and ship building yards in the province of Groningen. In the city of Groningen the interned had jobs in several small businesses.

Next to this during the harvest season many farms, bothered by a dire shortage of staff due to the mobilisation, received help from the British interned.On 11 November 1918 the truce was signed and as soon as 15 November 900 British left for England via Rotterdam. There were already 300 men on leave in England and the British working outside of the camp were to leave later.

Commodore Henderson and 50 of his men remained to settle camp business. The English Camp was officially terminated per 1 January 1919.Â

A DAILY ROUTINE

Soon it became obvious that something had to be done to prevent demoralization of the British troops. A daily routine was meticulously clung to: exercise, march and practice. Furthermore present qualities were utilized as much as possible.

Therefore numerous clubs were erected in which music, drama, crafts and especially sports were practiced. The cabaret company 'Timbertown Follies' was very well known. There was rehearsal space within the camp and workshops for the carpenters, furniture makers, tailors and electricians. Furthermore there were classrooms, a small church, a post office and a large recreation room. Not all British wanted to stay at the camp for as long as the war was to go on. Despite security there were several successful attempted escapes in 1915. A few Groningen inhabitants were even imprisoned because of aiding in these attempts.

Later the escapes were stopped because the Dutch and British government came to an agreement. The British received the right to regularly 'go on leave' to the centre of Groningen - sometimes the inhabitants complained of their alcohol abuse. Even later they received visitation rights allowing them, by word of honour and under certain conditions, to go to England for four weeks (often prolonged to eight weeks). Also

Continued on page 41

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Top: Engels kamp Timbertown, 1915 Bottom:The Royal Naval Brigade Athletic Club, Timbertown, 1915

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WAR GRAVES

ON THE ZUIDERBEGRAAFPLAATS GRONINGEN

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

On the Zuiderbegraafplaats (Southern Cemetery) in Groningen are the graves of nine British soldiers who died in the war years 1914 – 1918 during their internment in Groningen.The complex of graves can be found at the end of the central aisle in “Klasse [class] 4 - rij [row] 37 - graven [graves] 74-82. It consists of nine tombstones out of a greyish type of stone, standing in a common grave field. The monument is generally uninspiring and is certainly a deviation from the well known fields of honour with the white tombstones, such as those in Belgium and Northern France.

Albert T. Vigar Stoker 1st class - R.N. SS 100877 - Benbow Battalion Deceased 29/09/1916 (aged 33 years)

The wellknown Cross of Sacrifice was not erected as this is only put up in a field wsith more than 40 graves. The Stone of Remembrance with the text “Their name liveth for evermore” is not here either, as this is only placed in cemeteries with more than 400 graves. The grey stone Celtic cross is a unique cross of remembrance for Seaman John Mac Leay. The money for this cross was collected in 1915 by his fellow internees and the citizenry of Groningen.

Leslie E. Whitehead Able seaman - RNVR. L4/2861 - Hawke Battalion Deceased l8/03/1916 (aged 22 years) Donald McLeod Seaman - RNR. A3409 - Benbow Battalion Deceased 01/03/1916 (aged 25 years) John Smith Seaman - RNR. CH/2742/A - Collingwood Battalion Deceased 18/10/1917 (aged 42 years) John MacLeay Seaman - RNR. B2588 - Collingwood Battalion Deceased 26/08/1915 (aged 33 years) Thomas Bennett Stoker 1st class - R.N. 163931 - Hawke Battalion Deceased 08/06/1917 (aged 42 years) Percy H. Hedger Able seaman - RNVR. L7/3464 - Benbow Battalion Deceased 21/02/1917 (aged 22 years) Ernest Bruce Able seaman - RNVR. T2/169 - Collingwood Battalion Deceased 14/11/1918 (aged 24 years) Sydney F. Fowler Private - RMLI. PO/1604/S – 1st RM Battalion Deceased 30/11/1918 (aged 35 years) The first eight names belong to men from the 1st Royal Naval Brigade. The ninth grave belongs to Sydney F. Fowler, a prisoner of war repatriated out of Germany, and housed in the English Camp after the war. He died there 19 days after the Armistice.

We find the graves of: see names top right

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By: Rob Vaneker

Central Recruiting Office, Clifton Street, Belfast-some sources suggest that up to 200 Southern Irish citizens were enlisting in Belfast per week. (Belfast Telegraph)

The Forgotten Irish Volunteers:

Óglaigh na hÉireann dearmad déanta

Throughout the second World War, a significant number of Irish citizens fought in all branches of the British armed services. The exact number of these “Irish Volunteers”, as they were known, is uncertain.

Detailed records of their enlistment do not exist, since the British military was not permitted to officially recruit within Ireland’s borders and since, as a post-war London pamphlet notes, “in the conditions in some recruiting centres elsewhere, would-be recruits frequently thought it more prudent not to give their birthplace or addresses as being situated in Eire.”Though the document does not delineate these conditions, one can imagine several reasons that Irishmen would like to hide their place of birth from military recruiters. First, it is likely that Irish applicants for the British military faced prejudice on an economic, social, or ethnic basis.

Additionally, such individuals would probably seek to limit records of their Irish heritage to prevent negative repercussions from their own countrymen, who might express displeasure with the Irish Volunteers for participating in a conflict for which Ireland remained neutral or simply for supporting the traditional enemy, Britain.

eight Victoria Crosses and one George Cross won by these Irish soldiers “proved either that their numbers were very much greater than is officially admitted, or else that the men were of extraordinarily fine quality as fighting men.”

Though exact numbers of Irish casualties are unavailable, it is believed that approximately 3,500 Volunteers from the Free State perished, along with an additional 3,500 soldiers from Northern Ireland.Particularly in light of their recognized gallantry in combat, these volunteers were not insignificant to the Allies, making the contribution of Irish manpower – albeit on an unofficial basis – worthy of remembrance.

Bearing in mind the Allied-imposed isolation of Ireland in the months before Operation Overlord commenced on June 6, 1944, it is noteworthy that Irishmen from both sides of the border participated in the D-Day assaults, stationed aboard Royal Navy ships in the Channel, jumping with airborne units, and storming the beaches in considerable numbers.

Despite this secrecy, it is estimated that 43,249 Volunteers made up the Irish contingent of the British military during the conflict..The aforementioned pamphlet also notes that the

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masters,” unaware that all of Archer’s actions were conducted with the Taoiseach’s full knowledge and approval.By maintaining this separation between stated government policy and practical implementation, Ireland contributed to the Allied intelligence gathering efforts without betraying its mission to achieve independence from the British and maintain a public façade of neutrality. his intelligence that Ireland provided mainly pertained to German military aircraft and submarines that were operating near the island nation. For this purpose, the Irish military constructed radar stations along the coasts to monitor these German movements and established 24-hour report centers at Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Athlone. Reports of submarine activity were secretly transmitted to representatives of the United Kingdom based in Dublin, who could then forward the appropriate directives to Allied military command.Reports on German aircraft, however, were handled differently. The Irish adopted a policy of broadcasting the locations of any belligerent aircraft approaching its airspace, a strategy that maintained the appearance of neutrality by making the information available to both sides of the conflict; however, these broadcasts were by design useful to the Allies only. The proximity of Royal Air Force and United States Air Force bases in Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the areas described in the broadcasts allowed Allied air units to respond promptly. The Germans, however, found themselves at a significant geographic disadvantage, since their aircraft were based too far away to react effectively.

THE RIGID GOVERNMENT CONTROL

The rigid government control of the press and private communication, as well as the abrogation of certain civil liberties in Ireland during the war, suggests that De Valera could have prevented the Irish Volunteers from fighting in the British military – political institutions and popular opinion would certainly not have stopped him from doing so. The fact that he avoided such a course of action illustrates the Irish government’s willingness to support the Allied cause; however, a related policy illustrates the limit to this allowance. Whereas Irish civilians were quietly permitted to join the British military, Irish soldiers who deserted the Defense Forces to fight for the Allies were punished upon their return to Ireland after the war.This made a critical public distinction between British soldiers from Ireland and Irish soldiers in the Defense Forces – the former appearing unsanctioned and the latter representing the Irish state, which needed to appear unified in its support of neutrality. Though permitting Irish citizens to participate in the British military efforts represents a passive action on the part of de Valera and his government, the Irish enacted many policies that more actively served the Allied cause. These actions were conducted in a manner that either hid them from German attention or appeared ostensibly impartial, but their effects unquestionably benefitted the Allied war effort.

Additional intelligence sharing revolved around the potential threat of IRA collaboration with the German military and intelligence services. Both G2 and the Garda Special Branch passed on information about the organization’s contacts with the Abwher, notably including plans for a German landing in Northern Ireland that was to be supported by republican militants. British-Irish collaboration against the IRA would continue to be a uniting factor in the future, making this wartime example particularly important.

Anglo-Irish Intelligence Sharing G2 (Irish Army Intelligence), the Irish Defense Forces, and the Garda Siochana Special Branch remained in frequent contact with Allied military leaders throughout the war, sharing intelligence via a clandestine liaison between G2 and MI5 that de Valera had secretly approved. This collaboration also involved strategic planning for joint military efforts in the event of a German invasion of Ireland. Given de Valera’s public sentiments on neutrality, British military leaders and intelligence agents were surprised to have such a beneficial relationship with G2. They believed that Colonel Liam Archer, the agency’s director, “was more sympathetic than his political

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Keeping an unbiased image regarding internment was essential for publically maintaining the façade of neutrality. If the Germans had strong evidence that Ireland was returning or permitting the escape of downed Allied combatants, they may well have interpreted this practice as a belligerent act, which could lead to strong political and perhaps even existential ramifications for Ireland – the significantly weaker nation. Similarly, since Ireland also conceived neutrality as a symbol of independence from Britain, the perception of equal treatment of the prisoners of war was important for maintaining the public image of separation from the crown, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the United Kingdom. Of course, the internment policies practical implementation must be considered in light of geography. Although the simple crossing from Ireland to Northern Ireland facilitated the exodus of Allied pilots from Irish detainment, no such easy means of escape existed for Axis airmen. As a result, these German escapees would be stuck in Ireland, where there was a high risk that they would attempt to make contact with the IRA, Nazi spies, or other dangerous elements that could pose a substantial threat to Ireland’s security. As a result, the security risk of allowing Axis soldiers and airmen to live within Ireland at large may have been a contributing factor to Ireland’s unofficial policy of inequitable internment practices. Nevertheless, the proportional ease with which Allied combatants could escape and the greater risk posed by Axis captives to Irish institutions were not defining aspects of the Irish policy decision.

Instead, actions of the Irish government and security services demonstrated undeniable bias in favor of the Allied military effort and enabled many British and American airmen to find their way over the border and then back into combat.

BIASED INTERNMENT

In addition to tracking belligerent aircraft, Ireland adopted a policy of internment for downed airmen who landed within its borders – an action expected of neutral states under international standards. As noted previously, this policy called for the detainment of all belligerents, or “guests of the state” as the Irish referred to them. In practice, however, Irish security forces and civilians proved somewhat inclined to turn a blind eye to some downed Allied pilots, who were then able to “escape” across the border to Northern Ireland. A report from the British Home Office supports this finding, noting that the Irish internment policy was “not as strictly enforced” with British and American airmen than it was with German ones. The same report claims that the Irish government readily dispatched information regarding Luftwaffe aircraft and personnel found within its borders to Allied command. Notable Irish historian T. Ryle Dwyer concurs that the internment policy favored the Allies, claiming that “allied personnel were often secretly spirited over the border or released on a pretext, while German airmen and sailors were almost invariably confined for the duration of the war, even when strictly they might have been released in accordance with international law.

Whatever their actual intent, the Irish government clearly sought to maintain the image of neutrality regarding captured combatants. In a letter dated January 8, 1942, Colonel McNally at the Curragh internment camp reported the capture of an escaped Allied prisoner and noted the political importance of how treatment of the internees was perceived: ...the German Internees...have commented upon our general attitude in connection with British attempts to escape. I quite realize how embarrassing this whole position can be for the Government and I have endeavoured all along to ensure that the treatment for each set of Internees is identical, but while the two sets of prisoners are held so close together there are numerous little incidents occurring which give one or the other side the feeling that there is preferential treatment.

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communique. The propagandistic elements of this letter, which helped shape American and British public opinion of Irish neutrality.

SPIES IN

Like in instances of captured airmen, it seems that there was fairly substantial bias when it came to handling agents of belligerent nations’ intelligence services. As mentioned previously, the American OSS had a known presence in Dublin, but Allied clandestine agents received preferential treatment as well. One notable example is that of Major Edward Byass, a British spy captured by Irish security forces, but then released. In contrast, the Irish imprisoned all captured German agents for the duration of the war. Lieutenant Colonel Timothy McInerny, a United States Army intelligence officer based in Northern Ireland during the war, is another example of this biased treatment. A Boston Globe article published in 1946 notes that he frequently met with Irish military and intelligence officers during trips south of the border, and that these officers “referred to the Allies as ‘We’ and the Germans as ‘the Jerries.’

The article concludes with a poignant description of the Irish attitude toward McInerny, stating,

IRELAND

Spies of belligerent nations – particularly Germany – were a significant concern of de Valera and his government. As noted previously, their connections with the IRA represented a significant threat to Irish political institutions, and there are several notable instances of espionage in Ireland, though not to the extent claimed by Allied leaders. While the Irish government proved willing to counter the threat of Axis spying, they were more tolerant of Allied agents. In fact, it permitted the American Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency), to send an advisor to Dublin to monitor the intelligence gathering and analysis performance of G2 and the Garda Special Branch. Allied command feared that the German and Japanese diplomatic presence in Dublin was a front for espionage, and expressed particular concern about the German legation’s radio transmitter, which de Valera convinced Hempel, the German ambassador, to take down and store in a Dublin bank.Had the Irish publically chosen to leave the transmitter intact, this would have represented a direct violation of the provisions of Hague V, which states that neutral nations cannot permit a belligerent state to erect such devices.Hempel’s willingness to acquiesce to this Irish request may have stemmed in part from his political history. His “membership of the Nazi party was nominal and reluctant, and his Irish appointment was attributed to the fact that a real Nazi would not get on with de Valera.

No matter how strictly Mr. De Valera and his government interpreted the laws of neutrality, the people, on the other hand, paid little or no attention to them. To begin with, full permission of the Irish Government was accorded this officer to travel to and from his post in the north, the only requirement being that he dress in civilian clothes.

The Irish had been looking on foreign uniforms for hundreds of years and had decided the only uniform that could be legally worn at the time in their country was their own.

The Irish distinction between Allied and Axis spies not only highlights the effort to assist the Allied cause, but also is an example of cooperation between the security forces of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Working against a common threat, this collaborative effort set an important precedent for the future of their relationship.

Despite the removal of the transmitter, the Allies remained displeased with Ireland’s stance on Axis diplomats. On February 21, 1944, American Ambassador David Gray presented de Valera with a letter from Washington now known as the “American Note.” The letter demanded the immediate closure of all Axis diplomatic posts in Ireland in order to ensure that the German government was not practicing espionage in Dublin. Despite significant political pressure, de Valera refused to comply, and the foreign missions remained in operation throughout the war. It is noteworthy that the American Note played a bigger role than as just an intergovernmental

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dispatching fire brigades to Belfast after German bombings and allowing the British certain considerations with Irish-registered petroleum tankers.It should be noted that Ireland’s military collaboration with Britain was not a one- sided affair. In an effort to ensure that Ireland would not fall into German control, Britain lent assistance to the fledgling Irish military. For example, the British armed forces furnished limited amounts of equipment, arms, and ammunition to the Irish, and on at least one occasion sent a Royal Air Force instructor to train Irish airmen. This spirit of collaboration hints at the true relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom during the war, suggesting that Irish policy had left the two nations on better terms than many historians might suggest or than the general public might recognize.

IRELAND AND THE ALLIES

Fortunately for the Ireland and the Allies, countering the threat of Nazi espionage in Ireland did not prove very difficult. As noted previously, weaknesses in the IRA limited the value of local contacts for German agents, but uncharacteristic failures in the German intelligence network also contributed to the failure of their efforts. Gunther Schuetz, an experienced German spy who parachuted into Wexford in 1941, is a telling example. He had been so poorly briefed by the Abwher “that he was convinced that the IRA and the Irish Army were one and the same.”Captured by the Irish, Schuetz did manage a daring escape from Mountjoy Jail by means of a self-fashioned grappling hook; however, he was soon recaptured and imprisoned for the remainder of the war. In total, it is estimated that approximately 12 German spies were active in Ireland during the war.This relatively small number of agents and their inability to achieve any serious successes for the German war effort was due in part to de Valera’s crackdown on the IRA and on Axis espionage efforts, but also in part due to Ireland’s well-crafted neutrality. The government perpetuated an image that made neutrality palatable for the Allies and the Axis, ultimately convincing both sides that it was in their interest to respect Irish policy throughout the war and limit their espionage activities.

Conclusion With such interaction with the Allied powers, it would be difficult to characterize Ireland’s policies as legitimately neutral; however, there were limits to its participation that irked Churchill, Roosevelt, and other important Allied leaders. Ireland’s failure to declare war, mobilize forces against the Germans, or allow Britain the use of the treaty ports complicated its relations with the Allies, and opened the door for some scholars to question the moral legitimacy of Ireland’s wartime policies.

Beyond politics and strategy, however, many saw Ireland’s actions in a positive light rather than as an example of appeasement of the Nazis or spite for the British. Even Bertie Smyllie, the contemporary editor of the Irish Times referred to as “an unabashed Anglophile” believed that Ireland’s policies aided the Allied war effort, coining the term “unneutral neutral Eire” to describe Ireland’s position in war-time Europe.

Nevertheless, unsatisfied Allied leaders clamored for additional Irish participation in the conflict, obfuscating much of Ireland’s assistance in an effort to shame the nation into a declaration of war.

Miscellaneous Considerations Though intelligence sharing, biased interment practices, and one-sided counterespionage were the main Irish contributions to the Allied war effort, the Free State provided several other means of assistance. One such action was that Ireland permitted the Allies to use certain areas Irish territory on a limited basis. Though the issue of the treaty ports had threatened to rend the relationship between Britain and Ireland, the Irish did quietly permit the use of Lough Foyne, the airspace corridor at Lough Erne, and the Malin Head wireless facility. Other small actions that Ireland undertook to help the Allies included

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IRELAND NEUTRALITY It is worth considering whether Ireland’s declared neutrality served Britain’s interest better than if they had declared war. If Dublin had provoked a German invasion by declaring its support for the Allied cause, the United Kingdom might have found itself completely surrounded.

With Irish ports and air bases under Nazi control, Britain would likely have been cut off from U.S. shipping, subject to bombing runs from the East and West, and perhaps even to a land invasion. It is, of course, difficult to predict such outcomes – there are simply too many variables at play. What is clear, however, is that tactful diplomacy from Ireland and its willingness to walk the tightrope of neutrality during a global conflict kept the Germans at bay and likely saved Britain from conducting war on yet another front. a neutral state as one that adopts a stated policy of nonbelligerency and abides by current international standards of neutrality without giving undue considerations or favoritism to belligerents on either side of a given conflict. Clearly, Ireland’s actions during the war exceed the permissible limits of neutrality. Though careful to appear as though it was respecting the standards of state neutrality, Ireland actually gave substantial assistance to the Allied war effort.

Picture: John Stout (pardoned) were among the tens of thousands of Irishmen who joined the British Army to fight Nazi Germany but were shunned when they returned home.

This raises an important question: If Ireland provided notable help to the United Kingdom during the conflict, why does history present a different narrative of Irish action during this period? The answer lies in the complex mechanisms of propaganda and censorship active throughout the war, which shaped public perception of Ireland and significantly impacted Anglo-Irish relations.

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Unsung hero: A citation for Irishman Corporal Edward Brown who took on a Machine Gun post as the British forces advanced through France in August 1944.

In recognition of the courage and bravery of those individuals court martialed or dismissed from the Defence Forces who fought on the Allied side to protect decency and democracy during World War Two.

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Abandoned Coastal Command maintenance jetty, RAF Castle Archdale)

By: Rob Vaneker

COASTAL COMMAND

When the Fleet Air Arm was transferred to the Royal Navy in 1937, Coastal Command became the RAF’s sole maritime arm.

Bearing the motto Constant Endeavour, RAF Coastal Command tasked with the protection of Allied convoys and the defence of supply lines from German UBoats and aircraft. The formation operated graceful flying boats as well as more conventional aircraft – including the Beaufighter, Spitfire and Lancaster – during the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War.Operating between 1936-1969 and unflatteringly known by some as the ‘Cinderella Service’, RAF Coastal Command nevertheless proved its worth flying exhausting missions over treacherous seas in search of enemy ships.

In World War Two alone, its members racked up over one million flying hours with nearly 6,000 personnel killed in action. And while the formation itself may long ago have been absorbed into other outfits, evidence of the RAF maritime arm’s short life still remains.

ABANDONED BASES OF THE RAF’S MARTIME ARM Today, not much remains of the old base. Just some overgrown buildings fallen into disuse, and the derelict slipway. Sections of it have even been turned into a caravan park, although a museum has also opened on the site, charting its role in defeating the German war machine.

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shore of Lower Lough Erne in Northern Ireland,its position placed it a mere 30 miles from the Atlantic. Unfortunately, those 30 miles didn’t pass through Allied airspace. Instead, they crossed over County Donegal, part of neutral Ireland.

ROYAL AIRFORCE

Given the history of animosity between Britain and Ireland (more apt in the 1940s than today), this could have led to disaster. Surprisingly, though, the two governments reached a secret agreement. RAF planes would be allowed to fly over County Donegal provided they stuck to a very narrow air corridor aptly known as the Donegal Corridor. Unlikely as it was, this decision allowed Coastal Command to dominate their part of the Atlantic. It also managed to last the entire war.The ruins can be seen on next pages.

RAF CASTLE ARCHDALE, COUNTY FERMANAGH, NORTHERN IRELAND Abandoned Coastal Command bases lie dotted around the shores of Britain, most of them long since forgotten or adapted for other uses.One of the most-westerly RAF bases in the whole of Britain, Castle Archdale was almost one of the most controversial too. Situated on the eastern

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Top: Sunderland flying boat at RAF Castle Archdale Bottom: station beacon

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Top: abandoned refueling jetty Bottom: the abandoned Coastal Command Base today

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LITHUANIA VS U.S.S.R

By: Edward.G.Lengel

A secret hot fight into the Cold War World War II is supposed to have ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, when German representatives signed the act of military surrender in Berlin. Isolated German units held out a little longer, and there remained sporadic instances of unrest elsewhere. Greece was in a state of turmoil—civil war would break out there in March 1946 and last until 1949. A new “cold war” loomed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Yet for the most part the guns seemed to have fallen silent.

Picture right:Lithuanian freedom fighter Juozas Lukša, center, and compatriots joined tens of thousands of their fellow Forest Brothers in resistance to postwar Soviet rule. (Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania)

But in at least one part of the continent the guns had not stopped firing. In a remote forest in southern Lithuania, on the afternoon of May 26, 1946, partisans of the Iron Wolf Regiment leapt to action as Soviet troops advanced cautiously through the woods. Hiding their valuables, including printing equipment they had used to produce subversive literature, the partisans abandoned their log bunkers and fled several hundred yards into the forest to await developments.

Picture Top:One of the many killed Lithuanian partisans, Juozas Luksa – "Skirmantas", "Daumantas",after his death on the 4th of September 1951.

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Lithuanians regarded as their historic capital, and Germany and Russia had become increasingly ominous neighbors. The sword of Damocles fell in September 1939, when the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland. Secret terms of the subsequent Nazi-Soviet pact split Eastern Europe and initially assigned Lithuania to German domination, but in September the pact’s signatories agreed to reassign most of the country to the Soviet Union in return for concessions to Germany elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Soviet occupation of the Baltic States began that autumn under the guise of “defense and mutual assistance” pacts that placed Red Army garrisons throughout the region. In June 1940, as Germany crushed France, the Soviets occupied and annexed all three Baltic States. Lithuania received Vilnius as Stalin’s “gift,” even as the country lost its independence.

ARRIVAL OF THE SOVIETS

Shortly thereafter, a frightened rabbit heralded the impending arrival of the Soviets, and a scout reported the enemy had discovered the partisan camp. Suddenly, a young partisan named Juozas Lukša noticed a Red Army soldier standing just yards away, automatic rifle at the ready. Lifting his own rifle, Lukša put the soldier in his sights and fired. The Russian fell like a post, dropping his weapon as gunfire erupted throughout the forest.

Keeping up their fire, the partisans slowly withdrew. The Soviets refused to be drawn deeper into the forest. Instead, they turned to plunder the partisan camp. The day of reckoning would have to wait.Beginning in 1944, as Adolf Hitler’s shattered armies retreated from Russia to the heartland of Germany, an armed insurgency spread across Eastern Europe. It intensified after Germany surrendered and Joseph Stalin’s Iron Curtain came crashing down. Officially ignored at the time and still largely unknown today, the fight against Soviet domination left tens of thousands dead in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Soviet atrocities, including mass executions and forced deportations, helped incite this desperate but surprisingly well-organized armed resistance. Hardy partisan bands in those countries held off the Red Army for years, until largely suppressed by a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. Nowhere was the fighting more widespread and violent than in tiny Lithuania where, incredibly, the last active partisan resistance was not eliminated until 1965.

Over the next several months Stalin planned for mass executions and deportations of politicians, intellectuals, community leaders and other “unreliables” from the former republics, but fortunately the Soviet machine moved slowly. The first of a series of planned deportations did not take place in Lithuania until June 14, 1941, when Red Army soldiers swooped down in the middle of the night to herd more than 30,000 civilians off to Siberia, most never to be seen again.

Lithuania is the southernmost of the Baltic States, with Latvia and Estonia to the north. A great kingdom in the Middle Ages, Lithuania had decayed over time and finally disappeared from the European map in the 18th century, falling mostly under Russian dominion. Nationalist feelings revived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by the 1914 outbreak of World War I Lithuanians once again dreamed of independence.The dream became a reality in 1918 as the Russian and German empires collapsed and Lithuania declared independence.

A period of relative prosperity followed, but by the mid-1920s Poland had annexed Vilnius, which

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Eight days later Germany invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and the other Baltic States. Infuriated by Stalin’s atrocities, many Lithuanians at first welcomed the German invaders as liberators. Thousands of insurgents, including some former Lithuanian army units, harassed retreating Soviet columns, inflicting thousands of casualties despite the Red Army’s savage reprisals. Not all the Lithuanian rebels were altruistic; some collaborated with the Germans in pogroms against the country’s population of approximately 210,000 Jews.

Naive Lithuanian hopes for independence under German protection soon foundered, however, as signs emerged that Adolf Hitler intended to treat his Eastern conquests as occupied territories

After Germany surrendered, Stalin resumed his long-planned mass deportations. From September 1945 to February 1946 the Soviets deported more than 100,000 Lithuanians to Siberian gulags, and many more would follow. The impact on a population of 2.5 million people already impoverished by war was catastrophic.

The apparent randomness of Stalinist atrocities— mostly deportations but including looting, beatings, murder and rape—made everyone feel like a potential victim, engendering anger and despair that led directly to armed resistance. By the spring of 1945 about 30,000 Lithuanians were actively fighting Soviet rule. Only in western Ukraine did the population rise up against the Soviets on a larger scale. Many thousands of Latvians and Estonians also resisted.

KILLING OR DEPORTING

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke of killing or deporting most Lithuanians as racially unreliable, but his first task was to exterminate the country’s Jews. Almost immediately after the German invasion SS troops, with the active cooperation of many civilians and some self-styled “partisan” units, began systematically murdering the large Jewish populations of Vilnius and Kaunas. By war’s end they had slaughtered all but a few thousand of Lithuania’s Jews.

To Himmler’s intense frustration, however, attempts to recruit into the Waffen-SS those Lithuanians deemed “racially pure” were dismal failures. While thousands of Latvians and Estonians eventually joined up, resistance groups in Lithuania boycotted recruiting efforts. Himmler in turn declared Lithuanians racially unfit for the privilege of serving in the SS, and German troops retaliated on their recalcitrant subjects by closing schools and deporting Lithuanian officials to concentration camps.In February 1944, driven to desperation by the approach of the victorious Red Army, German officials resurrected elements of the old Lithuanian army as a sort of home guard.

But as resistance to Nazi rule mounted in its ranks, the Germans attempted to draft guardsmen into the SS. Lithuanian officers and soldiers almost universally rejected Nazi service and fled to the woods. The Germans caught and executed some of them and sent many others to concentration camps. Those who remained in hiding served as a nucleus for resistance to the invading Soviets.

The Lithuanian resistance included individuals of all social and economic backgrounds. Women fought alongside men. Many insurgents wore old Lithuanian army uniforms to emphasize their status as legal combatants, but their ranks included a few Red Army deserters and escaped German POWs. And though their number was comparatively small, they were not without hope.

No one imagined they could defeat Stalin’s battletested war machine, but many predicted eventual Western political or military intervention.

Soviet forces crossed the Lithuanian border in early July 1944 and had occupied most of the country by the end of the month. Lithuania’s dense pine forests teemed with refugees, German deserters and Lithuanian soldiers evading conscription into the SS. The Soviets struggled to establish control in the almost complete absence of any political infrastructure. As the Soviets approached, Juozas Lukša, at the time a 22-yearold architecture student at Kaunas University, went into hiding with his three brothers and joined one of the armed bands in the woods.

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FIRST

THE INSURGENTS At first, the insurgents were entirely decentralized, striking against the Red Army when and where they could. The Roman Catholic Church initially provided the only structure, organizing resistance cells around parishes, sometimes under the command of individual bishops and priests. By 1946, however, the resistance had been nominally coordinated under a national movement. It adopted various names and political platforms before settling in 1949 on Lietuvos Laisves Kovu Sajudis (Lithuanian Freedom Fighters), or LLKS, and calling for independence under a Westernstyle democratic government. To the Lithuanian people the partisans were known simply as Miško Broliai (“Forest Brothers”), a label that also applied to the many women in their ranks.

Partisan bands were nominally organized into nine districts in three military regions. Units ranged in size from a few individuals to several hundred, with contacts among units and districts maintained by specially trained liaisons, usually young women. Some insurgents lived full-time in forest bunkers. Others merged by day into civilian life, working in towns or on farms while gathering intelligence. At night they would retrieve their carefully hidden weapons and carry out attacks.

Living conditions were primitive. Partisans depended on sympathetic civilians for basic supplies and used abandoned German or Lithuanian army equipment as well as weapons

Lithuania’s WWII: Torn apart by two super powers.

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From 1944 to 1946 the Forest Brothers concentrated their raids on Soviet interior ministry troops and secret police, which were primarily responsible for carrying out deportations and other atrocities against civilians. Partisans blew up installations and even launched open assaults on Soviet garrisons. One of the most storied engagements took place in May 1945 when several hundred Soviet NKVD soldiers assaulted a detachment of some 80 Forest Brothers in the Kalniskes forest in southern Lithuania. The battle lasted several hours as partisans resisted repeated Soviet assaults, killing dozens of soldiers before withdrawing into the forest. Insurgent bands sometimes occupied whole townships and ran up the Lithuanian flag over municipal buildings.

Such large-scale operations resulted in heavy casualties, with more than 14,000 insurgents killed by 1946. Partisan leaders then changed their tactics, operating in smaller numbers and avoiding open battle. They intimidated or killed Soviet officials and suspected collaborators, boobytrapped anti-Soviet posters, interfered with attempts at collectivization and land redistribution, and attacked polling stations for rigged Soviet elections. Partisans also gathered information on deportation operations and helped civilians to escape.

Soviet countermeasures were heavy-handed. In 1944 Red Army commanders seriously considered a proposal to deport the entire Lithuanian population to Siberia. Communist leader Mikhail Suslov, who had overseen wholesale wartime deportations of Muslims from the Caucasus, once quipped, “We need Lithuania—even without the Lithuanians,” and considered equally drastic measures in the Baltic. Soviet leaders rejected Suslov’s suggestion; but Sergei Kruglov, the Soviet commissar of internal affairs, decried any “sentimental approach” to repression and ordered the execution of civilians suspected of supporting the resistance and the burning of their farms and villages. Soviet soldiers carried out these orders and also committed atrocities on their own volition. Occasionally Soviet officials would attempt to curry favor with civilians by disciplining their more vicious subordinates; others turned a blind eye in order to evade official responsibility.

the Soviets had sent up to a quarter of a million Lithuanians to Siberia. Targeting regions that had shown sympathy to partisans, these measures severely undermined civilian supply and support.

The Soviets also employed such terror tactics as the mutilation and public display of partisan corpses, sometimes forcing civilians and even schoolchildren to file past them.Military operations continued as well. After 1947 Soviet mass-assault tactics gave way to careful, slowdeveloping operations aimed at isolating, encircling and eliminating insurgent bands. In 1948 70,000 Soviet secret police participated in antipartisan operations in Lithuania, along with eight regular Red Army divisions and even air units. By that time the average lifespan of a Forest Brother was about two years.Like many of his compatriots, Juozas Lukša held out hope for support from the West—if the Americans and British did not actively intervene, he hoped, they would at least send intelligence agents and supplies. Having spent two years as a partisan inside Lithuania, he escaped to Sweden just before Christmas 1947 and immediately made contact with Western intelligence. He bided his time in Paris while attempting to organize Western support and penning his memoir. Western intelligence agencies did not entirely ignore the Lithuanian uprising: In 1950 the CIA trained Lukša in espionage at a special camp near the West German town of Kaufbüren. A C-47 parachuted him, along with a team of Lithuanians and supplies, back into Lithuania on the night of October 3–4, 1950. The Soviets learned of his arrival and immediately launched massive manhunts in search of the tall, athletic, curlyhaired and blue-eyed Lithuanian.

BY 1947

By 1947 the Soviets had to admit their measures were as ineffectual as they were cruel. If anything, they only made the partisans stronger by increasing their civilian support. In many regions of the country the Soviets ruled the day, while insurgents controlled the night. Fearful of these developments and aware of partisan attempts to reach out to the West, Soviet leaders decided to change their tactics. Major A.M. Sokolov of the Soviet MVD (formerly NKVD), or secret police, who successfully suppressed revolts in western Ukraine, was brought to Lithuania as a counterinsurgency specialist.

The biggest problem in Lithuania, Sokolov decided, was the lack of reliable intelligence.

Russian agents who attempted to infiltrate the partisan bands were quickly captured and killed by the wary Lithuanians. To counter this Sokolov turned to captured former Lithuanian insurgents who were amenable to being bribed, retrained and sent to rejoin active partisan groups. Their knowledge of partisan jargon and ability to pass tests of loyalty made them more useful. In some cases, Sokolov even organized fake partisan bands that engaged in staged battles with Soviet troops. The “survivors”—actually Soviet agents—fled afterward to genuine partisan bands, which welcomed them as battle-tested reinforcements.

Such maskirovka, or deception operations, spread paranoia and provoked counterproductive partisan reprisals against suspected collaborators.These agents, who received training in surveillance, interrogation and torture from a special Soviet secret police school, were known as spetsgruppy (“special forces”) by the Soviets and stribai (“destroyers”) by the Lithuanians. They were frighteningly effective. Recently opened Soviet archives reveal that by 1949 spetsgruppy had infiltrated partisan units to their very highest levels. Soviet agents identified insurgent leaders and their civilian supporters, and even penetrated Lithuanian émigré organizations in the West.

The CIA and Britain’s MI6 thus did provide training and modest supplies, and they did help Lithuanian partisans cross the border in both directions. No substantial assistance was forthcoming, however, and Soviet success in penetrating Western intelligence organizations often made CIA and MI6 support worse than useless. British double agent Harold “Kim” Philby is thought to have betrayed some partisan leaders and Western agents sent to Lithuania—in any event, such operations were doomed from the start.Continue on page 59

The successes of Sokolov’s countermeasures did not slow Soviet aggression against civilians. Mass deportations ramped up after 1947, and by 1952

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The end of World War II saw a Germany dramatically reduced in size. Before long it was also divided into East and West. Germany's defeat meant that Poland and Czechoslovakia returned to the map of Europe after a six-year absence. But not so for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and northern East Prussia (Kaliningrad) that all remained occupied by the USSR.

Entering a Siberian Gulag (leaf from Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya's notebook). During the period 1940 – 1953 Stalin’s Soviet deported approximately 600,000 individuals from the Baltic States to Siberia. Around 100,000 of them never returned to their homelands.

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EARLY

contributed to nationalist feelings that inspired the 1987–90 independence movement. The current Lithuanian government has even recognized the partisans as the legal political authority in the country during the Soviet occupation.

By the early 1950s the Forest Brothers had grown desperate. Feeling abandoned by the West, and with Soviet intelligence anticipating their every move, they increasingly concentrated their activities against fellow Lithuanians suspected of collaborating with the enemy. “Lithuanian partisan,” read one bulletin, “punish mercilessly those who have sold out their country, their nation for a crumb of gold, a spoon of good food.”

Inevitably, many innocent victims fell to such reprisals, further alienating a population weary of war.Stalin’s death in 1953 put an end to the mass deportations; and while the forced collectivization that began in 1949 infuriated landholders and caused severe hardships for peasants, it also drove a wedge between the haves and have-nots.

Soviet propaganda eagerly portrayed the Forest Brothers as agents of privilege and Western imperialism. Perhaps most important, by the mid-1950s average Lithuanians felt they had no choice but to come to terms with Soviet occupation and get on with their lives.

The memory of the Lithuanian uprising persisted in the Russian imagination as well, even after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1979–89 war in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

During the 1994–96 war in Chechnya some Russian soldiers told fanciful stories of deadly accurate Baltic female snipers, known as “white tights,” aiding the Chechen insurgents. More plausibly, military planners and intelligence agents from Russia, the United States and other countries have drawn lessons from the success with which Soviet agents subverted a powerful insurgency that grew despite continuing Stalinist brutality.

1950

Bronius Krivickas, a Forest Brother killed in 1952, expected future historians to ponder how tiny Lithuania “did not fall but managed to struggle hard and long.” In the end, he decided, his nation had fought to defend “dignity and everything that is dear to all free and honest people. In this way, it was an honorable and valuable member of humankind and the family of nations. In this way, it contributed to the common fight for the ideals of freedom and humanity.”Didnt’ we in the West know, or did we prefer not to know?

Approximately 5,000 partisans remained under arms in 1950; two years later the Forest Brothers were no more than 700 strong. The last known guerrilla leader was captured, tortured and hanged in 1956, though scattered diehards held out as late as 1965, churning out and surreptitiously distributing underground newspapers. In the course of the fighting the Soviets had killed some 20,000 partisans, while admitting to the loss of about 13,000 of their own troops. Some 13,000 suspected Lithuanian collaborators had perished, and the Soviets had deported nearly 250,000 Lithuanians to Siberia; many of the latter died in exile. A Lithuanian collaborator lured Juozas Lukša into a deadly Soviet ambush on Sept. 4, 1951, nearly a year after his insertion into the country. His grave has never been found.

The occupation of Lithuania persisted almost until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. During those years the legend of the Forest Brothers became the subject of Lithuanian folklore, celebrated in poetry and songs. The legend

The Forest Brothers often used cellars, tunnels or more complex underground bunkers as their hideouts, such as the one depicted here.

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Left: F4U Corsair taking off from USS Boxer during the Korean War, 1951. Photograph Courtesy of the US Navy History & Heritage Command

By: Kenny Hickman

CHANCE VOUGHT F4U CORSAIR - DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT: In February 1938, the US Navy Bureau of Aeronautics began seeking proposals for new carrier-based fighter aircraft.

Issuing requests for proposals for both singleengine and twin-engine aircraft, they required the former be capable of a high top speed, but have a stall speed of 70 mph. Among those who entered the competition was Chance Vought. Led

by Rex Beisel and Igor Sikorsky, the design team at Chance Vought created an aircraft centered on the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine.

To maximize the power of the engine, they selected the large (13 ft. 4 in.) Hamilton Standard Hydromatic propeller.

Designated the XF4U-1 Corsair, the new aircraft quickly moved forward with the Navy approving the mock-up in February 1939, and the first prototype took flight on May 29, 1940. On October 1, the XF4U-1 made a trial flight from Stratford, CT to Hartford, CT averaging 405 mph and becoming the first US fighter to break the 400 mph barrier. While the Navy and the design team at Chance Vought were pleased with the plane's performance, control issues persisted. Many of these were dealt with by the addition of a small spoiler on the leading edge of the starboard wing.

While this significantly enhanced performance, it presented problems in designing other elements of the aircraft such as the landing gear. Due to the propeller's size, the landing gear struts were unusually long which required the aircraft's wings to be redesigned.In seeking a solution, the designers ultimately settled on utilizing an inverted gull wing. Though this type of structure was more difficult to construct, it minimized drag and allowed for air intakes to be installed on the leading edges of the wings. Pleased with Chance Vought's progress, the US Navy signed a contract for a prototype in June 1938.

With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the Navy altered its requirements and asked that the aircraft's armament be enhanced. Chance Vought complied by equipping the XF4U-1 with six .50 cal. machine guns mounted in the wings. This addition forced the removal of fuel tanks from the wings and an expansion of the fuselage tank. As a result, the XF4U-1's cockpit was moved 36 inches aft. The movement of the cockpit, coupled with the aircraft's long nose, made it difficult to land for inexperienced pilots. With many of the Corsair's problems eliminated, the aircraft moved into production in mid-1942.

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purpose-built AU-1 Corsairs were constructed for use by the Marines. Retired after the Korean War, the Corsair remained in service with other countries for several years. The last known combat missions flown by the aircraft were during the 1969 El Salvador-Honduras Football War.

F4UCORSAIR OPERATIONAL HISTORY

In September 1942, new issues arose with the Corsair when it underwent carrier qualification trials.Already a difficult aircraft to land, numerous problems were found with its main landing gear, tail wheel and tailhook. As the Navy also had the F6F Hellcat coming into service, the decision was made to release the Corsair to the US Marine Corps until the deck landing problems could be resolved. First arriving in the Southwest Pacific in late 1942, the Corsair appeared in larger numbers over the Solomons in early 1943.Marine pilots quickly took to the new aircraft as its speed and power gave it a decisive advantage over the Japanese A6M Zero. Made famous by pilots such as Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington (VMF-214), the F4U soon began to rack up impressive kill numbers against the Japanese. The fighter was largely restricted to the Marines until September 1943, when the Navy began flying it in larger numbers.

CHANCE VOUGHT F4U CORSAIR SPECIFICATIONS: General Length: 33 ft. 4 in.

Wingspan: 41 ft.

Height: 16 ft. 1 in.

Wing Area: 314 sq. ft.

Empty Weight: 8,982 lbs.

Loaded Weight: 14,669 lbs.

Crew: 1 Performance: Power Plant: 1 × Pratt & Whitney R-2800-8W radial engine, 2,250 hp

It was not until April 1944, that the F4U was fully certified for carrier operations. As Allied forces pushed through the Pacific the Corsair joined the Hellcat in protecting US ships from kamikaze attacks.In addition to service as a fighter, the F4U saw extensive use as a fighter-bomber providing vital ground support to Allied troops. Capable of carrying bombs, rockets, and glide bombs, the Corsair earned the name "Whistling Death" from the Japanese due to sound it made when diving to attack ground targets. By the end of the war, Corsairs were credited with 2,140 Japanese aircraft against losses of 189 F4Us for an impressive kill ratio of 11:1. During the conflict F4Us flew 64,051 sorties of which only 15% were from carriers. The aircraft also saw service with other Allied air arms.

Range: 1,015 miles Max Speed: 425 mph Ceiling: 36,900 ft.

Armament: Guns: 6 × 0.50 in (12.7 mm) M2 Browning machine guns Rockets: 4× 5 in High Velocity Aircraft Rockets or Bombs: 2,000 lbs.

Retained after the war, the Corsair returned to combat in 1950, with the outbreak of fighting in Korea. During the early days of the conflict, the Corsair engaged North Korean Yak-9 fighters, however with the introduction of the jet-powered MiG-15, the F4U was shifted to a purely ground support role. Used throughout the war, special

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Top: Definitely one of most distinctive designs ever employed by fighter aircraft,Vought F4U-5NL Bottom: F4U Corsair World War II Fighter

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Left: A Japanese Navy ‘Zero’fighter takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941.National Archives & records Administration

By: Kenny Hickman

A6M ZERO - DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT: The design of the A6M Zero began in May 1937, shortly after the introduction of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter.

Operating under the Imperial Japanese Navy's (IJN) specification "12-Shi," Mitsubishi and Nakajima commenced preliminary design work on a new carrier-based fighter, while waiting to receive the final requirements for the aircraft.

These were issued by the IJN in October and were based upon the A5M's performance in the on-going Second Sino-Japanese War. The final specifications called for the aircraft to possess two 7.7 mm machine guns, as well as two 20 mm cannon.

After initial testing, Horikoshi determined that the IJN's requirements could be met, but that the aircraft would have to be extremely light. Utilizing a new, top-secret aluminum, T-7178, he created an aircraft that sacrificed protection in favor of weight and speed. As a result, the new design lacked armor to protect the pilot, as well as the selfsealing fuel tanks that were becoming standard on military aircraft. Possessing retractable landing gear and a low-wing monoplane design, the new A6M was one of the most modern fighters in the world when it completed testing.

In addition, each airplane was to have a radio direction finder for navigation and a full radio set.

For performance, the IJN required that the new design be capable of 310 mph at 13,000 ft. and possess an endurance of two hours at normal power and six to eight hours at cruising speed (with drop tanks).As the aircraft was to be carrierbased, its wingspan was limited to 39 ft. (12m).

Stunned by the navy's requirements, Nakajima pulled out of the project believing that such an aircraft could not be designed. At Mitsubishi, the company's chief designer, Jiro Horikoshi, began toying around potential designs.

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A6M ZERO OPERATIONAL HISTORY

A6M ZERO - SPECIFICATIONS:

Entering service in 1940, the A6M became known as the Zero based on its official designation of Type 0 Carrier Fighter. In early 1940, the first A6M2, Model 11 Zeros arrived in China and quickly proved themselves as the best fighter in the conflict. Fitted with a 950 hp Nakajima Sakae 12 engine, the Zero swept Chinese opposition from the skies. With the new engine, the aircraft exceeded its design specifications and a new version with folding wingtips, the A6M2, Model 21, was pushed into production for carrier use.For much of World War II, the Model 21 was the version of the Zero that was encountered by Allied aviators.

General Length: 29 ft. 9 in.

Wingspan: 39 ft. 4 in.

Height: 10 ft.

Wing Area: 241.5 sq. ft.

Empty Weight: 3,704 lbs.

Loaded Weight: 5,313 lbs.

Crew: 1 Performance Power Plant: 1 × 950 hp Nakajima Sakae 12 radial engine

A superior dogfighter than the early Allied fighters, the Zero was able to out-maneuver its opposition. To combat this, Allied pilots developed specific tactics for dealing with the aircraft. These included the "Thach Weave," which required two Allied pilots working in tandem, and the "Boom-and-Zoom," which saw Allied pilots fighting on the dive or climb. In both cases, the Allies benefited from the Zero's complete lack of protection as a single burst of fire was generally enough to down the aircraft. This contrasted with Allied fighters, such as the P-40 Warhawk and F4F Wildcat which though less maneuverable, were extremely rugged and difficult to bring down.

Nevertheless, the Zero was responsible for destroying at least 1,550 American aircraft between 1941 and 1945. Never substantially updated or replaced, the Zero remained the IJN's primary fighter throughout the war.

Range: 1,929 miles Maximum Speed: 331 mph Ceiling: 33,000 ft.

Armament Guns: 2 × 7.7 mm (0.303 in) Type 97 machine guns (engine cowling), 2 × 20 mm (0.787 in) Type 99 cannons (wings) Bombs: Combat- 2 × 66 lb. and 1 × 132 lb. bombs, Kamikaze: 2 x fixed 550 lb. bombs

With the arrival of new Allied fighters, such as the F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair, the Zero was quickly eclipsed. Faced with superior opposition and a dwindling supply of trained pilots, the Zero saw its kill ratio drop from 1:1 to over 1:10.During the course of the war, over 11,000 A6M Zeros were produced. While Japan was the only nation to employ the aircraft on a large scale, several captured Zeros were used by the newlyproclaimed Republic of Indonesia during the Indonesian National Revolution (1945-1949).

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Top: Mitsubishi A6M Zero Fighter Plane Bottom: Crashes of Japanese Fighters A6M "Zero" on ground in the Pacific Islands

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04.

53.

• References for the Battles of Ligny: • "Les oeuvres originales sur la bataille du 16 juin 1815" , Accueil (in French), retrieved 25 October 2016

• References for Lithuania vs USSR

• Beck, Archibald Frank (1911), "Waterloo Campaign", in Chisholm, Hugh, Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 371–381

• Hardt, John Pearce; Kaufman, Richard F. (1995). EastCentral European Economies in Transition. M.E. Sharpe.

ISBN 1-56324-612-0.

• Chandler, David G. (1967), Campaigns of Napoleon[full citation needed]

• Maddison, Angus (2006). The world economy. OECD Publishing. ISBN 92-64-02261-9.

• Clausewitz, Carl von (2010), "5. The Campaign of 1815: Strategic overview of the Campaign (chapters 20-29)" , in Bassford, Christopher; Moran, Daniel; Pedlow, Gregory W., On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington, and the Campaign of 1815, Clausewitz.com, ISBN 9781453701508

• O'Connor, Kevin (2003). The history of the Baltic States.

Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-32355-0 • See also: History of Lithunia.

• Provisional Government of Lithuania

• Cornwell, Bernard (2015), Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, Lulu Press, p. ~230 , ISBN 978-1-312-92522-9

• Republics of the Soviet Union

• Georg Dubislav Ludwig von Pirch , fortunecity.com, a r c h i v e d f r o m t h e o r i g i n a l on 15 August 2007[better source needed] • Franklin, John (2015), Waterloo 1815 (2): Ligny, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 94 , ISBN 978-1-4728-0368-9 • Garrelts, Gerh. Andr. von (1856), Die Ostfriesen im deutschen Befreiungskriege: Gesch. des ehemal. 3ten Westphälisch-Ostfries. Landwehr-Infanterie-Regiments, der freiwilligen Jäger, der Cavallerie .. seit ihrer Entstehung bis zur Auflösung in den Kriegsjahren 1813, 1814 u. 1815. Mit alleger. Abbildung des Upstalsbooms u.

Schlachtplan von Ligerz u. Waterloo (in German), W. Bock,

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GIESBERT OSKAM

More info: Amstellandlaan 64,1182 CE Amstelveen NL T: Work Phone,+31 (0)20-640 2575 Work Email,info@antiquariaatoskam.nl

We warmly welcome you to the right place for the better (antique) book. Via ( on the right side) the following address you can international order our extensive book catalog .Please contact by using our (email) address or just phone!

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Sponsor annual convention I.M.O.S in Breda- Netherlands 2017 You are very welcome r u Z el t o h d n a L

e tt i m Sch

An all-inclusive hotel, just 200 km across the German border, in the land of 1000 mountains, directly on the most beautiful slopes of the Sauerland.Our hotel is located in the Beautiful and Popular Sauerland.

In our area you can go hiking,skiing and besides there are much opportunities for recreation.

For a pleasant holiday together with your dog, you also have come to the right domestic address.Extremely recommended for veterans, active and former servicemen.

An all-inclusive hotel, just 200 km across the German border, in the 71

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