NAPOLEON | June 18–Waterloo, 1815

The Battle of Waterloo ended Napoleon's 100 days' comeback on his return from exile in March 1815.

Waterloo was the final end of his rule as Emperor of France.

Now in Belgium, Waterloo was then within the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Napoleon was defeated by an English army under the command of the Duke of Wellington supported by a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher.

Napoleon had returned to power in March 1815. Many states joined together as the Seventh Coalition to resist his return.

Two large forces under Wellington and Blücher assembled near the north-eastern border of France. Napoleon chose to attack in the hope of destroying them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other allies.

Waterloo was the decisive engagement. It was Napoleon's last. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw".

Two days before the battle, Blücher's Prussian army had been defeated by the French at Ligny. Upon learning that the Prussian army had regrouped and was able to march to his support, Wellington held his line against repeated attacks by the French.

In the evening of that Sunday, June 18,  the Prussians arrived in force and broke through Napoleon's right flank. At that moment, Wellington's army counter-attacked and sent Napoleon's army into a confused retreat.

Poet laureate Robert Southey said that Waterloo was “the greatest deliverance that civilized society has experienced” since Charles Martel repelled an Islamic conquest of Europe in 732.

The New York Times today noted that Belgium has minted a new coin in remembrance of Waterloo's 200th anniversary, and noted the pleasure of the Belgians in remembering the date and figuring a way to get around the EU rules against competitive coinage (it did so by coining an unusual denomination). The Times added:

In Britain,  the new €2.50 coin aroused similar adulation. “Well done Belgium beat the French at their own game of finding ways around EU rules, the English should take note!!” Michael Dunn, from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote on Twitter. Others were less impressed. On Facebook, Manuel Di Pietrantonio suggested that the value of the dispute was about €2.50.

WW2 | D-Day + 71–Normandy Landing)

D-Day Assault Plan.

June 6, 2015 is the 71st Anniversary of D-Day.

The few surviving veterans from World War II are fading away with an attrition rate of about 30 percent per year. I have interviewed one survivor at length.

My wife Alice and I went to France last June to pay our respects to those who died. We were in Normandy and Mayenne (south of Normandy).

My uncle Willem van Stockum is buried in Laval, Mayenne, along with his six crew-mates on a Halifax bomber flying out of an RAF base (Squadron 10) in Melbourne, Yorks., UK. The place was shot down after its mission was completed on June 10, 1944. Another seven in crew from another Halifax on the same mission are buried next to them. A book (Time Bomber, adult or YA) about him and his mission was written by Dr. Robert Wack and has a five-star review on Amazon with seven reviewers.

In preparation for our visit last year (about which I have written here1 here2 here3 here4 and here5), I assembled data on D-Day and World War II in Europe. My main source was a new book targeted at young people by Rick Atkinson, D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy, 1944, published by Henry Holt. It is meant to be used in schools and is adapted from Atkinson's #1 best-selling book The Guns at Last Light. It is on Goodreads' list of the 167 best books for kids about World War II here.

The listing I found gives Atkinson's book an average rating of 4. One librarian objected to the poor quality of the photos and their somewhat haphazard placement. Also, the book is definitely for the older YA market because the language does not make much allowance for expected vocabulary in the elementary school grades.

Deaths from WWII

• Atkinson - Total 72 million people, or 28,000 people every day of the 2,174-day war (This is also the top Wikipedia figure.) Soviet dead 26 million - military 10.7 million, civilian 15 million. U.S. dead 419,000 - military 417,000 (out of 16 million who served), civilian 2,000 UK dead 451,000 - military 384,000 (out of 6 million who served), civilian 67,000 Canadian dead 23,000, all military (out of 1.1 million who served). German dead 8.8 million - military 5.5 million, civilian 3.3 million. European Jews killed in Holocaust - 6 million. Number of American soldiers buried in Europe (25,000 U.S. pilots killed behind enemy lines) 14,000.
• UK Source (worldwar2.org.uk). Total dead 50-70 million. Soviet dead 26.6 million, of which 8.7 million soldiers died in World War 2. British 700,000 military and 60,000 civilian deaths. Poland’s dead were between 5.6 and 5.8 million. USA military dead: 416,800. German total 7.4 million, of which military dead and missing are 5.3 million.
• History Channel Total dead 35-60 million. (That's a big range from the lowest estimate, especially when Atkinson and Wikipedia go up to 72 million.)

Military Force in WWII

• D-Day Armada Allied Troops landed - 156,000 Vehicles landed - 30,000 Planes - 11,000 Ships and landing craft - 5,000 Parachutists - 13,000
• Most Effective Bombers Used in Europe Britain Avro Lancaster, DeHavilland Mosquito (wooden, to avoid radar). USA B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, B-29 Superfortress. Germany Heinkel III, Junkers 87 Stuka, Junkers Ju-88.
• Most Effective Tanks Used in Europe USA M4 Sherman Soviet T-34 German Panther (partly copied from Soviets), PzKfw Mk. IV Panzer, Tiger I/II.

U.S. Veterans in WWII

U.S. armed forces personnel who served in WWII between December 1, 1941 and December 31, 1946: 16.1 million.

The National World War II Memorial was dedicated on May 29 in Washington, D.C. Located between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, it is the first national memorial dedicated to the men and women who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, including those who died in combat and the Americans who supported the war effort on the home front.

33 months The average length of active-duty by U.S. military personnel during WWII. 

73% The proportion of U.S. military personnel who served abroad during WWII. 

292,000 The number of U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines killed in battle in WWII. 

114,000 The number of other deaths sustained by U.S. forces during WWII. 

671,000 The number of U.S. troops wounded during WWII.

5.7 million The number of World War II veterans counted in Census 2000. The census identified the period of service for World War II veterans as September 1940 to July 1947.

475,000 The estimated number of WWII veterans living in California in 2002, the most in any state. Other states with high numbers of WWII vets included Florida (439,000), New York (284,000), Pennsylvania (280,000), Texas (267,000) and Ohio (208,000). See Table 529 at 

5.4 percent - The proportion of WWII veterans among the Clearwater, Fla., civilian population age 18 and over in 2000. Other large places (100,000 or more population) with high concentrations of WWII vets were: Cape Coral, Fla. (5.1 percent), Oceanside, Calif. (4.3 percent); and Scottsdale, Ariz.; Pueblo, Colo., Metairie, La., St. Petersburg, Fla.; Santa Rosa, Calif.; Mesa, Ariz.; and Independence, Mo. (all around 4 percent).

210,000 - Estimated number of women in 2002 who were WWII veterans. These women comprised 4.4 percent of WWII vets. See Table 530.

22% The proportion of all veterans in April 2000 who were WWII veterans.

Source: http://www.census.gov/Press Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/001747.html

WW2 | Bletchley Park's U.S. (AT&T) Component

The late Sgt. Tom Collins, aka "Sam Scram", who was 
the only person to accompany the Dragon 1 computer 
to Bletchley Park in 1944-45. Photo by JT Marlin, 2010.

At the BookExpo America in New York City this week I picked up a book by William Bynum called A Little History of Science (Yale University Press, 2012).  It has nearly two pages on the use of computers in World War II, notably at Bletchley Park in England.

I have been comparing these pages with what I remember of The Imitation Game and two YouTube videos I just watched on how the German Enigma and Lorenz computers worked and how their codes were broken.

The Enigma worked on a 25-letter alphabet, whereas the Lorenz cryptography machine worked with the 32-character Baudot code. Hitler deliberately used the different Lorenz encryption for his top command.

The Bletchley group first cracked the Enigma code on July 9, 1941. But the sheer volume of messages required them to be constantly seeking more mechanicals ways of processing the coded messages that they received.

The report presented in A Little History of Science is consistent with the YouTube stories in giving virtually all the credit to the Bombe and Colossus machines - the Mark I and finally the Mark II, of which there were ten at Bletchley by 1944.

These machines worked through the Tunny machine (see p. 609 of the book to which a link is shown) to decrypt German messages.

The second YouTube video cited above ("How their codes were broken") references Bell Labs, which until the 1940s was in New York City; it later moved to New Jersey. Bell Labs was at the ] time a division of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary. Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and several popular programming languages - C, S and C++. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work at Bell Labs.

The late Tom Collins (nicknamed "Sam Scram" at Bletchey after a popular radio character) of Springs, N.Y., worked for Western Electric, and personally accompanied the Dragon 1 cryptography machine to Bletchley during World War II.  I am wondering where the Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 (both of which he worked on) fit into Bletchley's history. Was the Dragon 1 generated by Bell Labs and then transferred to Chicago for operation? Just wondering.

Here are the top six links I got typing Tom's name and "Bletchley" into a Google search:

1. Sgt. Tom Collins at Bletchley - Warriors-Families

warriors-families.blogspot.com/.../a-veterans-story-sgt-tom-collins-at.htm... Jun 9, 2013 

2. T Collins Bletchley Park - BOISSEVAIN NEWS USA

www.boissevain.us/timetravel/tcollinsbletchleypark.html Sgt. Collins brought the Dragon 1 

Cryptography Machine to Bletchley Park, 

3. Newmanry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newmanry The Newmanry was a section at Bletchley Park... Middlesbrough; Tom Collins; Barbara Cooper, Ealing;...

4. Breaking Teleprinter Ciphers at Bletchley Park: An edition ...

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1119061628

Colin Burke, Pam Camp, Ray Chase, Tom Collins, David DeGeorge, Gina Douglas and John Parmenter, Ralph Erskine, Frederika and Stephen Freer, David ...

5. 'Taps' In A Small Town - Forbes

www.forbes.com/.../james-brady-on-media-cx_jb_0601memday.h... 
Forbes. Jun 1, 2006 - Tom Collins, 84, marches in his old soldier suit. ... but during the war, he was one of the few Yanks at Bletchley Park, where the British code ...

6. Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0192801325

F. H. Hinsley, ‎Alan Stripp - 2001 - ‎History. 'Sam Scram', see Collins...

WW2 | Spies–Choices

This book about World War II offers the reader choices - a
clever way to involve readers in history.

The last three days I have been at BookExpo America - the largest annual book convention in the USA - and I picked up a book called World War II Spies by Michael Burgan, published by You Choose Books, part of Capstone Press.

The You Choose books are an ingenious way of teaching history. The choices help the reader understand that history is not something that had to happen the way it did. History happened because people made choices that affected the outcomes.

The Spies book had special meaning for me because my father worked for the American spy service, the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) during World War II - first in Dublin and then in London.

The book starts with a well-written summary of how Hitler came to power and began by sending troops into countries where many Germans lived. Italy invaded North Africa and Japan invaded China. They formed what was called the Axis.

Then in 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and F.D.R. and the Congress declared war on the Axis. You, the reader, are recruited for spying work, and you are asked to make choices. It's the same approach to teaching history that is used within the Verzetsmuseum, the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam ("Your country has been occupied. Do you (1) collaborate and get favors from the occupiers, or (2) just behave as if nothing has happened, or do you (3) join the Resistance at great peril?")

The first three options are:

• You are in Denmark and you want to help fight the Nazis.
• You are a German and you want to join the Abwehr, the German spying service.
• You are an American and want to join the O.S.S.

Spoiler to follow: 

The outcomes of the different paths are sometimes successes where you the reader survive.

But sometimes they end in the death of the reader. Shot by the Nazis or dead when a parachute doesn't open. But you know as you die you did something to fight evil.

The endings depend on the choices, as in real life.

At each ending, the reader is sent to the concluding section which tells how the war concluded. The idea that one could have affected the outcome of the war is not in this book. That would be Science Fiction, where alternative futures are offered by someone coming back from the future. That is the theme of, for example, Time Bomber by Robert Wack.

This book is well written and designed, and is extremely instructive. I recommend it.

I have also read another book in this series, World War II Pilots.

VETS | Financial Coaching

U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez and Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray
promote a two-year pilot program in coaching veterans.
Arlington Employment Center, Va., May 20, 2015.

Better financial education of consumers is one way to prevent scams and help elderly people achieve financial security by holding on to the money they earn.

It should be a national priority as 10,000 more baby boomers turn 65 years old every day.

Veterans in transition are often targets of scammers. Even the wrong choice of credit card could be very costly.

In military service they may not have kept up their financial management skills, and the stress of transition to civilian life may open them up to scams.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor have initiated a two-year pilot program to help veterans and economically vulnerable consumers to manage their money.

About 60 certified financial coaches will be put in the field at locally based centers,  including 35 American Job Centers.

"These professionals will provide one-on-one free coaching to help them craft a personalized plan for financial success," said Perez. More

WW2 | Maloney Presents Purple Heart (Updated July 8, 2016)

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney presents corrected Purple

Heart to family of late WW2 Veteran Nick Stafanizzi, Sr.

Apr 15, 2015–At the Kings County (New York) American Legion Family Testimonial Dinner on Sunday, March 25th, Rep. Carolyn Maloney presented a corrected Purple Heart Medal to the Family of World War II Veteran, Nick Stefanizzi, Sr. 

The presentation was made to Nick Stefanizzi, Jr.

Nick Sr. was a Past Commander of St. Stanislaus Memorial Post in Greenpoint and a Past Kings County American Legion Commander.

He was wounded in action in the European Theater near the end of the war. The gun battery he was manning was hit by enemy fire and he was seriously injured, eventually losing sight in one eye. On his return home, he spoke little of his combat experiences. As he aged, his son Nick Jr., also a Past Commander of St. Stan’s Post and Past County Commander, asked him about his wartime service, and learned the story of his injury, which was never recognized with the award of a Purple Heart. Nick Jr. brought the matter to the attention of Assemblyman Joe Lentol and then Congressman Stephen Solarz, who arranged a presentation of the award to Nick Sr.

It wasn’t until recently, when Nick Jr. was trying to determine who should be the next person in the family to hold the heirloom, that he examined it and found typographical errors and misspelling of the family name in the engraving on the medal. He once again approached Lentol, who got the office of Maloney involved to secure a corrected medal. Once her office advised that the medal had been received, Nick Jr. explored an opportunity for an appropriate presentation. Current Kings County American Legion Commander Fred Schwally suggested the occasion of the testimonial dinner, and Congresswoman Maloney accepted the invitation.

WW2 | The Dutch Record–NIOD, a Great Research Center

Loe de Jong (1914-2005), author of Holland's
official history of World War II.

NIOD is a research institute much like SIPRI in Stockholm. It's centrally located 5 minutes from the Dam. It's at the "Spui" stop on the 1, 2 or 5 tram.

SIPRI has a clearer name and mission - its initials stand for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, easy to parse and understand. It has a simple focus on ways to maintain peace, avoid causes of wars, and reduce the dangers of arms races. For years I have followed their numbers, especially when I was working on military-conversion issues after the end of the Cold War.

The Meaning of NIOD

The NIOD constituency is more complicated to figure out and explain:

• NIOD was originally called the Rijks Instituut voor Oorlogs Documentatie (Royal Institute for War Documentation), or RIOD. 
• Then maybe people thought Rijks sounded too much like the Nazi Reichs (Reichskommissar was the title Hitler gave to Arthur Seyss-Inquart), and they renamed it the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogs Documentatie, NIOD. So far so good. Since 1999, NIOD has been part of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).
• NIOD has now merged with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). The acronym now stands for the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Dutch: NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies).

However difficult the etymology of NIOD, its great early achievement was to publish the fine official 14-volume Dutch history of the war by the late Loe de Jong - Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog ("The Kingdom of the Netherlands During World War II"), which topped out at 18,000 pages. The entire history is supposed to be available digitally.

Services

NIOD also works like a boutique library of the quality of the British Library in London. Go there at  380 Herengracht and enjoy the many services it has available. The only Dutch you must learn is that  Trekken means "pull" and you will need to pull the door open to get into the registration area to get permission to use the the reading room. Then you must know the word Duwen, which means "push" after you go down the hall, to get into the reading room.

Here's what the NIOD reading room offers to anyone serious about doing research on World War II:

• Sixty-five thousand books and three kilometers of archives - so far as I know, all on the premises.
• A reading room with 25 reading areas, with wi-fi throughout.
• Professional staff on hand.
• Lots of people interested in the same thing you are.
• Events, such as films and seminars.
• The center of a web of institutions that are digitizing all their documents and sharing them online.
• A building designed by A. Salm and inspired by the Chateau de Chenonceau, which spans the Loire.

The book shelves include thousands of books in English. However, you may not find much in English in the archives.The archival documents are mostly in Dutch and German.

If all else fails, you may be interested in the 100,000 photographs that NIOD has available. I found some of great interest to me. (I also found some at the Amsterdam Stadsarchief, the City Archives.)