Nancy Wake RIP

Australian war hero Nancy Wake, died yesterday in London

She was 98.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand on 30 August 1912 Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was the youngest of six siblings. Her family moved to Sydney when she was two years old

Wake became a nurse before an inheritance from a New Zealand aunt enabled her to leave home in 1931 and fulfill her dream of travelling.

After studying journalism in London, she became a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in Paris and reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. A 1933 trip to interview Hitler in Vienna led her to become committed to bringing down the Nazis. "I saw the disagreeable things that he was doing to people, first of all the Jews," she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in 1985. "I thought it was quite revolting."

When World War II broke out in 1939, she was living in the French city of Marseille with her first husband, French industrialist Henri Fiocca. She helped British servicemen and Jews escape the German occupying force.

Her husband was eventually seized, tortured and killed by the Gestapo. But Wake managed to escape to London in 1943 through where she received the espionage training before helping to lead the French resistance in its final days.

Code named "The White Mouse" by the Gestapo during the war, Wake died Sunday in a London nursing home, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said.
"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Gillard said in a statement.
Trained by British intelligence in espionage and sabotage, Wake helped to arm and lead 7,000 resistance fighters in weakening German defenses before the D-Day invasion in the last months of the war.
While distributing weapons, money and code books in Nazi-occupied France, she evaded capture many times and reached the top of the Gestapo's wanted list, according to her biographer, Peter FitzSimons. "They called her the 'la Souris Blanche,' 'the White Mouse,' because every time they had her cornered... she was gone again," he said. "Part of it was she was a gorgeous looking woman," he said. "The Germans were looking for someone who looked like them: aggressive, a man with guns — and she was not like that."

France decorated her with its highest military honor, the Legion d'Honneur, as well as three Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance. The United States awarded her its Medal of Freedom and Britain, the George Medal. She was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.


Wake continued working for British intelligence in Europe after the war until 1957, when she moved back to Australia and married British fighter pilot John Forward. She moved back to Britain in 2001, four years after Forward's death. She never had children.
According to her wishes, Wake's body is expected to be cremated privately and her ashes scattered next spring at Montlucon in central France, where she fought in a heroic 1944 attack on the local Gestapo headquarters.


Rest in peace Nancy Wake

Photo from Wikipedia
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De Valera and that message of condolence upon the death of Hitler again

Arsehole

It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with any aspect of Irish history. It was fortunate that I happened upon this article in the Irish Independent yesterday – quite fortunate as I haven’t looked at the paper for some weeks.

Eamon De Valera was the second worst leader to grace the Republic of Ireland (or its predecessors) beaten only by the grossly corrupt criminal Charles Haughey to the top slot. That said the gruesome twosome of Ahern and BIFFO (the current Taoiseach Brian Cowan – the Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly) are close behind due to their gross economic mismanagement which has turned the Celtic Tiger into that infamous dead cat that bounces during an economic slide.

Among his many acts of utter stupidity was his visit to Eduard Hempel, the German Ambassador to Ireland in 1945 to sign a book of condolence for Adolf Hitler. This act caused international anger and contributed to Ireland’s status as a semi outcast nation for at least a decade.

New research has shown Mr de Valera fully expected the furore he created when he called on the German ambassador Eduard Hempel, to "express condolences" after Hitler's death was announced on May 2.

He never publicly explained the rationale behind his visit but previously secret papers in a new Royal Irish Academy book -- 'Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1941-1945' -- show his thoughts following the incident.

"I had expected this," Mr de Valera wrote. "I acted correctly and I feel certain wisely."

Mr de Valera said he could have feigned a "diplomatic illness" but he would "scorn that sort of thing".

"So long as we retained our diplomatic relations with Germany, to have failed to call upon the German representative would have been an act of unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation and to Dr Hempel," he said in a letter.

He said he was "certainly" not going to add to Dr Hempel's humiliation "in the hour of defeat".
"I had another reason," his letter says. "It would establish a bad precedent. It is of considerable importance that the formal acts of courtesy should not have attached to them any further special significance, such as connoting approval or disapproval of the state in question or of its head."


I have always considered De Valera’s act to be the act of a small, ridiculous man with a pathological adherence to protocol and the political nous of a flatworm.

This letter shows that m extremely low opinion of the man is fully justified. Regardless of his feelings towards Hempel – there is nothing to indicate that he was much more than a reluctant Nazi (for what that is worth) – It was an act if extreme stupidity. He knew full well that the act would be badly received and would poison relations, particularly with the USA with whom relations were already pretty poor.

Germany was dead and buried by the time Hitler killed himself. The allies were on the verge of victory in Europe and yet he felt that the niceties of diplomatic protocol were far more important than acknowledging the blatant political reality.

How can I best describe De Valera? The man was an utter fuckwit who would have been better off as a school teacher or a junior clerk. Ireland may well have been a better place if he hSource URL: http://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/WWII
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Perhaps why it was a good idea for Eire to be neutral in 1939

I've always felt that Ireland's neutrality during WWII was right but then wrong. In 1939 it was almost certainly the right call. Leaving aside any other considerations the country had a pitiful military capability at the time.

This represents the hardware that Ireland had to defend itself on outbreak of war

Defending the Seas



The Muirchu with one 12 Pounder naval gun



The Fort Rannoch, again with a 12 pounder naval gun





Two Vosper MTBs

Land strikeforce




Two Swedish Landsverk L60 tanks




One Vickers Mark II Medium tank


The army also had just four anti aircraft guns and four anti tank rifles (useless against even light tanks)


In the skies



The Irish Army Air Corp's strike capability consisted of three Gloster Gladiators. The Corps did also have Lysanders, Ansons and a number of Walrus seaplanes but these would have been ineffectual in an offensive role

The purpose of this post is not to sneer at the Irish military but to give a small indication of what military hardware it had at the start of WWIIand a small contributing factor to staying neutralSource URL: http://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/WWII
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From war in the ice to the Israeli Navy via a lot of vile crap

After meeting Bob from Brockley I resolved to finish off at long last the tale of the larger than life character Red Cushing by dealing with his time as a prospective German spy. It didn't last and he ended up in Sachsenhausen where he was a witness to the last days of the life of Yakov Stalin. Alas and Alack, I cannot put my hands on the books I need, Hiho....

That said it's interesting what you can come across on the internet. Starting off with Archibald Maule Ramsay, a ferocious anti semite who held the dubious distinction of being the only MP to be interned during WWII, proceeding through a number of Holocaust revisionist scumbags I end up at the piece of human shit that goes by the name of Ernst Zundel. I was not aware that he started his odious "literary"career peddling crap about Nazi saucers and Antarctic bases.

It's amazing how the German Neuschwabenland expedition just before the war, an American exercise (Operation High Jump) just after the war, a tiny British military expedition to Antarctica during in 1943 and the tardy surrender of a few U boats can form the bedrock of such nonsense as the existence of Nazi bases on that (almost but not completely) icy continent.

However, let me digress onto something truly fascinating and move from the South Pole and Holocaust denying vermin to the North and there was a real little war fought on the ice and on the icy seas. I didn't know until today that the vessel you see below was the first American warship (of sorts) to capture a (soon to be) enemy vessel in WWII



The Northland was a coastguard cutter, launched in 1927 designed specifically for arctic operation. In 1941 the US took over Greenland. The same month the Northland set out on a two month cruise to assist in the South Greenland Survey Expedition. It was then transferred to the newly formed Northeast Greenland Patrol.

On 12 September the Northland sighted the Norwegian sealer Buskoe 12 September and sent a boarding party to investigate. Buskoe, which was suspected of sending weather reports and information on Allied shipping to the Germans, was taken to MacKenzie Bay in Greenland, becoming the first American naval capture of WWII(although of course before it formally entered the war).

The Buskoe's capture led to the discovery of a German radio station further up Greenland coast from Mackenzie Bay. The Northland sent a raiding party captured three Germans, with equipment and code, as well as plans for other radio stations in the far north. The Germans were treated as illegal immigrants....

Although built for colder conditions, the Northland ended its life in much further waters. After being sold for scrap in 1947 the Northland was renamed Medinat-HaYehudim and was used to transport Jewish refugees to Palestine (but that is a different subject and one that does not reflect on Britain with any credit at all). In 1948 she was renamed Eilat and along with two former Royal Canadian Navy corvettes and a passenger ship formed the nucleus of the infant Israeli Navy under its first commander, Paul Shulman.

I know I dwelt a little on some utter scumbags at the start but it is tuly amazing what you can come across starting in one place on the internet and seeing where takes you... In this case the destination was fascinating evn if the journey featured some real pieces of slime at the start...Source URL: http://idontwanttobeanythingotherthanme.blogspot.com/search/label/WWII
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