Picture of the day

Damn duplicitous elephants, working both sides...

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Burma.
 
Can't see the ears of the Krautenelephant, but the Burmese critter is of the Asian variety, judging by it's ears.

Undoubtedly the capture of a JIF-indoctrinated local, pressed into service along with his mahout.
 
It's a nice war if you can get it...

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"Hello, baby. Some friends and I just got into town. Would you like to get a drink?"

Then, four years on, she wakes up with a brutal hangover and a freshly-shaven head.
 
Yeah, hell of a price to pay for being young and falling in love with a handsome soldier who happens to be in the wrong army. I've always felt empathy for the plight of those European women that were brutalized for 'fraternizing with the enemy".

There's a difference between that and collaboration with the enemy. I do understand the resentment towards the Vichy supporters, especially those that embraced the Nazi race laws.
 
Sharps '63 said:
Yeah, hell of a price to pay for being young and falling in love with a handsome soldier who happens to be in the wrong army. I've always felt empathy for the plight of those European women that were brutalized for 'fraternizing with the enemy".

There's a difference between that and collaboration with the enemy. I do understand the resentment towards the Vichy supporters, especially those that embraced the Nazi race laws.
Click to expand...

For a lot of those women, dating German soldiers wasn't about attraction, it was about survival. You pick the team that keeps you and your family fed.
 
Things were way different back then. My Mother worked at Aircraft Repair in Edmonton during WW2.She meet a nice US sailor that had been sunk a few many too many times by the Axis forces. He had a German last name and My Baba who had lived through the occupation of her country in WW1 never forgave her for consorting with the enemy.
 
Sharps '63 said:
Yeah, hell of a price to pay for being young and falling in love with a handsome soldier who happens to be in the wrong army. I've always felt empathy for the plight of those European women that were brutalized for 'fraternizing with the enemy".

There's a difference between that and collaboration with the enemy. I do understand the resentment towards the Vichy supporters, especially those that embraced the Nazi race laws.
Click to expand...

I suppose there were some who "fell in love". Most fell in some other category I suspect. A woman is programmed for reproduction just as males are, only in different ways. Nature will not be (long) denied.

I can understand their behaviour, given the thick book that would list French men collaborating with the Germans, even before WWII.

But does one piece of treason excuse another?

Plenty of German women were quite happy to "fraternize" with Allied POWs in Germany too.

The British usually take very little notice of the Germans and look straight through them. Many Germans have remarked that their own women, and in particular some of their allies could profit by studying the attitude adopted by the British towards their enemies. ###ual relations, for instance, between British prisoners and German women are very rare. This is probably due to the fact that the British have a strongly developed sense of national pride, which prevents them from consorting with women of an enemy nation....To sum up, the British tradition of behaving as Herrenvolk is kept up by the prisoners of war. Their presence in Germany is thoroughly demoralising, since their behaviour not only typifies a nation which is racially akin to ours, strong, and absolutely sure of victory – but also has given rise to discussions about the futility of a war between two nations of the same stock.
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ht tp://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured-article/ss-report-on-conduct-of-british-pows-in-germany.html
 
Those are victories.

That's Hans Wind on the picture. According to Wiki he had 39 victories on Buffalo and 36 in Bf 109G -total 75.
 
the german aces were often high scoring, into the 300s for some, not because they were necessarily better or more talented, but because they were in it until the war was over, where as our boys could go home after a tour
 
scott585 said:
the german aces were often high scoring, into the 300s for some, not because they were necessarily better or more talented, but because they were in it until the war was over, where as our boys could go home after a tour
Click to expand...

Didn't a lot of Luftwaffe aces get a good start on their victories with the Kondor Legion during the Spanish Civil War? That experience paid dividends later during the Polish Invasion.

In both cases, they were flying superior aircraft to those flown by their adversaries.
 
Erich Hartmann was the undisputed ace of aces: 352 confirmed kills.

He got his first in November of 1942: not exactly an easy time for the Luftwaffe.

His basic tactic was to outfly the other guy, get close and let loose. Doing this, he trashed 14 109s which were struck by pieces of the machine he was shooting down.... but he himself was never shot down.
 
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