I was told that the flag and picture were from when my grandfather liberated a concentration camp. Does anyone happen to know anything about Hoffen, Germany? Where is it located and what happened there? I cant find much online. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

William L Zuckerbrow was born in Perth Amboy, NJ on June 29, 1919 and enlisted in the Army on October 24, 1941.
He survived WW2, got married, had two sons, and passed away on June 3, 1997 in Arizona

US Army Signal Corps - SC 195600
Wescott Photographer / WWP-PD

I wanted to share this here because I believe this is one of the best written accounts by an American Soldier in World War II. I think it’s better written than Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald and Currahee! by Donald Burgett, and it ranks right up there with With The Old Breed by Eugene Sledge. The author Paul Boesch is well known in the wrestling community and is often regarded as the most decorated World War II wrestling veteran.

Interestingly, the book was published only because Charles MacDonald reached out to Boesch after discovering the manuscript while researching the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest as an army historian, saying that “It was too human a document to be ignored.”

My great grandfather brought home a couple things, does anyone seem to know what this bayonet is/for???? Plus the flag as a bonus picture. He landed in France 1944 and fought till the end of the war. 76th division. Have a berthier carbine also! But i dont know what this bayonet is!

Unfortunately all I have is a photocopy of it, and someone must have not known how to use the copier because it’s only every other page.

With English subtitles: Testimony on France during the Occupation during the Second World War, based on the “Parisian diaries” of the German writer Ernst Jünger and archive images.

The left is a picture of my grandfather Roger. He was in the US Army Air Corps and drove fuel trucks in France during the war. I'm not sure what unit he was in. It's been a long time since I've heard his stories. There were stories of his convoy getting strafed by Luftwaffe remnants. Stories about guarding Italian prisoners with a Thompson submachine gun. The story that sticks out the most is about a bayonet from the Franco Prussian War. Being of French Canadian descent the brothers could speak both French and English fluently. A GI owed an outstanding laundry bill to a French family. My grandfather was able to mediate and convinced the GI to pay his debt. The French family gifted him a Model 1866 Chassepot Yataghan bayonet that had been in their family since the Franco Prussian War. They would have had to hide it throughout the occupation as under Nazi law weapons including swords and bayonets were illegal. My father has the bayonet now. After the war my grandfather worked in the civil service at Brunswick Naval Air Station until he retired. There he would drive fuel trucks, plow snow from runways and roads, and operate other heavy equipment and trucks. Another one of his jobs was to transport men by bus from the base to the SERE survival school in Rangeley Maine. His older brother Camille (right) would never return home to Maine from Europe. Camille was a tanker in Company E, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division "Hell on Wheels". During Operation Grenade the 2nd crossed the Rohr river and spearheaded the assault into the Rhineland. The 2nd faced intense opposition and Camille's Sherman was knocked out in the fighting. He was grievously wounded and several days later would succumb to his wounds in a field hospital near Dusselfdorf. Camille rests permanently at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten at Plot K, Row 10, Grave 12.

I am genuinely wondering as my father and grandfather both say he's a German, but to my research the uniform is an RAF uniform, it anyone could help me find out what country he belonged to that'd be great.

I purchased two uniforms to 2Lt. Paul Nolan Hudgens, 0-797010. He was assigned to the 322nd Bomb Group, 449th Bomb Squadron, 9th AAF. I’m trying to find out his position on the B-26, and missions he flew. He received 11 Air Medals and 1 Distinguished Flying Cross. Also searching for his plane.

On January 28th, 1944, 25 B-25s of 70th BSqn, 42nd BGp, of the US Army Air Force attacked Japanese forces at Tobera Airfield, Rabaul, New Guinea. The bomber carrying this crew was on a run over the airfield when it rolled and crashed. Antiaircraft fire had likely either hit the pilot or severed control cables. There were no survivors.

In 1959, the wreck was discovered and the crew’s remains recovered. Due to the destroyed nature of the wreck, it was impossible to identify individual crew members’ remains, so they were buried together in a single grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

F/O Leslie D. Gilliland (pilot)
F/O Marion O. Stevens (co-pilot)
2nd Lt. Andrew V. Bobal (bombardier-navigator)
Sgt. James A. Goldsmith (engineer)
S/Sgt. Benton Freeman (radio-gunner)
Sgt. Charles D. Dintaman (gunner)

I was asked to find out what happened to Cpl William H. Pearce, a left gunner on a B-29 of the 792nd Bomb Squadron, 468th Bomb Group, lost at sea in July 1945. His family are happy for the research to be shared. Everything below is from US government records at the National Archives, and every page is in the gallery.

THE MISSION

On 12 July 1945 XXI Bomber Command sent four wings against four Japanese cities and an oil target in night incendiary raids, bombing by radar. Mission 263 was the 58th Wing's: four groups against Utsunomiya, 60 miles north of Tokyo, a city of 87,868 people in 1940 with new housing growing up beside the Nakajima aircraft plant. The command's report, signed by Curtis LeMay, puts the damage at 0.94 square miles destroyed, 34.2 per cent of the built-up area.

THE FUEL

42-24855 passed Iwo Jima on the way back at 0528 with 1,549 gallons aboard. About two and a half hours out of Iwo the flight engineer found No. 1 engine low and transferred 300 gallons into it. No. 1 then began using fuel far too fast, backfiring and smoking, and was feathered. When the engineer tried to move what was left in its tank to the other three engines, the transfer system failed. With 450 gallons for three engines and not enough to reach base, the pilot, 1st Lt Irwin A. Stavin, chose to ditch beside a convoy he had sighted.

He had a Dumbo with him on VHF. The bomb bay doors were faulty, so nothing could be jettisoned, and the loose equipment was thrown into the bomb bay. The astrodome and every escape hatch were opened before they went in.

THE CONVOY

USS Kerstin (AF-34), a stores ship carrying chilled and frozen provisions for Iwo Jima, was convoy commodore for LST-734, LSM-345, YP-645, YP-642 and the merchant ship Michael Casey, escorted by PC-809 and PC-1591. They had left Saipan on 12 July.

At 0745 on 13 July Kerstin's bridge logged a B-29 crossing the convoy at about 3,000 feet with a PBM following. At 0750 it began circling on the port bow. The port outboard engine was out of commission and the inboard port engine was "operating with difficulty". The commodore sent PC-1591, PC-809 and LSM-345 out to stand by, and at 0758 the B-29 came down about two miles off the convoy's port quarter. The PBM dropped what looked like a yellow life raft. Kerstin's log puts the convoy at 18°46'N 144°09'E at 0800.

THE DITCHING

The 58th Wing's ditching report has them coming down from 4,000 feet and approaching at 120 mph, parallel with swells about six feet high and twenty feet from crest to crest. They hit at 95 to 100 mph, nose up about five degrees. Four slight impacts were followed by a violent one when the right wing struck the crest of a swell and swung the aircraft hard to the right. The fuselage broke just aft of the wing; the rear section sank in less than a minute, and the front floated nose down for about two minutes.

Stavin was knocked out, came round as water came into the front compartment, and got out through his window with the nose, he reckoned, twenty feet under. The co-pilot used his own window. The bombardier followed the engineer through the engineer's hatch, and the CFC gunner, radio operator and navigator went out through the astrodome. The right and left gunners and the radar man used the rear escape hatch, and the tail gunner his own. Two rafts were released from inside and the Dumbo dropped two more.

Everyone except the left gunner, Pearce, and the tail gunner, Cpl William A. Teague, reached the big rafts. The two were seen in the water in their inflated Mae Wests and never reached the rafts. The survivors believed they were pulled under by wreckage as the aircraft sank, or slipped out of Mae Wests that were, in the report's words, "improperly fitted as per instructions received at Topeka, Kansas."

The report calls Stavin's "a new crew very recently reported in from the States". Most of them had never done a wet dinghy drill, and afterwards the wing made it compulsory for every new crew before its first mission. The report also records all eleven men alive after the landing.

THE RESCUE

Kerstin logged the B-29 sinking at 0811 and the three ships reaching the survivors at 0815. PC-809 was at the scene by 0823 and took aboard Stavin, 2nd Lt Richard LaCrosse, Sgt Frank Ortiz and Sgt Robert Silcox. PC-1591 picked up five more at 0907, "none injured", and landed them at Iwo Jima at 0730 on 15 July.

Kerstin's diary: "There were eleven (11) men in the crew. One was not recovered, one was dead when recovered and the remainder suffered minor injuries." It adds that "the pilot exhibited great skill in the manner with which he maneuvered and crash-landed his plane." Its roster lists nine men recovered and Teague under DECEASED. Pearce is not on it.

THE TWO GUNNERS

Cpl William Herbert Pearce, left gunner, 13104872, was born in Washington DC on 15 June 1922 and enlisted at Miami Beach on 4 February 1943. He is named on the Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial, Court 7, and was awarded the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. He was 23.

Cpl William A. Teague II, tail gunner, 14153875, was born on 30 January 1926 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Section 12, Site 510. He was 19.

STILL MISSING

I have found no photograph of the ditching or of 42-24855, and none of these papers names the PBM's squadron. If anyone has 468th Bomb Group photographs or a family connection to Stavin's crew, I would like to hear from you.

The plaque was presented by the citizens of Boise, Idaho, in memory of the 107 crewmen who were killed in the Battle of Cape Esperance, 11-12 October 1942.

A group of Serbs - political prisoners exiled to Bor mines for forced labour. 15.02.1942.

Inventory number 15205

Courtesy of Museum of Yugoslavia.

Almost 100 B-17s had extra passengers. Cameramen and photographers were on many planes. That formation flew over the North Sea, crossed Denmark, and continued east towards Marienburg in East Prussia. The idea was to confuse and avoid the Luftwaffe, bomb the Focke-Wulf factory at Marienburg, and use the footage in war propaganda to get more support for the bombing effort in Europe. This is how the 1944 movie „Target for Today”was made.

Today, the airfield at Marienburg is still in operation, as a Polish NATO air force base at Malbork.