Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.
Funny side stories of WWII thread
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their was that school teacher in england who loved to make riddles where you have to figure out all the lines to get the final solution…accidently he put words in it like juno, sword and so on and the crossword was overlord!!..he brought it up only a couple of weeks before the allied blow and landing in normandy w. the same TOPSECRET name OVERLORD and some of their beachhead-landingzones…
he got busted by american intelligence and held prison until overlord was over…it was one over other reasons that the whole mission was almost about to be called off!!!
(their were other reasons as well)
they interrigate the teacher but the outcome was that it was pure coincidence…however, they had to let him go… -
During a meeting between de Gaulle and Stalin the talks had stalled over the topic of which government to recognize in Poland. In a fit Stalin remarked he could not deal with a country who ran from an enemy to meet defeat. De Gaulle quipped under his breath, “In your case you just have much more room to run.”
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:roll:
My dad was a B17 ball turrent gunner in the 8th Airforce. While he was stationed in England he and the other crewmen would get together in the club between missions and drink cases of beer. So much so that they would stack the cans in the middle of the room in a pyrimid 5 or 6 feet high!
At sometime late in the evening their C.O. would come running into the room and dive head first into the pile of cans!
Everyone would cheer and go back to the barracks to sleep it off.
One night and new squadron came into the club early and started the stacking before the veterans got there, the pile was qutie large already so everyone tried to catch up to them by drinking a lot more quickly than usual, but what they did not know was that the new crews had started the stack around and on top of a table!
As usual the C.O. charged into the room and dived head first into the hugh stack!
Yep, he suffered a concussion, and then forbid the stacking of beer cans in the club for the rest of the war. :-P -
When Hitler was told that Brazil was leaning to the Allies camp, he remarked “Brazil will join the Allies when snakes smoke ciggarettes” When the Brazillian Expeditionary Force began fighting in Italy, they wore a shoulder patch showing a snake smoking
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When Hitler was told that Brazil was leaning to the Allies camp, he remarked “Brazil will join the Allies when snakes smoke ciggarettes” When the Brazillian Expeditionary Force began fighting in Italy, they wore a shoulder patch showing a snake smoking
Here’s a similar story about Hermann Göring, courtesy of Wikipedia:
On 9 August 1939, Göring boasted “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring: you can call me Meier!” (“I want to be called Meier if …” is a German idiom to express that something is impossible. Meier (in several spelling variants) is the second most common surname in Germany.) By the end of the war, Berlin’s air raid sirens were bitterly known to the city’s residents as “Meier’s trumpets”, or “Meier’s hunting horns.”
CWO Marc
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During operation HUSKY, German officers made vast attempts to mislead Italian soldiers about the treatment of POW’s in US camps. Efforts in this area were increased as the operaton went on in order to convince the Italians that fighting to the death would be a better road to take then surrendering after hoards of Italian units began surrendering en masse. During one interrogation of an Italian officer, the captive inquired, " So when are you gunna start?" The quizical interrogators replied, “Start with what?” The captured officer then returned to say, “Cutting off our balls.” After a brief moment of laughter the US interrogators assured him that they were not here to castrate him but only question him. With tears in his eyes he graciously thanked them for their clemency. To most US camp interrogators they felt more like saviors then their captors. (Atkinson “Day of Battle”)
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Also on the subject of Italian POWs: some Italians captured by the British in North Africa ended up being interned in the Orkney Islands, where they were put to work constructing concrete barriers to seal off the eastern entry route into Scapa Flow (the route taken by U47 when it torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak in October 1939). Sometimes, arguments would break out between the Italians and the British personnel supervising the work, and an Army interpreter would be called in to sort out the dispute. After one such altercation, a Navy officer took the interpreter aside and asked him why he had been translating for the Italian man who’d been complaining, saying that, “This fellow can speak English!” The interpreter retorted that the man couldn’t “even speak Italian!” – an answer which no doubt baffled the Navy officer until the prisoner later confided that he’d been speaking in dialect. (“Churchill’s Prisoners: The Italians In Orkney, 1942-1944.” St Margaret’s Hope : Orkney Wireless Museum, 1992.)
CWO Marc
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