Best World War One Leader

What if there were secret plans and an alien craft on the cruiser?

Government conspiracy.

@The:

@CWO:

@ABWorsham:

Did I forget a category or person?

I don’t know how his numbers stack up against the others, but Adolf Galland shot down over a hundred Allied aircraft.

Galland ranked right up there, if not surpassed, most of the airmen in the Luftwaffe.

He could also light a cigar and smoke while wearing his oxygen mask. Great fighter pilot! Had he not been promoted to General he may have added another hundred kills to his score.

@Clyde85:

@ABWorsham:

I would be aiming for a German victory in WWI, the Allies had their chance and screwed up.

A German victory in WW1 would be ideal here, but I believe that you wouldn’t need to bring and weapons back with you, just a history book, and point to the few mistakes Germany made and say, “ok, now don’t do that, do this instead”.

If I had to choose a weapon though, i’m kinda torn. On the one hand, bringing back the StuG III would be great to help the Germans break the dead lock without a doubt, but I wonder how well German industry could support them once they went into action, long enough to break the front? Maybe. On the other hand, if I were to bring back the MG42, I know that German industry could support and and keep these weapons running, meaning longer usage and a greater chance of this weapon tipping the balance for a German victory.Â

Awesome points, the MG 42 would have shredded Allied ranks between the lines.

@Axistiger13:

Britain and France planned to send a expeditionary force to finland, which would bring them to war with both germany and the USSR. If they did send a expeditionary force, how would the Winter War end? and also, how would the outside world (mainly japan and the US) react?

Britain’s expeditionary forces to Norway in 1940 and Greece in 1941 were humiliating failures that ended with Dunkirk-style evacuations (Dunkirk itself being the evacuation of another British expeditionary force), so I doubt that sending a Franco-British expeditionary force to Finland in 1939 would have been of much military help to the Finns against the Russians.  What makes this scenario interesting, however, is that it might have scrambled the landscape of political alliances in various ways, with unpredictable consequences for the rest of the war.  This was a time when alliances were still in flux – one example being Japan’s angry reaction to the signature in August 1939 of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by Germany, which had co-signed with Japan the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936.  Japan had been defeated by Zhukov at Khalkhin Gol a few days before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, so it was furious to see Germany sign a non-aggression treaty with Russia.  (Ironically, Japan did precisely the same thing in April 1941, seven months after the signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.)

Guilt or innocence is a hard thing to quantify, so im not even going to touch that part of it, but on the waging a war of aggression, I can comment.

I dont think it is a crime to wage a war of aggresion, atleast not one they should hang you for. It is said that when a country wages it is only justified in doing so in defense of itself. How do you quantify something like that though? Japan felt that the US was threating it, threating to cut it off from needed raw materials and strangle their country.
Japan felt that they were acting in defense of themselves by attacking the US and the allies, were they wrong?

Jodl was a career solider, raising in the ranks and working his way to the top. He was no different from the 1,000s of other men who did the same thing, spent their life in the military, and did what they were ordered to do. In a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany one man and his cloest cronied have total control on everything the state does. Jodl wasnt one of them, and he had very limited control over what the German armies did or where they went, that rested with Hitler and his thugs. Hitler told Jodl what he wanted done, and Jodl was left to figure out how to go about it. To have expected him to disobey Hitlers would have been expecting him to commit suicide.

@ABWorsham:

You guys have high regards for the Italian Armies.

The Italian war effort can be described as a failure. Italy had only one main front to fight taking on enemies that have many fronts to contend with. The battles of 1915-17 showsed little progress, 1917 the rout of Caporetto.

Only when Austria-Hungary was at the point of revolution could the Italian Armies have large sucess.

I agree.  But the Italians had more divisions and ships engaged with the enemy at any one time than the USA had during the entire conflict.

You also have to consider that the “Alpine Front” was one of the most difficult and geographically challenging of the entire war.

That’s a remarkable story.

I suppose the British wanted to avoid even the slightest risk of compromising Irish neutrality - so if the Irish put someone in a camp and the British acknowledge their status as a neutral and non-belligerent country, then it follows that they would honor the laws and regulations of that country and return the escapee. But I don’t think they would have followed the same reasoning if Mr Wolfe would have been a British subject.

November 06, 2009 
By Paul Fattig
Mail Tribune
Hugh Curthey was tired of working long hours for low pay in the gladiolus fields just south of Grants Pass in the spring of 1941 when he learned of a high-paying job overseas.

“My brother and I were working in those bulbs for a dollar and a half a day,” recalled the 93-year-old Medford resident. “That’s when we heard about this construction work on Wake Island.”

At that point, he couldn’t have told you where Wake Island was on the globe. What he did know was that he would be making at least $500 a month — good money in those days — as a construction worker for the Morrison-Knudsen Co. to help build a U.S. Navy base.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into but we sure found out soon enough,” he said during a recent visit with stepson and daughter-in-law Royce and Joyce Webber of Ruch.

“I still think about it every day,” he added. “I thank the good Lord I made it through.”

He and his brother, Robert “Bob” Curthey, were among some 1,200 civilians taken prisoner when Wake Island was captured by the Japanese on Dec. 23, 1941. Following a 16-day siege in which a 450-man Marine Corps garrison aided by civilians fought to repel the overwhelming Japanese invasion, they were held prisoner until the war ended nearly four years later. Both survived.

“It was rough on people like me because I’ve always like to eat,” said Curthey, a retired maintenance worker for the city of Grants Pass.

Meager meals were the least of his worries during an ordeal that included years of forced labor. More than 200 Americans with him died either during the battle or while in captivity.

Born May 3, 1916, in Kenosha, Wis., Curthey arrived with his family in southwestern Oregon a few years before the Great Depression gripped the nation. He attended first grade in Riddle, then went to schools in Grants Pass, a region where gladiolus were a popular cash crop in the late 1930s into the early 1950s.

Accompanied by brothers Bob and Charles, Curthey arrived on Wake Island in May 1941, although Charles returned to Grants Pass before the war erupted. They were among numerous residents from the region who had jumped at the chance for good jobs overseas.

For seven months, they helped build a naval base on the Pacific coral atoll located between Honolulu and Guam. But their balmy blue-sky world exploded nearly simultaneously with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Maj. James P.S. Devereux, the officer in charge of the Marines, told those on the island to hunker down and prepare for an assault. In addition to the Marines, there were 68 Navy personnel on the island.

During the next two weeks, the island was bombed eight times by Japanese aircraft. Many of the structures were leveled.

“There wasn’t enough rifles to go around so we didn’t have any,” Curthey said. “During the siege, Bob and I worked throughout the night changing gun positions and carrying ammunition and filling sandbags. During the day we stayed down in our dugouts that we had to dig. We didn’t have any protection. But we held out 16 days.”

He tells of a civilian who stood up on the edge of one dugout when a Japanese dive bomber swooped down. The man died instantly.

The defense was crushed by 9 a.m. Dec. 23 with 109 Americans — 62 military, 47 civilians — killed compared to an estimated 900 Japanese soldiers and sailors dead. Using their shore batteries, the Wake Island defenders sank at least two Japanese warships.

Following the surrender, the Americans were held under guard in their barracks. But one man continued to sneak out at night to dig up booze that had been buried before the Japanese invasion, Curthey said.

“He was a big man with a bull neck,” he said. “They told him if he got drunk one more time, off comes the head. He went out and got drunk again. They laid him on a block and off went his head.”

When the prison ship Nita Maru arrived to take the prisoners off the island, Curthey, by then a powerhouse operator, was supposed to stay with 98 other prisoners of war to teach the Japanese how to operate the powerhouse and other facilities.

“I told my brother I wasn’t going to stay so I went with the other POWs getting on the Nita Maru,” he said, noting that Bob was a truck driver on the island. “If I had stayed, I would have been history.”

Indeed, the 98 people left behind were executed on Oct. 7, 1943. They included David F. Chambers of Grants Pass and Wesley W. Stringer of Lakeview.

“I knew both of them,” he said quietly.

The Curthey brothers were placed in the stifling-hot hold of the ship with most of the other prisoners.

“We stayed down in that ship for 12 days — never saw the light of day,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room for us all to sleep so some people took their belts off and tied themselves to those big timbers down in the ship so they could stand there and sleep. The sweat just puddled beneath us.”

They were eventually taken to Shanghai, where they were marched a half dozen miles to the first of two POW camps where they would be held. They were given three scant meals a day.

“They confiscated all the food from the Chinese farmers,” he said. “It was a cup of white rice with a piece of meat in it once in a while. That and a cup of soup. And if we did anything wrong, they’d cut us down to two meals a day. I got a little thin.”

Each group also had a loaf of bread to divide once a week. Normally weighing about 185 pounds, Curthey dropped 50 pounds on the POW diet.

When hunger gnawed at his gut, he would pretend he was chewing gum and crack jokes to keep his mind off food.

“I’ve always had the ability to laugh at myself,” he said. “We (he and Bob) always figured we were gonna make it.”

Knowing his survival depended on it, he ate everything he was given.

“One guy when we first got there said he wasn’t going to eat their garbage,” he said. "Well, after about two weeks he decided he would eat it. But he couldn’t hold it down. He died.

“I’ve always said rice is like a drug to me — I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “Every so often you’d get burned rice. Tasted like toast.”

But they worked hard for what little food they were given.

“When I was a prisoner, I got down to about 135 pounds and carried 220-pound bean sacks,” he said. “The last time I had my back X-rayed, the doc asked me what I did for work. I told him about the bean sacks. He said, ‘That’s the answer. You have about five or six vertebras that are crushed. You will live in pain the rest of your life.’ Well, he ain’t been far off.”

As POWs in Japanese-occupied China, they served as slave labor, doing everything from hauling beans to moving dirt to building a rifle range, he recalled.

“And twice a day we had to stand at rigid attention and they’d come along and count us off,” he said. "One time, a group next to us weren’t ready for inspection on time. The Japanese sergeant came along and banged them all on the head with the clipboard.

“Well, the clipboard broke, so he beat them on the head with the pieces. All 36 men had blood dripping off their foreheads.”

When the war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, the POWs were placed on a ship and sent back to the states. Curthey returned to Grants Pass but not to the gladiolus fields.

“Never again, not for a dollar and a half a day,” he said. “I was ready for something else.”