Feburary 24th marks the 80th anniversary of the incident that was known contemporaneously as the Battle of Los Angeles. In early 1942, rumours of an attack on Los Angeles by the Imperial Japanese armed forces sent the inhabitants into a panic, leading to defence forces firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the sky… At an attack that didn’t exist.
Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, understandably the general public in the US was on edge, and following an attack on the Ellwood Oil Fields near Santa Barbara on Feburary 23rd, Los Angelenos were even more so.
Embarrassingly though, there were no actual aircraft, with a commission later concluding that it was a false alarm, with any supposed sightings being caused by misplaced weather balloons illuminated by searchlights that people mistook for planes. This explanation, naturally, lead to both contemporary newspapers accusing the government of trying to cover-up a potential attack… in addition to the the whole affair later being seized by the UFOlogy community, who claimed that the aircraft or lights folks claimed to see in one of the main photos of the event (see main image) where actually alien visitors.
In any case, even if the attack wasn’t real the damage that came afterwards certainly was, with numerous buildings and cars getting destroyed by shell debris that dropped back to Earth in addition to the three people who died in car accidents in the ensuing panic and additional two who died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hours-long cacophony of gunfire and sirens.
During the Second World War, Iceland was invaded and occupied by first the British and the Americans out of a fear that it would be used as a base by the Germans, who had themselves occupied Denmark, the nation that previously also governed Iceland via their countries sharing a king.
The reaction to the occupation was mixed, as while the Americans did things like build Reykjavík Airport, the Allied presence in the previously neutral kingdom made the local Icelandic people targets of the Nazis, with some 200 people killed by German mines, U-Boats and aircraft. The Icelandic people did use the time to officially declare themselves to be an independent republic separate from the Danish monarchy in
The small neutral Republic of San Marino, which is surrounded by all sides by the Italian peninsula, had officially declared that they weren’t involved in the War from the start, and for the most part had been left alone by the fascist government of Italy.
This came to an end in 1943, when Allied forces heading North through Italy first bombed San Marino under the mistaken belief that it had been occupied by the Germans (killing 35 people), closely followed by the German ACTUALLY invading (ignoring the signs the locals had put up on the border declaring their neutrality) to turn the country into defensive position against the Allies’ advance.
Once it was confirmed that Germans were actually now in the city, British and Indian forces launched into the Battle of San Marino against the invading German forces. The British themselves occupied San Marino for a grand total of one day, before leaving the nation in the care of local defence forces, as the Allied advance pushed further North the next day.
In 1941, Italian fascist newpaper Popolo D'Italia attempted to one-up this by claiming that a member of the Italian air force had personally killed the Lock Ness Monster with a direct hit with a bomb, but this story was treated with amusement by the anglophonic press when they got wind of it.
Recently, while looking though British Army Cold War training films, I stumbled upon something I never expected to see: a clip of an MCEM-2 firing.
Check out the video below:
The MCEM-2 (Machine Carbine Experimental Model No.2) was a small, compact, innovative submachine gun developed towards the end of the Second World War. In this video we will examine the gun’s origins and theorise about how it came to appear in a 1953 training film - long after it had been rejected!
Check out my full-length blog accompanying the video here.
In this final video of the Rhineland Campaign Weapons series we take a look at the little known role of the British and Commonwealth forces’ Vickers Guns. With the help of the Vickers MG Collection & Research Association we recreated a platoon line consisting of 4 Vickers Guns to recreate the Pepperpot tactics used during Operation Veritable – the western Allies’ invasion of Germany.
In this video we examine how Vickers Medium Machine Guns were used en masse to soften up enemy positions before Operation Veritable began and during the subsequent advance into the Rhineland. The Vickers was used alongside artillery, mortars and even anti-aircraft guns in what was known as a ‘pepperpot’ fire plan – where the focus was on weight of fire. The Vickers supported the advance through out the campaign and in this video we aimed to capture some of the feel of what those pepperpot bombardments might have been like – albeit on much, much smaller scale.
Many of us with familiar with Britain’s Home Guard, formed during the Second World War, but few of us will have heard of the Coastguard Auxiliary Patrol. While searching through the Imperial War Museum’s online collection database I came across an interesting series of photographs of a small Home Guard-like unit I had not been aware of. The photographs were taken by a Lieutenant L. Pelman in May 1943.
They appear to have been a part of the larger Coastguard Auxiliary organisation. The unit was tasked with assisting the regular forces with the monitoring of the south-east coast of England. The Coastguard Auxiliary began wearing khaki battledress in May 1942 when they became a part of the armed forces. Seemingly the units were tasked with watching not just for the enemy but also vessels in distress - the Coastguard’s traditional role.
From the entries and captions for the photographs it appears that the unit was about 400 strong and made up of former servicemen who manned watch posts. Unlike other organisations, like the Royal Observer Corps, the Coastguard Auxiliary Patrol appear to have been lightly armed with a mix of small arms.
In the photographs the unit appears to have been armed with surplus Canadian Ross MKIII rifles while the Auxiliary Patrol member above, with a medal ribbon, is armed with a Sten MkII machine carbine. According to the captions all men were apparently over 50, with the oldest aged 76.
The men are wearing standard battledress with Coastguard shoulder flashes. The chap on the far right has a ‘Coastguard AUX’ flash. One man has a rank braid on his shoulder - possibly Sub-Lieutenant. In none of the photos are the men seen in webbing or any other load bearing kit.
Thanks to Taff Gillingham, who has a surviving example, we know that the flashes were white-on-dark-blue. All of the men are seen wearing Coastguard caps with HM Coastguard cap badges. Sadly, nothing seems to have been written about the Coastguard Auxiliary Patrol with these photographs, their captions and some passing mentions in contemporary newspapers the sole sources I could find while researching the unit.
I recently came across an interesting segment in a January 1945 US Army Combat Bulletin newsreel. It showed men of B Company of the 238th Combat Engineers setting up improvised anti-tank mines in Belgium. The mines were fashioned from Bazooka rockets!
The No.36 or Mills Bomb was one of the longest serving grenades, developed during the First World War, it was manufactured across the British Commonwealth during the Second World War and after.
In this video we’ll use some brilliant newsreel footage from New Zealand to examine how the Mills Bomb (or No.36 Grenade) was manufactured during the war. We also take a look at the design and history of the No.36 which served for over 50 years.
A local woman and her dog look strangely out of place on the beach at La Panne (De Panne) just across the French-Belgian border from Dunkirk (Dunkerque) shortly after Operation Dynamo - June 1940
On #WomanCrushWednesday, we’re sharing this 1945 bulletin by the U. S. Department of Labor. It reminds us that popular culture’s conceptualization of Rosie the Riveter neglects the contributions of women of color.
From the Foreword:
What this report tells is a story of ways in which Negro women have helped to bridge the manpower gap. Working together with men and women of every other national origin, their contribution is one which this Nation would be unwise to forget or to evaluate falsely. They are an integral part of America’s prospect. Not only have they helped to produce the weapons of war, but their labor has been a large factor in preventing a major break-down of essential consumer services.
This bulletin, written by Kathryn Blood, is Pamphlet 2000.826, in Hagley’s Published Collections. We don’t yet have it scanned and on our Digital Archives, but you can find a full copy at the Internet Archive.
