by Oliver North
On 2 May, more than a million German troops in Italy surrendered unconditionally and Dönitz moved his headquarters to Flensburg, on the Baltic coast off Denmark, after ordering all U-boat commanders to cease hostilities and return to their home bases.
On 5 May the German High Command agreed to Eisenhower’s demand for the unconditional surrender of the remaining German forces still fighting. Later that day, 9th Army units in Westphalia discovered another Nazi treasure trove in a dank copper mine. The haul included paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Rubens; a gold sarcophagus of Emperor Charlemagne; jewelry; and an original manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. On 8 May a total cease-fire of all German forces took effect, ending the war in Europe, and by 5 June, less than a month after the end of hostilities, Germany was officially partitioned into American, Russian, British, and French occupation zones.
The pursuit of final justice for the architects of the Third Reich continued for months after the fighting was over, but the manhunt wasn’t always successful.
Though Heinrich Himmler disguised himself as a Wehrmacht private, a British soldier captured him. Unfortunately, he escaped a war crimes trial by committing suicide with a cyanide capsule.
On 20 November a war crimes tribunal convened at Nuremberg, with twenty-one defendants. Nearly a year later, on 1 October 1946, the tribunal’s findings were published. Eleven high-level Nazis were convicted and each sentenced to death:
• Hans Frank, the so-called “Butcher of Krakow”
• German interior minister Wilhelm Frick
• Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering
• Alfred Godl, chief of operations for the German High Command
• Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Gestapo and SD police
• Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the German High Command
• Foreign Minister Joachim von Rippentrop
• Reichminister Alfred Rosenberg
• Chief of Slave Labor Fritz Sauckel
• Austrian chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart
• Der Sturmer editor Julius Streicher
The executions were carried out on 16 October—but Goering cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide the day before.
Three defendants—Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy; Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, and Economics Minister Walther Funk—were given life sentences.
Albert Speer and Hitler Youth leader from 1931 to 1940 Balder van Schirach were each sentenced to twenty years in prison. Konstantin von Neurath, Reich protector, and Admiral Karl Dönitz were given fifteen-year and ten-year sentences, respectively.
Judgment at Nuremberg.
Reichbank president Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen were acquitted, but Schacht was later found guilty by a German court and sentenced to eight years in prison.
In the end, the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich exacted a staggering cost. According to Russian statistics, in 1,418 days of military operations, nearly twenty million Soviets were killed, and another forty million were wounded. The Russians also reported that on the German-Russian front, ten million Germans were killed or wounded.
Allied estimates of Soviet and German losses were generally about the same—with nearly nine million Soviet soldiers and seventeen million civilians killed in the USSR—along with 3.5 million German soldiers and nearly three million German civilians killed. More than 200,000 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice to liberate a captive people from the grip of the merciless dictator.
EPILOGUE
JOHN ALISON, after the war, became the youngest-ever assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics. He returned to military service during the Korean War and eventually retired as a major general in the Air Force Reserve. He was national president, then chairman of the board, of the Air Force Association and retired from Northrop Aviation as a senior vice president.
JOSEPH BOITNOTT decided to stay in the Army Air Force after the war and made the transition to the U.S. Air Force in 1947. He served in four different services: National Guard, Army, Army Air Force, and USAF—and was on active duty during the Korean War.
DUANE STONE spent three long years in a POW camp and was liberated at the end of the war. He returned to his hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa, on 15 June 1945, married, and raised five children, including three boys—all of whom served in the U.S. Armed Forces.
ANGELO MONTEMARA was awarded a medal for valor by the French government for his courage during the invasion of Normandy. He and four brothers all survived the war and returned to a celebratory family reunion in New York. He married, raised five children, and has ten grandchildren.
CHRISTINE “CHRISSY” QUINN survived the Blitz and the long-distance correspondence with her fiancé, a British soldier. When he finally returned to England in 1946, the two were married.
RON DICK was so influenced by the bravery and resolve of his countrymen during World War II that he joined the Royal Air Force in 1950. He served as a squadron officer, flight instructor, USAF exchange officer, and eventually as the commander of a Royal Air Force squadron in Cyprus. Today he is a writer-lecturer and European-tour leader for the Smithsonian Institution.
CHARLES LEAH served throughout the war for the Air Raid Precautions organization, rescuing his fellow Britons. He subsequently joined the British army as a Royal Engineer, where his duties included defusing bombs—as he had done during World War II.
GUNTHER RAAL, the Luftwaffe ace, returned to the German air force after WWII, rising to the rank of general and chief of air staff. He also served as the German military representative in Brussels on the Military Committee of NATO.
BILLY DRAKE was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross for heroic service in WWII. He earned a bar for the DFC from the United States, and spent a career in the Royal Air Force, with service as group captain commanding RAF Chivenor, Devon, until his retirement in 1963. He then lived for more than twenty years in Portugal.
PETER BROTHERS, a RAF fighter ace with sixteen kills, flew during the Battle for France and the Battle of Britain with No. 242 Squadron and later No. 457 Squadron. His decorations include the CB Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross with bar.
BETTY SHEA BOYD married a fellow ferry pilot whom she had met at 10,000 feet above Madison, Wisconsin. He stayed in the Air Force and served two tours in Korea. The couple has remained close to their many friends from both wars.
MARIA FASTOVA volunteered when the Red Army asked for thirty girls from her town to become communicators. She was trained to defend herself with a rifle and served in the 199th Division of the 38th Field Army. Wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad, she recovered in time to celebrate the Russian victory.
KEN CROSBY left the FBI after the war and joined the financial firm Merrill Lynch, where he worked for twenty-five years. Today he works with the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, running courses for government agencies and private groups on terrorism, counter-terrorism, espionage, and counter-espionage.
CHARLES CALHOUN served in the South Pacific against the Japanese after his experiences in the Atlantic and the European theater. He retired as a captain in the U.S. Navy in 1967. Since then he has written three books on his wartime experiences.
CHARLES HANGSTERFER was with the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, when they breached the Siegfried Line—among the first U.S. troops into Germany. In the Hürtgen Forest a reoccurrence of malaria hospitalized him in England. After the war he returned to the U.S., where he married Geneva, a fellow veteran, on 31 October 1945.
PEARL MCKEOUGH met and married her husband Michael (“Mickey”) while he was the orderly for General Eisenhower. They continued to serve Ike throughout the war and remained close to Eisenhower after he became president.
ROBERT GREEN taught at Fort Benning, Georgia, went to medical school on the GI Bill, and was commissioned in the Medical Corps. A practicing U.S. Army physician, he eventually served as a deputy in the surgeon gene
ral’s office.
JEFFERSON WHITE participated in three invasions, seven major battles, and earned the Silver Star for valor. He was wounded in action at the Battle of the Bulge and spent more than seven months recuperating in a Florida hospital.
GEORGE PERRINE was wounded three times during WWII. Treated in four U.S. military hospitals, his last wounds required hospitalization until 1947.
A. H. “ED” SPEAIRS came back to Oklahoma City, wrote a book about his World War II experiences, and stayed in touch with his friend Bill Mauldin, whose famous Stars and Stripes cartoons helped GIs keep their sense of humor during WWII.
EDWIN “ED” SAYRE recovered from his serious wounds, stayed in the Army, and retired as a colonel in 1968, after serving in Viet Nam. He described his most satisfying moment as the day he and a fellow officer convinced 3,000 Axis soldiers defending a small Italian town to surrender—thereby precluding the need for an attack.
TIMOTHY “TIM” DYAS, liberated from a German POW camp on 27 April 1945, made it across the Elbe River to American lines. He used the GI Bill to attend and graduate from Harvard.
EDWARD “ED” STAFFORD, after serving in the European theater, was posted to the South Pacific to join the fight against the Japanese at Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. After the war he wrote a book based on his experiences in WWII.
FELIX SPARKS settled in Colorado after the war. During the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis, he was recalled to active duty and eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general. He became a lawyer, judge, and state supreme court justice and in 1968 he was named ground commander for the Colorado National Guard.
RAY SADOSKI stayed in the Army until 1947 and played football at the Army War College. He married Eleanor (now deceased) in ’46, and they had four children. Ray worked for Prudential Insurance and was a health inspector for the city of Hartford, CT.
VAN T. BARFOOT was awarded the Medal of Honor for single-handedly destroying two enemy machine-gun nests and capturing the crew of a third—taking a total of seventeen enemy prisoners. He also disabled an enemy tank, killed its occupants, and carried two seriously wounded men of his platoon to safety through enemy fire.
ROBERT “BOB” DOLE was hospitalized for thirty-nine months recovering from the wounds he received in Italy. He earned a law degree on the GI Bill and entered politics in 1952. He subsequently served in the U.S. House of Representatives, in the U.S. Senate as majority leader, and in 1996 was the Republican nominee for president of the United States. In 1997 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
WALKER “BUD” MAHURIN downed twenty-one enemy planes in Europe and one more in the Pacific theater. During the Korean War his F-86 was shot down over North Korea. Bud was a POW until the end of the Korean War.
CHARLES “CHUCK” YEAGER stayed in the USAF after the war and became a test pilot. On 14 October 1947, while flying the X-1, he became the first man to break the sound barrier. He flew his last combat missions in Viet Nam, where he logged 127 missions.
ROBIN OLDS returned to the U.S. after World War II and continued to fly fighters. During the 1960s, while flying missions over North Vietnam, he shot down four Russian MiGs. He retired from the USAF as a brigadier general and went on to be Director of Aerospace Safety in the Air Force Inspection and Safety Center, a separate operating agency and an organization of the Office of the Inspector General, Headquarters, U.S. Air Force.
RICHARD BUTLER and his copilot both returned to the U.S. in March 1944 after sustaining serious injuries when an engine of their B-24 exploded and they crash-landed on Katania, Sicily. Rich remained on active duty after recovering and retired in 1971 as a USAF colonel.
LEE ARCHER flew more than fifty missions as a “Tuskegee Airman” during World War II and stayed in the service to make the transition from Army Air Corps to the U.S. Air Force. His commitment and courage were rewarded in 1947 when President Harry Truman officially ordered the de-segregation of the U.S. Armed Forces.
GEORGE DUFFY, captured by the Germans but turned over to the Japanese, was brutally treated as a slave laborer until liberated in September 1945. Though not eligible for veterans’ benefits under the GI Bill, he put himself through college and returned to the sea as a Merchant Mariner.
PETER PETERSEN was released from a British POW camp after Germany surrendered but was placed in an internment facility for several months until he was discharged to work on a farm in his now-divided county. He later immigrated to the U.S. and then became an American citizen.
DAVID BATE, after serving aboard two destroyers in the Atlantic waters, went to the Pacific theater in April 1944 where he served aboard the USS Dewey until the end of the war. After his discharge from the service in October 1945, he went to law school and became an attorney.
DOROTHY DEMPSEY, one of the original U.S. Coast Guard SPARs, was discharged at the end of the war, married, and had two children. The SPARs were disbanded in 1948. During the Korean War she was asked to return to service as a full-fledged member of the U.S. Coast Guard, but as a young mother, she declined the request.
EDGAR “ED” NASH made it back from the war in time to enroll at Yale for the spring term of ’46 and graduated with a degree in industrial administration. A successful heavy equipment salesman in Pittsburgh, he designed heavy hydraulic machinery and eventually moved to Visalia, California, where he made a career in real estate.
PHYLLIS MCKEY left her job as a welder at the end of the war so that she and her husband could raise five children. She subsequently became a bookkeeper, then an interior decorator, and has since traveled by RV throughout North America.
JOHN CULLEN received the Legion of Merit for discovering and reporting the first landing of German saboteurs on the U.S. coast on 13 June 1942. After the war he worked for Macy’s and United Parcel Service and later for National Dairy, on Long Island.
LOURELEI PRIOR and her husband, Herb, started a small business and raised two daughters. She has four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and has served as a Disabled American Veterans volunteer at an Indiana VA hospital, and was auxiliary chaplain at American Legion Post 296 for more than twenty years.
DR. BERNARD J. RYAN, wounded at Normandy, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, is the recipient of two Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts. After the war he returned to New York to practice medicine.
WALTER D. EHLERS is a Medal of Honor and Purple Heart recipient who was wounded four times. In 1946, after a tour of duty with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany, he left the service and returned to California, where he worked for the Veteran’s Administration, married, and raised three daughters.
LEONARD LOMELL was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, our nation’s second highest decoration for valor, for his courage in France. He participated in the fortieth and fiftieth D-Day anniversaries in France.
ARTHUR “ART” VAN COOK came home in September 1945, rejoined the National Guard as a captain, and was recalled to active duty in 1948. He served in Korea and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1964 to become a civilian administrator in the office of the secretary of defense. He retired a second time in 1984, started a consulting firm and retired “for good” in 1988.
JERRY MARKHAM, awarded the Navy Cross for valor at Normandy, went to Harvard on the GI Bill and became a labor relations negotiator. He worked for Continental Can Company and led its subsidiary, Hazel Atlas Glass Co., with fourteen plants and 9,000 employees. After heading several other corporations, he returned to Omaha beach in 1984 to mark the fortieth anniversary of D-Day.
CHARLES CURLEY stayed in the Army for a year after the war and met his future wife in 1947. They married, raised five children, and now have six grandchildren. In 2004, sixty years after the invasion of Normandy, Charles was awarded the French Legion of Honor in ceremonies in France.
ROBERT WEISS was awarded the Silver Star, Purple Heart, Presidential Unit Citation, Croix de Guerre with Bronze Star (France), Fourragere (Belgium), and European Theater ribbon for his participation in four
major battles. After the war he became an attorney, married, raised two children, and wrote a book about his experiences at Hill 314, Fire Mission! The Siege at Mortain.
ANGEL GARCIA was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts for his courage and wounds. After leaving the service in 1945, he married, raised his family in California, and wrote about his experiences. He has been honored in France for his service and has participated in 30th Infantry Division reunions in Normandy, France.
