Category Archives: World War II

February 20, 2022 · 12:59 pm

Tales from A Japanese Civilian interned in Australia during World War Two

Miles Kemp

Bank worker Miyakatsu Koike was minding his own business, working quietly in the Surabaya Java branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank, but events on one December day in 1941 turned his life upside down. He had no connections with the military. But his homeland had staged a daring, amoral and unprovoked attack on the US pacific fleet in Hawaii, dragging both countries immediately into World War II. Mr Koike, then 36, was arrested by Dutch colonial authorities immediately and in January the next year became one of South Australia’s most reluctant residents. In harsh conditions, he spent more than four years at the Loveday internment camp located near Barmera.

 Loveday POW camp

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October 22, 2021 · 12:01 am

The Religious Threads and Corporate Institutions behind Our World Wars?

Brian Victoria, presenting an article that has appeared in Countercurrents on 19 October 2021 with this title “Something Worse than Slavery?”

With the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, together with the emergence of Critical Race Theory, the spotlight has once again been shone on the heinous institution that was slavery and its aftermath, racial discrimination. Could anything be worse than a system in which a human being becomes the property of another, to do with as the slave owner sees fit?

For good reason, the ownership of one human being by another is now universally prohibited, at least legally, for the inhumane abomination it has always been. Yet, in rejecting slavery it is easy to overlook one aspect that may be identified, for lack of a better word, as its sole positive feature. Namely, it was not in the slave owner’s interest to kill their slaves outright, for only living slaves made it possible for the owner to profit from their labor.

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October 21, 2021 · 6:17 pm

The Modern Nation States’ Victims

Adam Henry Hughes, whose original title runs thus “Hiding the Body Bags: The Nation-State, Killing and Death”

During a lecture [in 2010], the famous news correspondent Robert Fisk told a story of the reaction of a Reuter’s news agency (London) to receiving graphic pictures of civilian death and destruction caused in Iraq by British forces. Reuter’s called the pictures “obscene” and therefore not fit to be shown back home.(1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We learn about the abstract war, the war of nationalist or ideological sacrifice and endurance, the achievement of some military objective or another; the war that is remembered in one national cemetery or memorial museum. But we must not see the broken and mutilated bodies—the final state of the human being once steel, bomb, bullet or blade meets flesh.(2)

 

 

 

 

Many died in the Battle at LONE PINE

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October 5, 2021 · 11:35 pm

The Lineage “Hoolsema” – Nazi Europe to Sydney

 Michael Roberts

 My story here begins in Colombo in mid-2020 where I stubbed by big toe badly as I walked into the National Archives. The injury turned septic; and I was treated … I would say rescued …. by a Richmondite, Dr Sarath Gamani De Silva.[1] He ensured that I was fit to fly to Australia in mid-September 2020. This entailed extra airfare and quarantine for two weeks at another cost of 3000$. The toe became a godsend because it meant that my enforced stay was at a hotel run by the Health Department and not that run by the Police.

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August 8, 2021 · 7:23 pm

Stalag Luft III and Its “Great Escape” Tunnel: An Archaelogical Treasure

The Great Escape Tunnel

Untouched for almost seven decades, the tunnel used in the Great Escape has finally been unearthed. The 111-yard passage nicknamed ‘Harry’ by Allied prisoners was sealed by the Germans after the audacious break-out from the POW camp Stalag Luft III in western Poland. Despite huge interest in the subject, encouraged by the film starring Steve McQueen, the tunnel undisturbed over the decades because it was behind the Iron Curtain and the Soviet had no interest in its significance.

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May 5, 2021 · 2:42 pm

  Subhas Chandra Bose: Indian Nationalist with Fascist Links

Wikipedia Account distilled & re-shaped by Capt. Kumar Kirinde, with this title: “Subhas Chandra Bose: Leader of the Indian Independence League (IIL) and Indian National Army (INA)” …..         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bos

      Subhas Chandra Bose (January 1897–18 August 1945) was an Indian nationalist whose defiant patriotism made him a hero in India, but whose attempts during World War II to rid India of British rule with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan left a troubled legacy.

Bose meets Adolf Hitler

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April 26, 2021 · 2:23 am

Remembering the Aussie Air Force Personnel Who Died in World War Two

Steve Waterton, in The AUSTRALIAN, Special Magazine Edition, 31 March 2021

Stella Bowen, one of the few Australian women to be appointed an official war artist, began her preliminary pencil sketches for the painting on this magazine’s cover on April 27, 1944. Her subjects were the crew of a Lancaster bomber of 460 Squadron, six Australians and their English flight engineer. That night their raid took them over Friedrichshafen, an important German industrial centre; the next morning they were reported missing, presumed dead.

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April 2, 2021 · 1:45 pm

Songs and Music from Auschwitz and Other Concentration Camps

Meagan Flynn, in Washington Post, 17 April 2018, where the title runs thus: “How thousands of songs composed in concentration camps are finding new life”

  Ilse Weber 1903-1944

Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet, was imprisoned at the concentration camp at Terezin in German-occupied Czechoslovakia when she wrote a song called “When I Was Lying Down in Terezin’s Children’s Clinic.” The song was about caring for sick children at the camp where Weber worked as a nurse. She had little-to-no medicine available. But she had her poetry and her music — some of which her husband managed to salvage by hiding the written verses in a garden shed after her death at Auschwitz in 1944.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp 

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March 1, 2021 · 3:33 am

A Medical Duo’s Forensic Study of Death in War

R M Coupland 1  and D R Meddings:   “Mortality associated with use of weapons in armed conflicts, wartime atrocities, and civilian mass shootings: literature review,”

9 Aug 14;31999(7207):407-10. 
 doi: 10.1136/bmj.319.7207.407.

Free PMC article

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Aside

Aimée  Jonklaas Williams: RAF Pilot in Wartime …. and a Remarkable Life

R.T. conveying a Vale from “City Dweller” …. [it is now revealed that “R.T.” is Roger Thiedeman of Melbourne

In July this year [2000], Aimée  Jonklaas Williams, a woman of Ceylonese birth, died in Spain, just short of her 81st birthday. Her ashes were interred in an English village on July 20. Early in August, in another Sri Lankan newspaper, a close friend using the pseudonym “City Dweller” wrote a moving tribute in celebration of the life of this remarkable woman.

 

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January 6, 2021 · 3:05 pm