Summit Gist

Captured German soldier getting searched by Canadian soldier in Italy, 1943 On this day in 1943, during the Second World War, Canadian soldiers started their courageous fight to capture the German-occupied city of Ortona. One of the most important events of the Italian campaign, the rubble-filled streets of Ortona saw fierce hand-to-hand fighting throughout this battle. The Germans had prepared to defend Ortona a week earlier, using explosives to blow up houses and create rubble piles where they dug defensive fighting positions. When the Canadian soldiers reached the town, it was littered with rubble and scattered mines. With adjoining buildings composing the city, a “Mouseholing” tactic was widely used by Canadian soldiers to advance through the rubbles while avoiding the deadly streets. The soldiers would blast the connecting walls of two buildings and then battle any Germans on the other side. Ortona was liberated in eight days from some of the German army’s best combat troops. On t...

German soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, 1943 About 1 in 8 of them survived being pows and made it back to Germany. Of course, it depends on precisely what time frame you're talking about and who you're asking(the Russians had a much lower number, of course), but the German government, after the war, estimated about 1 in 3, with the last prisoner returning home in 1956. No question, though. It was a lot. The first thought I had when I saw this picture was "things will not go well for you." Seriously? I thought the number was more like 1 in 2. That may be close for the overall German prisoners during the war, but for just the German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, only 5,000 of 91,000 POWs taken ever returned to Germany. dude what... those are EXTERMINATION CAMPS, im talking about surviving concentration camps. HUGE difference! Also, The jewish population in europe Pre-ww2 was 9.5 million. After ww2 it was 3.8 million, so 6 million were killed by the nazis. That me...

The US pilot who shot and killed a Japanese pilot mid fall with his pistol, 1943 Despite what you think, this is a real story and it is even more unbelievable and badass than you think. Owen J Baggett was a US pilot, who was flying a B-24 bomber to destroy a bridge in Burma, however his plane and squadron was attacked by at least 13  Japanese Ki-43 Hayabusa fighter planes and a fight in the sky took Place Bagget's B-24 was heavily damaged due to it's big size and slower speeds. The fuel tank of the B-24 was shot and the aircraft went on fire.... Read story  Bagget and his crew just jumped out with a few mere seconds to spare before the B-24 blew up. Little did he know, Bagget would make history in just a few minutes.  While falling in the air, Baggett deployed his parachute. Roughed up and parachuting through an aerial battle, Baggett continued his decent through the fight but remembered a disturbing fact. Japanese planes had a tendency to shoot or crash into US pilots pa...

Leonard Siffleet about to be beheaded with a sword by a Japanese soldier, 1943 A photograph of the Japanese soldier Yasuno Chikao an instant before he strikes off Siffleet’s head was taken from the body of a Japanese casualty later in the war, 1943 A Japanese soldier executes an Australian POW Leonard Siffleet was an Australian Special Forces radio operator, sent on a mission to Papua New Guinea to establish a coast watching station. Read story  In September 1943, his patrol was sent to Japanese-held New Guinea, to recon the Japanese forces stationed there. Siffleet and two other Australian soldiers were captured by local natives friendly to the Japanese and turned over to the Japanese. All three men were interrogated, tortured, and confined for approximately two weeks before being taken down to Aitape Beach on the afternoon of 24 October 1943. Bound and blindfolded, surrounded by Japanese and native onlookers, they were forced to the ground and executed by beheading, on the orders...

The ball turret on the American B-17 bomber plane, 1943, World War II. The gunners operating this was forced to assume a fetal position within the turret with his back and head against the rear wall, his hips at the bottom, and his legs held in mid-air by two footrests on the front wall. This left him positioned with his eyes roughly level with the pair of light-barrel Browning AN/M2 .50 caliber machine guns which extended through the entire turret, located to either side of the gunner.... The cocking handles were located too close to the gunner to be operated easily, so a cable was attached to the handle through pulleys to a handle near the front of the turret.  Another factor was that not all stoppages could be corrected by charging (cocking) the guns. In many cases, when a stoppage occurred, it was necessary for the gunner to "reload" the gun, which required access to the firing chamber of the guns. Access was severely restricted by the guns' location in the small turr...