Paul C. Miltenberger: Hero


Barb’s father, the late Paul C. Miltenberger, receiving the Silver Star following the Battle of Luzon in WWII. Dr. Miltenberger. From the St. Louis Post, July 18, 1945:

Captain Paul C. Miltenberger, 29 years old, Army medical corps officer, has been awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action last April 23 on Luzon. When a platoon sergeant had been seriously wounded and had fallen in an exposed sector of the jungle, Capt. Miltenberger dragged him 800 yards to a protected area where he administered first aid.

800 yards (almost half a mile) through the jungle, under enemy fire, is a long way. Dr. Miltenberger was one of the best people I’ve known in my life. I never heard him say an unkind word about anybody.

Party time in the Führer bunker

“When Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) was finally released from her typing at around 4 a.m. on Sunday 20 April, and the Führer and Frau Hitler retired, she went upstairs to find some food for the Goebbels children. The scenes which she encountered, not far from where the wounded lay in the Reich Chancellery’s underground field hospital, shocked her deeply. ‘An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody.”

“Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’ SS officers
who had been out searching cellars and streets for deserters to hang had also been tempting hungry and impressionable young women back to the Reich Chancellery with promises of parties and inexhaustible supplies of food and champagne. It was the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption, with the concrete submarine of the Reich Chancellery underworld providing an Existentialist theatre set for hell.”

The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Antony Beevor)

Hitler’s final memo

One more from Antony Beevor’s great history, The Fall of Berlin 1945:

“Hitler took Traudl Junge (one of his secretaries) away to another room (in the bunker), where he dictated his political and personal testaments. She sat there in nervous excitement, expecting to hear at last a profound explanation of the great sacrifice’s true purpose. But instead a stream of political clichés, delusions and recriminations poured forth. He had never wanted war. It had been forced on him by international Jewish interests. The war, ‘in spite of all setbacks,’ he claimed, will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people’s will to live’” (emphasis mine)

The Fall of Berlin 1945

I so thoroughly enjoyed Antony Beevor’s history of the siege of Stalingrad I ordered The Fall of Berlin 1945. I’m about halfway through the 430 page book and, like Stalingrad, it’s a page-turner. No work of fiction –movie, novel, TV documentary series– could ever capture the scope and horror of these events.

As with all (most?) non-fiction books, I’m reading with a marker in hand, highlighting the passages I want to save. Like so much of the history I’ve read, I’m finding eerie parallels to current events. Nazism and Trumpism; Hitler and Trump the most obvious example.


“We may go down, but we will take the world with us.” — Adolph Hitler (1945)

“(Hitler’s) monstrous vanity could not allow him to lose a foreign capital, even one which he had totally destroyed.”

“The Soviet armies advancing in huge, long columns were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, their T-34s churning up the earth as they dipped and rolled with the ground, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, open Chevrolets with tarpaulin-covered mortars in the back and tractors hauling great howitzers, all eventually followed by a second echelon in horse-drawn carts.”

“The population at large saw nothing of Hitler. He had disappeared from the newsreels, and they heard only Hitler’s very last broadcast on 30 January, marking twelve years of Nazi government. His voice had lost all its strength and sounded completely different.”

“Berlin’s population in early April (1945) stood at anything between 3 and 3.5 million people, including around 120,000 infants. When General Reymann raised the problem of feeding these children at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery bunker, Hitler stared at him. ‘There are no children of that age left in Berlin,’ he said. Reymann finally understood that his supreme commander had no contact with human reality.”

“On the evening of 12 April 1945, the Berlin philharmonic gave its last performance. It is said that after the performance, the Nazi party had organized Hitler youth members to stand in uniform, with baskets of cyanide capsules, and offer them to members of the audience as they left. “

“The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power. Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany.”

“A smaller size of (German)steel helmet had been manufactured for boy soldiers, but not nearly enough were produced.”

“On the morning of Saturday 21 April, just after the last Allied air raid had finished, General Reymann’s (Berlin) headquarters (was) swarmed with brown uniforms. Senior Nazi Party officials had rushed there to obtain the necessary authorization to leave Berlin. […] Over 2,000 passes were signed for the Party ‘armchair warriors’, who had always been so ready to condemn the army for retreating.”

“An intensive artillery bombardment of Berlin began at 9.30 a.m., a couple of hours after the end of the last Allied air raid. Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, reported that the Führer, a few minutes after having been woken, emerged unshaven and angry in the bunker corridor which served as an anteroom. ‘What’s going on? he shouted at General Burgdorf, Colonel von Below and Günsche. ‘Where’s this firing coming from?’”

“(Hitler’s) severe personality disorder, even if it could not quite be defined as mental illness, had certainly made him deranged. Hitler had so utterly identified himself with the German people that he believed that anybody who opposed him was opposing the German people as a whole; and that if he were to die, the German people could not survive without him.”

“In the (Berlin) cellars and air-raid shelters distinctive subcultures had grown up during two years of heavy air raids. […] The ‘cellar tribe’ as one diarist called these curious microcosms of society, produced a wide variety of characters, whether in markedly rich or poor districts. Each cellar always seemed to have at least one crashing bore, usually a Nazi trying to justify his belief in the Führer and final victory.” […] “Many cellar tribes developed a particular superstition or theory of survival. For example, some believed that they would survive an almost direct hit by wrapping a towel round their head. Others were convinced that if they bent forward at the first explosion, this would prevent their lungs from tearing. Every eccentricity of German hypochondria seems to have received full expression.”

Jeep: Steel Soldier

(YouTube) “Best video-history of the initial creation of the “Original Jeep”. The video shows the story of the “Jeep” from its original Bantam roots, all the way through its initial civilian use.” Should come as no surprise the Jeep has a rich a history at the Land Rover but I learn something new every time I watch one of these. And there seems to be a lot of them.

The history of the Jeep is at least as rich as that of the Land Rover. The first clip below is Bill Travers, a Jeep driver with the 87th Infantry Division. (45 sec) Below that a 2 minute clip about the CJ2A:

 

STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

I’ve only read a handful of history books (crime fiction is my passion) but they’ve all be great reads. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civ89l War Era; Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869; and Wires West: The Story of the Talking Wires. I’m currently reading STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor.

(Wikipedia) “Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. The book starts with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent drive into the Soviet Union. Its main focus is the Battle of Stalingrad, in particular the period from the initial German attack to Operation Uranus and the Soviet victory.” Continue reading