Thursday, May 21, 2015

PATHFINDERS: IN THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS

MOVIE INFO

An elite squad of American paratroopers goes behind enemy lines in Normandy on a mission to set up the navigational equipment that will aid Allied forces in the D-Day invasion in this war drama inspired by actual events. With little time to prepare and no support once they've landed on the ground, the fearless paratroopers must avoid the German infantry while locating the ideal site for the equipment. The job won't be easy but should they succeed, the tide of the entire war will be turned in theAllies favor, striking a crucial blow against their enemies, and paving the path to ultimate victory. Christopher Serrone and Michael Conner Humphreys star.

Rating:	Unrated
Genre:	Action & Adventure
Directed By:	Curt A. Sindelar, Michael Conner Humphreys
Written By:	Charlie Armstrong, Curt A. Sindelar
In Theaters:	Nov 30, 2010 Wide
On DVD:	Jan 8, 2013
Runtime:	1 hr. 31 min.

Inception Media Group - Official Site

Editorial Reviews

June 5th, 1944... A secret mission is launched prior to the D-Day Invasion. A small elite group of American paratroopers drop behind enemy lines and land right in the lap of the German Infantry. They are outnumbered, unsupported, and racing against the clock. Their sole duty is to stay alive long enough in order to find a strategic location and set up the Top Secret Navigation Equipment needed to guide in the main airborne assault on D-Day. Failure means the lives of thousands. This elite group of American paratroopers is a mix of renegades from different military units. They are strangers to one another, thrown together at the last minute, with no time to prepare and with two different Commanding Officers. This is a recipe for disaster. It is a violation of all the rules of warfare and only a miracle is going to make this mission work. Based on actual events. This untold story of these men, their mission and the facts behind it, has remained hidden for over 60 years.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

CHANGI

home/War history/Journal of the Australian War Memorial
/Journal of the Australian War Memorial

Issue 33 - 2000
Australian War Memorial

Kevin Blackburn

TOP ISSUE 33 CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS JOURNAL HOME WEBSITE HOME

{1} From the 1970s to the 1990s, south-east Asian countries, principally Thailand and Singapore, received an increasing number of visitors interested in seeing historic sites associated with the experience of the prisoners of war (POWs) captured by the Japanese during the Second World War. This has resulted in the construction of several major museums in the region representing the POW experience - the Jeath Museum (opened in 1977) and Hellfire Pass Museum (1998) along the Burma-Thailand Railway, and Changi Prison Museum in Singapore (1988). Individuals visiting these historic sites have included ex-POWs on personal pilgrimages of commemoration, but most visitors have been tourists drawn to the locations by curiosity about Japanese atrocities committed against the POWs.[1] Their interest has stemmed from the prominence of the POW experience in popular consciousness in the West and in east Asia. Stereotypical images of the POWs as human skeletons toiling under poor conditions, supervised by brutal Japanese guards, became etched in the public imagination during the postwar period and produced a perennial interest in a human tragedy.[2] Critical studies of the lives of the POWs under the Japanese, however, have long suggested that conditions varied according to what camp the POWs were held in. The popular image of "horror camps" never accurately represented conditions at every one of the POW camps in south-east Asia.[3]
{2} These studies raise an intriguing question about how the POW museums of south-east Asia have narrated the experiences of the POWs. Have the museums commemorated the variety of individual experiences, or have they reproduced public stereotypes in an attempt to commodify the past? In order to investigate how these conflicting interpretations may have shaped the public representation of the POW experience in these museums, it is best to examine Changi Prison Museum as a case study, because the creation of this museum has been the best-documented in government records.

{3} David Lowenthal has suggested that historic sites of human tragedy frequently become commodified by being turned into atrocity exhibitions which are meant to pander to the preconceptions of the tourists. The central thesis of Lowenthal's work is that the past cannot be re-created. All that modern re-creations of the past do is produce a representation of history that is shaped by present-day concerns. If tourists want to see a gallery of horrors, that expectation will influence those who attempt to re-create the past for the tourists.[4] John Urry and other writers on cultural tourism have corroborated Lowenthal's thesis.[5] Theorists on cultural tourism have noted that both tour operators and owners of tourist attractions who try to re-create the past do so according to what they think tourists want to experience or what they believe their intended audience thinks might have happened there. They deliberately package the past for their visitors' brief stay. The visit becomes a non-durable consumer commodity, if an intangible one, in which the tourists pay for the time they spend surrounded by exhibits selected, packaged and presented for them. This process means that, in representing the past, aspects of it are emphasised, while other events may be downplayed or left out entirely of the narrative presented for the visitors' consumption.
Kanchanaburi as a "commodified-tourist site"
{4} Museums and historic sites in south-east Asia that have been built on the POW theme offer good case studies in which to test Lowenthal's thesis. Work done by Annette Hamilton on the Kanchanaburi historic site along the Burma-Thailand Railway suggests that the area has become what she has called "a commodified-tourist site".[6] The Kanchanaburi site, which has come to mark the beginning of the Burma-Thailand Railway for tourists, has been manipulated by the local community to attract tourists to the small town in order to show them the past that they want to see. The 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai (based on a novel of the same name by Pierre Boulle) had, by the 1970s, brought many tourists to the town, all wanting to see the "real bridge on the River Kwai"; they met disappointment because both film and book were fiction. Ronald Searle, who worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway as a POW, wrote in his recollections: "as for the Bridge on the River Kwai, it crossed the river only in the imagination of its author", because the two "big bridges" were viaducts that did not cross the river, but hugged the impassable cliffs along the river's east bank.[7]

{5} In his novel Pierre Boulle took "Kwai" from the name of the Kwae Noi (meaning "little tributary"), which ran alongside the Burma-Thailand Railway. There was close to the Kwae Noi both a wooden bridge and a steel bridge, but these bridges were over the Mae Khlaung, a river that the Kwae Noi flowed into. Both these bridges over the Mae Khlaung were part of the Burma-Thailand Railway built by the POWs. The surviving steel bridge was the only remaining fixture that the locals could have designated as the "bridge on the River Kwai" to satisfy the demands of the mass influx of tourists to see the "authentic" bridge. How this was done had more to do with artifice than a regard for historical accuracy. Kevin Patience, an amateur British military historian, writing after he visited the location in 1979, noted that "although the film title was incorrect (there was never a bridge constructed over the Kwae Noi .) the locals not wanting to disappoint the booming tourist trade created by the movie, soon adopted the little-used name of Kwae Yai (Big Kwae) for the Mae Khlaung. Thus there is now a bridge over the River Kwae!"[8] The impact of tourism and fiction had overwhelmed historical and geographical truth.
{6} Annette Hamilton, studying the site in the early 1990s, has critically assessed the intensive commercial activities taking place near the bridge. There are numerous souvenir shops which sell every conceivable commodity that can be connected with the historic site, from T-shirts to miniature bombs and bridges. There are also festivals, such as the "River Kwai Bridge Week", with its fireworks display over the bridge, held every November-December to simulate Allied bombing of the bridge during the war. Ice-cream and drink stands and hawker food stalls dot the area to cater to the busloads of tourists and guests staying in the nearby luxury hotels, such as the "River Kwai Hotel". There are even "Bridge on the River Kwai" restaurants on rafts flanking the bridge. From this, Hamilton concluded that "the conversion of 'history' to tourist attraction is carried here to its extreme: the site of the famous bridge is a monument to consumption, against which the narratives and relics that give it meaning are trivialised into mementos, souvenirs and snapshots".[9]

{7} At Kanchanaburi, amid the hawker stands and souvenir shops, and conveniently alongside the river, stands the Jeath Museum, which narrates the POW past. Its name has been sometimes taken by tourists for a misspelling of "Death", but its operators insist that "Jeath"came from "J" for Japan, "E" for England, "A" for Australia and America, "T" for Thailand, and "H" for Holland.[10] Nonetheless, this convenient confusion adds to tourist curiosity. The museum, which is a replica of the long bamboo sleeping huts that the POWs slept in, uses gruesome artefacts and pictures to convey the horrors of the POW experience. When it was established in 1977 by a local Buddhist monastery, a ticket costing the equivalent of fifty British pence bought visitors the sight of a re-creation of the miseries of the POWs as they walked down the bamboo hut, which was dimly lit to create an eerie atmosphere. Ticket-holders could gaze at a long gallery of gruesome images. Hamilton has noted that such has been the unrelenting nature of the depiction of human horrors that sometimes the eagerness of the tourists in seeing the atrocity exhibition has led to their curiosity turning into shock and tears.[11]
{8} Even less has been left up to the imagination at the Hellfire Pass Museum further up the Burma-Thailand Railway. This museum was opened by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, on ANZAC Day 1998. The project had been funded by the Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce. In the dimly-lit chambers of the Hellfire Pass Museum, life-size dummies representing the POWs as living skeletons move the wooden ramparts of the railway. This museum has had the blessing of the Australian government and ex-POWs. In comparison with Kanchanaburi, the Hellfire Pass Museum appears to be more a site of commemoration than a site for tourists. This is perhaps because not so many tourists are willing to go far up the Burma-Thailand Railway beyond the more easily accessible Kanchanaburi.

{9} The Jeath Museum and the Kanchanaburi site have provided a reference point for the development of other POW historic sites in south-east Asia. When Changi Prison Museum was created, Harold Payne, President of the Federation of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War Clubs in Britain, referring to what had occurred at Kanchanaburi, remarked: "I am all for having a museum provided it doesn't turn into a commercial playground with native stalls. That's one of my biggest moans about a certain bridge in Thailand, which has turned into a tourist fairground with light and sound shows".[12] These sentiments, also expressed by other representatives of ex-POWs, hint at their desire to preserve historic sites associated with their life histories as places of commemoration rather than as tourist attractions manipulated by tourist businesses.
{10} The commodification of the Kanchanaburi site in the 1970s invites questions about how Singapore tourism authorities in the 1980s handled the Changi Prison historic site, which had Kanchanaburi as an obvious example to follow if commodification of the place was desired. Did the tourism authorities of Singapore in the 1980s set out to commodify the POW experience by perhaps trying to create an atrocity exhibition of horrors that would draw tourists? Before examining this question, it is necessary to outline how the Changi Prison site had been used before the Singapore tourism authorities intervened to create the Changi Prison Museum. The prior uses of the site may well have exercised considerable influence over their decision-making process.

{11} When vacant land next to Changi Prison was chosen by Singapore tourism authorities to be transformed into the location of a POW museum for tourists, the prison already had a long history as a site of commemoration, dating back to the end of the Second World War. At Changi, in contrast to Kanchanaburi, the ex-POWs and their military units had exercised considerable control over what happened to the site. Changi Prison was surrounded by British military bases until the British withdrew from Singapore in 1971. These have since been occupied by Singapore Armed Forces personnel. These bases housed ex-POWs still serving in the armed forces, as well as military units who had members imprisoned in Changi by the Japanese.[13] Prison authorities, even after Singapore's independence in 1965, still included former colonial officers who had been interned at Changi as civilians and POWs, or, in the closely-knit British expatriate community of the time, mixed with individuals who were ex-civilian internees or ex-POWs.[14] William Goode, Singapore's Chief Secretary, who help dedicate Changi Chapel as a POW commemorative chapel in 1957, had been incarcerated at Changi and had worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
{12} Soon after the war Changi Prison functioned as a site of commemoration at which former civilian internees and ex-POWs returned regularly to remember a common experience. The prison chapel, originally meant for Christian prisoners and constructed inside the prison in 1953, was made into a chapel for commemorating the POW experience by returning ex-POWs, who began placing the plaques of their military units on its walls in the 1950s. Ronald Searle, a popular cartoonist and artist, who had been a POW at Changi and on the Burma-Thailand Railway, donated some illustrations for the chapel. The prison authorities sent Searle's personal secretary a letter of thanks: "we only wish Mr Searle could make a trip out here to Singapore and visit the Chapel. ... I'm sure he would be pleased with the setting of his work".[15]
Changi as "POW Heaven"
{13} The occasions for commemoration of the POW experience at Changi in the postwar years were not grim affairs at which only the horrors were remembered. There was a good reason for the ex-POWs not to commemorate such horrors: atrocities did not occur at Changi. Out of the 87,000 POWs who passed through the camp, only 850 died.[16] Many of the fatalities at Changi were the result of battle wounds the men had suffered before being taken prisoner in 1942, not because of conditions at the prison. Compared with other POW camps, Changi did not have a high death toll. Instead of marking atrocities, in the early postwar years the ex-POWs celebrated the friendships they had made there. In January 1948, Brigadier Frederick J. ("Black Jack") Galleghan, Australian commander at Changi, on the way to take up a military post in Europe, stopped off at Singapore to meet former POWs who had been under his command. At the airport he was met by three former members of his 2/30th Battalion, who jokingly presented him with his former Changi rations as dinner with a note on which was written, "Memo: Black Jack - your ration, sir". His "rations" were one egg, soya, a tin of bully-beef and two "doovres". They then had two "quick drinks" at the airport before taking him on a tour of Changi Prison.[17] Ex-POWs visiting Changi in the postwar period were conscious that, while Changi brought back pleasant thoughts of their old friends, it was other places, particularly the Burma-Thailand Railway, that evoked painful memories of death and loss.[18]
{14} Ex-POWs themselves have not seen Changi as a site of horrors. Some have expressed bemusement at such descriptions in the media. In the introduction to his published POW diary, Stan Arneil wrote: "the portrayal of the 'dreaded Changi' camp brings a smile to the faces of many former prisoners of war who longed for Changi as almost a heaven on earth compared to some of the dreadful places to which they were taken".[19] Likewise, Lionel De Rosario, a Eurasian POW who was imprisoned at Changi and worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway, concluded: "when compared with the life and working conditions on the Siam-Burma railway work camps and other camps in the East Indies, Changi Camp was more like a low budget holiday camp". Writing fifty years after the POWs were freed, De Rosario looked at the reputation that Changi had gained in the public imagination and assessed it in light of his own experience as a POW:

Changi became known as the most notorious camp in Asia, and in the minds of many people in England, Australia, and America, the Changi prisoner-of-war camp would invoke visions of atrocities, starvation, bad living conditions and emaciated men. It was the place where prisoners-of-war were reduced to a physical state more looking like living skeletons. As a prisoner-of-war, not only in the Changi Camp but in various camps in Singapore and Siam [Thailand], I cannot understand how Changi had earned such a reputation. My memories of Changi have never been unpleasant. Prisoners-of-war in Changi did suffer deprivation and loss of self-esteem, but conditions were not appalling. Although food was rationed, it was provided every day. The camp was also provided with amenities, such as electric lights and piped water, which contributed to our cleanliness and good healthy conditions.[20]

15} Ex-POWs' descriptions of their time in Changi as relatively pleasant are so numerous that the conception of Changi as a "horror camp" seems untenable. Even ex-POWs with an abiding hatred of the Japanese have recalled that their time at Changi was pleasant. Hank Nelson's and Tim Bowden's collection of interviews with ex-POWs conducted in the early 1980s revealed that most of those surveyed did not view Changi as a place of atrocities. In this collection, Russell Braddon, an Australian ex-POW who particularly hated the Japanese, described Changi, like De Rosario, as a "holiday camp".[21] Changi was semi-autonomous and run day to day by the prisoners' own military commanders, not by the Japanese. This relative autonomy meant that the prisoners could arrange many leisure activities. POWs held concert parties, had a library, and even conducted educational courses at an educational centre referred to as "Changi University".[22] In Nelson's and Bowden's collection of interviews, Fred Stringer described Changi as "like heaven" when he expressed how he felt about coming back to Changi after being on the Burma-Thailand Railway.[23] Nelson and Bowden felt that this feeling was representative enough to have it as the title of a chapter dealing with Changi. This image has not been a recent development as the passage of time has mellowed the ex-POWs' antagonism towards their captors: a similar impression is recorded in Rohan Rivett's Behind bamboo (1946), the first account published by an ex-POW. Rivett noted that after coming from the harassment and persecution of the tightly controlled POW camps in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies, "Changi appeared to us like POW heaven".[24]
King Rat and re-creating Changi's past
{19} By the early 1980s the practice of taking visitors inside the prison had been turned into a lucrative activity by bus tour operators because they were bringing not just small groups of returning ex-POWs, but many paying tourists. Individual tourists could not just turn up at the prison gates and walk in; they had to arrange a visit inside Changi Prison through the tour operators, who charged a fee for their bus tours. The increasing commodification of the site was highlighted when tour operators expanded their schedule to include a visit to the roof of the prison complex, where according to their brochures, "from here", Lord Louis Mountbatten addressed freed POWs after the Japanese surrender.[29]29. Changi Prison and East Coast Tour, 67, PD/PRJ/45/88, vol. 7.
In 1986 Changi Prison was being visited by an average of "two hundred tourists or five coach loads" of people each day, but in late 1986 "prison authorities had found it increasingly difficult to handle the large volume of tourists going through its prison gates, as it affected its security".[30] The chapel was then moved into a modern building in the prison area, but outside the gates of the prison complex. Tour operators immediately reported to the STPB that many tourists were unhappy with the new arrangements because they could no longer experience the atmosphere that being inside Changi Prison evoked.[31]31. Pamelia Lee and Bajintar Singh, 23 September 1997.
{21} Clavell's fiction has been the text which has had the most influence in shaping public perceptions of Changi. The novel represents the prison camp as a chamber of horrors. Clavell himself spent almost all of his time as a POW at Changi and was not sent to places like the Burma-Thailand Railway, where conditions were far worse. Many POWs who only experienced Changi have felt unease at being spared the terrible conditions on the Burma-Thailand Railway, while their comrades were taken away and often worked to death.[32] They have tried to rationalise their guilt. Clavell did this by portraying Changi in a harsher light than those who experienced a variety of camps have described it. The frequent blurb on the cover of King Rat has perpetuated the myth of Changi as "the most notorious prisoner of war camp in Asia", where "only one man in fifteen had the strength, the luck, the cleverness to survive".[33] Clavell himself always maintained that his book was fiction, although it had a historical setting.
{25} The principal members of the STPB project team on the Changi site, Robbie Collins, Pamelia Lee, and Bajintar Singh, still saw a re-creation of the POW past at the Changi as the most viable way of restoring the place as a tourist attraction. The opportunity of cheaply re-creating the past came when the prison chaplain, the Reverend Henry Khoo, showed them pictures from Lewis Bryan's, The churches of the captivity in Malaya (1946).[38] According to Collins, the prison authorities "showed us a book on Chapels in Malaya during the war put out in 1946", which contained photographs of makeshift chapels constructed in Changi prison exercise yard and outside the prison's walls. The members of the project team were particularly struck by the rustic simplicity of the outdoor chapels. The chapel that most caught their attention was one that had "just a small corrugated zinc roof shed just over the altar area while the pews are in front in the open". Collins then proposed that "the chapel as shown in the book be re-created in the open field" outside the prison walls. The prison authorities completely endorsed this proposal, and offered the use of prison labour to build the replica chapel in order to make the project affordable. The proposed chapel went ahead because it cost very little-only $18,500.[39]
Representing a masculine POW experience
{31} The selection of objects to be put on display by the creators of Changi Prison Museum reflected the infatuation of the Singapore tourism authorities with the image of Changi, largely deriving from King Rat, as a place where only the fittest men survived. They decided to make George Aspinall's photographic collection the central feature of the museum's displays. These photographs, which had been published as a popular book,[48] included many showing the very bad conditions on the Burma-Thailand Railway, as well as those of the POWs at Changi. In the display the experience of the Burma-Thailand Railway was thus mixed up with that of Changi, suggesting that conditions in the two places were much the same. The second most prominent display at the museum was Max Haxworth's water colours of the male section of the civilian internment camp. From 1942 to 1944 civilian internees occupied Changi Prison, while the POWs were kept outside the prison walls in camps surrounded by barbed wire. In May 1944 the POWs were moved inside the prison, and the internees were moved to another camp in Singapore. The male image of Changi was strongly projected in these two displays. Haxworth's water colours, painted while he was an internee, depicted male figures tackling the problems of very basic living conditions inside the grey prison walls. The collection reinforced the images of King Rat. The seven hundred women and children in the civilian internment camp in Changi Prison were ignored, despite the availability of material to depict their experience.

Inglourious Basterds,Sciesopoli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds
Inglourious Basterds poster.jpg

Theatrical release poster

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Produced by Lawrence Bender

Written by Quentin Tarantino

Starring

Brad Pitt

Christoph Waltz

Michael Fassbender

Eli Roth

Diane Kruger

Daniel Brühl

Til Schweiger

Mélanie Laurent

Cinematography Robert Richardson

Edited by Sally Menke

Production
company

A Band Apart

Studio Babelsberg

Distributed by

The Weinstein Company(United States)

Universal Pictures (other territories)

Release dates

May 20, 2009 (Cannes)

August 20, 2009(Germany)

August 21, 2009(United States)

Running time
152 minutes^[1]

Country

Germany^[2]^[3]^[4]

United States^[2]^[3]

Language

English

German

French

Italian

Budget $75 million^[5]

Box office $321.5 million^[6]

Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Quentin Tarantino
Produced by	Lawrence Bender
Written by	Quentin Tarantino
Starring	Brad Pitt Christoph Waltz Michael Fassbender Eli Roth Diane Kruger Daniel Brühl Til Schweiger Mélanie Laurent
Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Edited by	Sally Menke
Production company	A Band Apart Studio Babelsberg
Distributed by	The Weinstein Company(United States) Universal Pictures (other territories)
Release dates	May 20, 2009 (Cannes) August 20, 2009(Germany) August 21, 2009(United States)
Running time	152 minutes^[1]
Country	Germany^[2]^[3]^[4] United States^[2]^[3]
Language	English German French Italian
Budget	$75 million^[5]
Box office	$321.5 million^[6]

Background[edit]

Jewish Brigade headquarters under both Union Flag and Zionist flag

After World War I, the British Empire and the French Empire replaced theOttoman Empire as the pre-eminent powers in the Middle East. This change brought closer the Zionist movement's goal of creating a Jewish state. TheBalfour Declaration of 1917 signified the first official approval of this proposal, and led to a surge of Jewish emigration in 1918–1921, known as the "Third Aliyah".^[6] The League of Nations incorporated the Declaration in the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. Jewish immigration continued through the 1920s and 1930s, and the Jewish population expanded by over 400,000 before the beginning of the Second World War.^[6]

Brigadier Ernest Benjamin, commander of the Jewish Brigade, inspects the 2nd Battalion in Palestine, October 1944.

However, in the White Paper of 1939, the British government under Neville Chamberlain abandoned the idea of establishing a Jewish Commonwealth. When the Second World War began in September 1939, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, famously declared: "We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper."^[7]

Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organization, offered the British government full cooperation of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine. Weizmann sought to establish an identifiably Jewish fighting formation (under a Jewish flag) under the auspices of the British Army. His request for a separate formation was rejected, but many Jews in Mandatory Palestine wanted to fight the Nazis and joined the British Army. Some of these were formed into separate Jewish companies in their battalions^{[citation needed]}. There was a Jewish battalion attached to the British Army’s East Kent Regiment stationed in Mandatory Palestine.^[5]

In all, fifteen Palestinian Jewish battalions were formed in the British Army in September 1940, and fought in the Greek campaign of 1941^{[citation needed]}.

But there was no designated all-Jewish formation. Jewish groups petitioned the British government to create such a force, but the British refused.^[8] At that time, the White Paper was in effect, limiting Jewish immigration and land purchases.^[5]

Some British officials opposed creating a Jewish fighting force, fearing that it could become the basis for Jewish rebellion against British rule.^[5] In August 1944, Winston Churchill finally agreed to the formation of a "Jewish Brigade". According to Rafael Medoff, Churchill consented because he was "moved by the slaughter of Hungarian Jewry [and] was hoping to impress American public opinion."^[8]

Formation of the Jewish Brigade[edit]

1st Battalion of the Jewish Brigade on parade

After early reports of the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust were made public by the Allied powers, the Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a personal telegram to the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting that "the Jews... of all races have the right to strike at the Germans as a recognizable body." The president replied five days later saying: "I perceive no objection..."

After much hesitation, on July 3, 1944, the British government consented to the establishment of a Jewish Brigade with hand-picked Jewish and also non-Jewish senior officers. On 20 September 1944 an official communique by the War Office announced the formation of the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Army and the Jewish Brigade Group headquarters was established in Egypt at the end of September 1944 (the formation was styled a brigade group because of the inclusion under command of an artillery regiment). The Zionist flag was officially approved as its standard. It included more than 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine organised into three infantry battalions of the Palestine Regiment and several supporting units.

1st Battalion, Palestine Regiment

2nd Battalion, Palestine Regiment

3rd Battalion, Palestine Regiment

200th Field Regiment (Royal Artillery)

The contemporary newspapers dismissed it as a "token" (The New York Times on page 12) and "five years late" (The Manchester Guardian).

World War II[edit]

Men of the Jewish Brigade ride on a Churchill tank in North Italy, 14 March 1945

Jewish Brigade soldiers in Tarvisio

Jewish Brigade troops on the Italian-Austrian border

In October 1944, under the leadership of Brigadier Ernest F. Benjamin, the brigade group was shipped to Italy and joined British Eighth Army in November which was engaged in the Italian Campaign under 15th Army Group.^[5]^[9]

A Jewish Brigade soldier carries an artillery shell. The Hebrew inscription on the shell translates as "a gift to Hitler."

The brigade group took part in the Spring Offensive of 1945. It took positions on the front line in the Alfonsine sector, and was soon engaged in combat. On March 19-20 1945, it initiated two attacks. The brigade then moved to the Senio River sector, where it fought against the German 4th Parachute Division commanded by GeneralleutnantHeinrich Trettner. On April 9, the brigade crossed the river and established a bridgehead, widening it the following day.^[10] In addition, they were represented among the liberating Allied units at a Papal audience. The Jewish Brigade was then stationed in Tarvisio, near the border triangle of Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria. They searched for Holocaust survivors, provided survivors with aid, and assisted in their immigration to Palestine.^[5] They played a key role in the Berihah's efforts to help Jews escape Europe for British Mandatory Palestine, a role many of its members were to continue after the Brigade disbanded. Among its projects was the education and care of the Selvino children. In July 1945, the Brigade moved^[9] to Belgium and the Netherlands.

Overall, in the course of World War II, the Jewish Brigade's casualties were 83 killed in action or died of wounds and 200 wounded. Another 78 of the brigade's soldiers were mentioned in dispatches, and 20 received military decorations (7 Military Medals, 7 Order of the British Empire medals, 4 Military Crosses, and 2 US awards).^[11

Selvino children

The Story of Selvino's Children: Journey to the Promised Land; Megged, Aharon and Eden, Vivian (translator); Published By Vallentine-Mitchell & Co Ltd.; ISBN 0-85303-397-8,

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diana Schoeps age 5, one of the Selvino children, inset into a photo of the Sciesopoli building

The Selvino children were a group of approximately 810 Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust,^[1] rescued after World War II fromghettos and concentration camps and housed in a former Fascistchildren's home called Sciesopoli in the Alpine town of Selvino, Italy. The facility had been constructed in the 1930s as a "sports palace" or gymnasium and training center for athletes.^[2] There, the children were allowed to recover physically, mentally, and spiritually from their ordeal, while being instructed both in the general education they had missed during their imprisonment, as well as in their heritage of Judaism and Judaic culture, in preparation for their later relocation to Israel as part of the Bricha. The house was run by members of a Palestinian Jewishunit of the British Army stationed in Northern Italy under Moshe Zeiri, along with the generous help of many Italian citizens. From early 1947 to May 1948, when Israel became a state, Amalia (Mania) Schoeps was director of Sciesopoli.^[1]

A plaque was installed in 1983, but was shortly afterwards removed; its fate is unknown.^{[citation needed]} It read:^{[citation needed]}

Between the years 1945-1948, nearly 800 children and youths - holocaust orphans - were gathered in this house. They were survivors of the ghettos and concentration camps. Here the joys of youth and the belief in mankind, that was snatched from them, were restored to them. They learned their people's ancient tongue - the language of the Bible, and were prepared for life in their homeland - Israel. Here they learned to recognize and cherish the goodness of the Italian people.

The building is now in a state of complete abandonment, despite the efforts of the former mayor to allocated funds to publish in Italian the book written by Aharon Megged, and the twinning of the city with Kibbutz Tze’elim. Plans to demolish the building alarm a group of activists who fear that a heroic chapter of history following the war will be erased from the memory of future generations.^{[citation needed]} They believe that part of the building should be secured as a memorial/museum to honor the lives of orphan children survivors of the holocaust, as well as honoring committed well wishing Italian citizen of Selvino.

   A movement is now (2014/15) afoot to restore and save Sciesopoli

Miriam Bisk,Marco Cavallarin and many others have collected signatures The organizing committee for the 70th anniversary of the opening of Sciesopoli which will take place in September 25-29th.http://www.sciesopoli.com/en

Plot[edit]

In 1941, SS colonel Hans Landa, the "Jew Hunter", interrogates French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite as to the whereabouts of the last unaccounted for Jewish family in the neighbourhood. Under threat of continued harassment from the Germans, LaPadite reveals that the Dreyfus family is hidden under the floor. Landa orders SS soldiers to shoot through the floorboards and kill the family. All are killed except Shosanna who manages to escape and begin fleeing through the field. She manages to escape the premises after Colonel Landa seems to spare her life instead of shooting her.

In the spring of 1944, 1st Special Service Force Lieutenant Aldo Raine recruits Jewish-American soldiers to the Basterds, who spread fear among the German soldiers by brutally killing them behind enemy lines. The Basterds also recruit Staff Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz, a German soldier who murdered thirteen Gestapo officers. Adolf Hitlerinterviews a Nazi soldier, Private Butz, who relates how his squad was ambushed and his sergeant beaten to death with a baseball bat by Staff Sergeant Donny Donowitz, the "Bear Jew". Raine carved a swastika into Butz's forehead with a knife so he can never escape his Nazi identity.

In June 1944, Shosanna Dreyfus runs a cinema in Paris under an alias. She meets Fredrick Zoller, a German sniper who has killed 250 soldiers in a single battle; Zoller is to star in a Nazi propaganda film, Stolz der Nation (Nation's Pride). Infatuated with Shosanna, Zoller convinces Joseph Goebbels to hold the premiere at her cinema. Shosanna plots with her projectionist and lover, Marcel, to burn down the cinema and kill the top Nazi leaders at the premiere. Meanwhile, the British recruit Lieutenant Archie Hicox, a film critic specialising in German cinema, plans for a similar operation. Hicox will rendezvous with a double agent, German film star Bridget von Hammersmark, and the Basterds to plant explosives at the premiere.

Hicox, along with Hugo Stiglitz and another German speaker from the Basterds, meets von Hammersmark at a tavern, where a German soldier, Wilhelm, is celebrating his son's birth. Major Dieter Hellstrom, a Gestapo officer notices Hicox's odd German accent and becomes suspicious. Hicox convinces Hellstrom that he is from the German mountains, but gives himself away by ordering glasses with the incorrect hand gesture. After a Mexican standoff, the Basterds open fire, and everyone but Wilhelm and a wounded von Hammersmark is killed. Raine arrives at the tavern and negotiates with Wilhelm for von Hammersmark's release, only for von Hammersmark to shoot Wilhelm when he lowers his guard. Landa investigates the scene and finds evidence that von Hammersmark was there, including a lost shoe.

Raine learns from von Hammersmark that Hitler will attend the premiere, and decides to continue the mission. Two of the Basterds, Donowitz and Ulmer, join him in posing as Italians, hoping that their limited Italian will fool Germans unfamiliar with the language. Landa, who speaks fluent Italian, converses briefly with the Basterds before sending Donowitz and Ulmer to their seats. He takes von Hammersmark aside to a private room, replaces her shoe with the one from the tavern, and strangles her to death. He orders the capture of Raine and another of his men, Utivich, but instead of raising an alarm, has Raine contact his superior with the OSS. Landa cuts a deal, allowing the mission to proceed in exchange for immunity and rewards.

During the screening, Zoller slips away to the projection room to see Shosanna, who rejects him. After he tries to force himself on her, she shoots him, but he fatally shoots her as well before dying. As Zoller's film reaches the climax, a spliced-in clip of Shosanna tells the audience that they are about to be killed by a Jew. Marcel, having locked the cinema, ignites a pile of flammable nitrate film behind the screen as Shosanna's image laughs. Ulmer and Donowitz break into the box containing Hitler and the other top Nazis, killing them, and then fire their submachine guns into the crowd until the bombs go off, killing everyone present.

Landa and his radio operator drive Raine and Utivich into Allied territory, where they surrender. Raine shoots the radio operator, then tells Landa that he cannot go unpunished for his actions. Raine carves a swastika into Landa's forehead as a permanent reminder of his crimes.

References[edit]

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Background[edit]

Jewish Brigade headquarters under both Union Flag and Zionist flag

After World War I, the British Empire and the French Empire replaced theOttoman Empire as the pre-eminent powers in the Middle East. This change brought closer the Zionist movement's goal of creating a Jewish state. TheBalfour Declaration of 1917 signified the first official approval of this proposal, and led to a surge of Jewish emigration in 1918–1921, known as the "Third Aliyah".^[6] The League of Nations incorporated the Declaration in the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. Jewish immigration continued through the 1920s and 1930s, and the Jewish population expanded by over 400,000 before the beginning of the Second World War.^[6]

Brigadier Ernest Benjamin, commander of the Jewish Brigade, inspects the 2nd Battalion in Palestine, October 1944.

However, in the White Paper of 1939, the British government under Neville Chamberlain abandoned the idea of establishing a Jewish Commonwealth. When the Second World War began in September 1939, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, famously declared: "We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper."^[7]

Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organization, offered the British government full cooperation of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine. Weizmann sought to establish an identifiably Jewish fighting formation (under a Jewish flag) under the auspices of the British Army. His request for a separate formation was rejected, but many Jews in Mandatory Palestine wanted to fight the Nazis and joined the British Army. Some of these were formed into separate Jewish companies in their battalions^{[citation needed]}. There was a Jewish battalion attached to the British Army’s East Kent Regiment stationed in Mandatory Palestine.^[5]

In all, fifteen Palestinian Jewish battalions were formed in the British Army in September 1940, and fought in the Greek campaign of 1941^{[citation needed]}.

But there was no designated all-Jewish formation. Jewish groups petitioned the British government to create such a force, but the British refused.^[8] At that time, the White Paper was in effect, limiting Jewish immigration and land purchases.^[5]

Some British officials opposed creating a Jewish fighting force, fearing that it could become the basis for Jewish rebellion against British rule.^[5] In August 1944, Winston Churchill finally agreed to the formation of a "Jewish Brigade". According to Rafael Medoff, Churchill consented because he was "moved by the slaughter of Hungarian Jewry [and] was hoping to impress American public opinion."^[8]

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Thursday, May 21, 2015

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Journal of the Australian War Memorial

Kevin Blackburn

Inglourious Basterds,Sciesopoli

Background[edit]

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