#World War 2

[fuckyeahhistorycrushes]

Tamara Wiszniewska (1919-1981) - Polish actress

Tamara Wiszniewska was born on December 19, 1919 in Dubno, Poland (now a region in western Ukraine) on the banks of the Ikva River. It was here that she spent her younger years during which she picked up dancing, which eventually led her to her career in film. In her 1981 obituary in the Democrat & Chronicle, it was reported that Tamara, at age 15, “Was a ballet dancer, when German film director Paul Wegener discovered her and gave her a role in the historical film, August der Starke (August the Strong)” which premiered in 1936. This German/Polish co-production is a biographical look into the life of Augustus II, ruler of Saxony and Poland-Lithuania from 1694-1733. Although Tamara played only a small role it marked her debut and eventual rise to fame within the Polish film industry.

Following her appearance in August der Starke, Tamara appeared in thirteen other films between 1936 and 1939, including Trójka Hultajska (The Trio Hultajska, 1937), Ordynat Michorowski (Ordinate Michorowski, 1937), and Kobiety nad Przepaścią (Women Over the Precipice, 1938). Wladyslaw (Walter) Mikosz, Tamara’s future husband, produced two of these films. In an interview, Tamara and Walter’s daughter, Irene, states that, "The two met because of their film careers, and were married [late that same year] in 1937".

Life for the Mikoszs was happy for a time. Tamara continued to pursue her acting career through 1938 and 1939 and had welcomed a new born daughter into the world alongside her husband, Wladyslaw. Unfortunately, these happy times did not last long as the Mikosz family experienced the rise of Nazi Germany and their occupation of Poland in 1939 during World War II. The following excerpt from an interview with Tamara in a 1974 Times Union tells how drastically their lives were changed:

"I always played a rich spoiled girl who had lovely clothes, and for a short time I lived that kind of life too. It was a short, beautiful life that ended when the Germans took over Poland in 1939. We were wealthy and the toast of the town then. We’d go to Prague and Vienna just to see an opera or to play in the casinos. When the Germans came, my intuition told me I should have something on me to exchange. I sewed my jewelry into my clothes. Later, it bought us passes to freedom and bread so we were never hungry."

The German occupation of Poland during World War II brought then “beautiful” life of the Mikosz family to an end. Gone were their illustrious careers in film and the rewards that such a life had brought to them. In a later interview, Irene mentioned that her mother "was preparing to sign a contract for a film career in Hollywood, but Hitler’s invasion of Poland derailed the plans". Sadly, Tamara’s last appearance on the silver screen was in 1939 prior to the invasion of Hitler’s Germany; she never again starred in any films.

Although her dreams had been crushed, Tamara and her family did not lose hope. They made the best of their current situation, and were able to survive by selling the fruits of their labors that they harvested during their days in the film industry; their lives had been consumed with a fight to survive rather than a dream to thrive. However, not being ones to live quiet lives, the Mikoszs volunteered for the Polish Underground, the exiled Polish government that fought to resist German occupation of Poland during World War II. As civilians with backgrounds in film, Tamara and Walter were most likely engaged in spreading Polish nationalistic and anti-German propaganda. Such efforts of the civilian branch of the Polish Underground was in support of what Jan Kamieński refers to as "small sabotage" in his book, Hidden in the Enemy's Sight: Resisting the Third Reich from Within: "In contrast of major sabotage, the idea of small sabotage was to remind the German occupiers of an enduring Polish presence, to ensure that they felt a constant sense of unease and generally undermine their self-confidence". While attending to these duties within the Underground, the Mikosz family was separated and shipped off to separate countries: Tamara and her daughter, Irene, to Czechoslovakia (where Tamara’s parents had been sent) and Walter to Bavaria. The family was not reunited until 1945, when they were sent to the same refugee camp in Bavaria. The Mikoszs remained in the Bavarian refugee camp until the year 1950, in which they emigrated to the United States of America. Tamara and Walter lived quiet lives in Rochester, NY after arriving from a war-torn Europe, and did so until they passed away.

Although they have long since passed away from this Earth, the stories of the Polish film star, Tamara, and her film-producer husband, Wladyslaw Mikosz, will live on so long as there are people around to tell it.

#history #history crushes #submission #tamara wiszniewska #polish #actress #film history #1930s #30s #old hollywood #women in film #women in history #poland #wwii #world war 2 #ww2 #ww2 history #old movies #old phography #20th century

[theworldatwar]

US soldiers and a Sherman tank of the U.S. 3rd Army make their way down a country lane - Metz, north-east France; November 1944

#world war two #ww2 #worldwar2photos #history #1940s #ww2 history #wwii #world war 2 #ww2history #wwii era #Metz #France #1944 #usarmy #us army #sherman #sherman tank

[mapsontheweb]

Soviet proposal for Finland in the Winter War

#maps #finland #proposals #winter war #world war 2

[yourspeirs]

Happy Birthday

Ronald Charles Speirs was born on April 20, 1920 and would've turned 104 today. Rest easy.

#ronald speirs #he shared his birthdate with hitler fyi #band of brothers #ronald c. speirs #speirs #band of brothers speirs #band of birthdays #matthew settle #easy company #hbo war #world war 2 #band of brothers ron speirs #ron speirs #101st airborne division

[curaheehee]

@claxmcb on tiktok

QUICK!! who's this and who's he talking about?

#hbo war #band of brothers #world war 2 #history #george luz #the pacific #eugene roe #lewis nixon #carwood lipton #donald malarkey #easy company #curaheehee

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

#kai rambles #so like #i enjoy ships and learning about them and looking at them but like #i dont really care for warships #i dont hate them viscerally like i do cruise ships but i never really care for them #apart from the ones that were just like either ridiculously designed like the hms captain or the vasa or the novgorod #or the ones where just insane shit happened like with the william d porter #like this isnt even the extent of the porters unfortunate incidents like shr was sank by a kamikaze attack that MISSED #but somehow ended up below the ship and exploded and just like yeeted the porter out of the water #william d porter #uss william d porter #ww2 #world war 2 #world war ii #warships #again warships are really not my thing but god some of them are so fucking funny #uss iowa #fdr #franklin d. roosevelt #this suddenly got so many notes in like less than 24 hours what the fuck #shipposting

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

#196 #my thougts #leftist #leftism #jewish #jumblr #actually mentally ill #mental illness #neurodivergent #actually neurodivergent #world war 2 #world war ii #history #queer #gay #queer history #pagan #athiest #athiesm #disability rights #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #anti conservative #anti christianity #christanity #christianity #mad pride #madpunk

[xoxoauntscripty]

*TW for amateur surgery*

Okay. It's 1942.

There's a US submarine, USS Silversides, operating in HIGHLY dangerous Japanese waters.

And one poor bastard, some machinists mate, gets a case of acute appendicitis

They can't radio for an airlift because the Japanese will find them

But they don't have a surgeon on board.

The only medical person they have is a fucking pharmacist's mate

As in, a pill counter guy

As in, the cold and flu and small stitches guy

Not the "cut open a machinists mate on a moving submarine" guy

Not even 3 steps below that guy

But he's all they have, and if they do nothing, this guy is gonna fucking die.

So this motherfucker

Risks a court martial

To do surgery

Without an OR

With bent fucking spoons as makeshift retractors

And the patient's coworkers as assistants

He somehow miraculously fucking gives the dude spinal anesthesia, correctly

Opens the abdomen

Cuts out the appendix (somehow without rupturing it, which would have killed the guy)

Almost kills everybody with ether (because of course he does, it's incredibly dangerous for everyone in the room)

Identifies a MAJOR fucking bleed

Can't find the source of the bleed, so he *runs the bowel like a fucking surgeon*

Figures out it's a clamp that slipped

Does fucking vascular surgery to fix the bleed

Closes the guy up

And the patient fucking lives

This fucking completely untrained pharmacist's mate

Performs a major surgery

Underwater

On a moving ship

Without antibiotics

And saves a motherfucking life

(And manages the patient through multiple rounds of getting depth charged by a Japanese destroyer, because war)

The fucking patient is back on duty less than a week after the surgery.

So tip out a fucking glass to Pharmacist's Mate Thomas A Moore, who risked a murder and professional suicide

And possibly had

The biggest balls under the waves.

#history #medical history #amateur surgery #world war 2 #submarines

[kemetic-dreams]

Honoring the 1st US Army African Female Pilot - Millie Bailey. She served in WWII and was 104 years old when she passed away in May of 2022. Show this Beautiful Woman some Love! RIP. Thank you for your service to our country and freedom for all.

#african #afrakan #kemetic dreams #africans #brownskin #brown skin #afrakans #millie bailey #ww2 #world war 2

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

An American G.I. leans out his tent to shake hands with a dog in Luxembourg’s frozen landscape during the Battle of the Bulge, January 1945.

#battle of the bulge #us army #world war 2 #wwii #military #history #puppy #snow #winter

[theworldatwar]

Soldiers of the British 8th Army advance along a street in San Clemente near San Marino - Italy, Sept 1944

#world war two #ww2 #worldwar2photos #history #1940s #ww2 history #wwii #world war 2 #ww2history #wwii era #british army #san clemente #san marino #1944 #Italy

[starlightshadowsworld]

The idea that because of the Holocaust Israel has the right to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, is absurd.

That's like saying the genocide of native Americans is okay because America was once under British control.

Hell that's like saying every country that was under British imperialism has a pass to commit genocide.

Because they suffered they should be allowed to let other people suffer.

That's not how that works.

You under went something awful, that does not give you the right to inflict that on others.

And they want to, a Israeli politican today (18.12.2023), David Azoulai said that Gaza should be made into Ausuwitch.

“The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.”

The Ausuwitz Museum actually commented on this, calling it sick and hateful.

Agreed.

And that's without mentioning that Israel treats its Holocaust survivors like shit.

As of 2023 there are 165,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel and 1 in 3 live under the poverty line.

And it's not like they don't have the money for it either, given America gives them millions.

But they'd rather use that money to kill Palestinians than help their own people. Even putting foreign settlers above their own people.

They have the Hannibal protocol which calls for the killing their own civilian hostages, which they've done multiple times.

Even when they've stepped forward with a white flag and spoke to them in Hebrew, they've shot them and said they thought they were the enemy.

Because they don't care, they are using the trauma of the Holocaust as a tool to kill others.

Holocaust survivors are speaking out that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is exactly what the Nazi's did to them, but the Israeli government doesn't care.

Not for them, and definitely not for the Palestinians.

The fact people think they should be allowed to do any of this and thinking it's justified is disgusting.

#free palestine #free gaza #anti israel #anti zionisim #ww2 #world war 2 #israel #palestine #gaza

[odairfilm]

christopher nolan did such an exceptional job at making the audience feel the tension and horror during the trinity test sequence even though we already knew the outcome and what it meant when they realized that the bomb actually works

#oppenheimer #oppenheimer movie #christopher nolan #cillian murphy #florence pugh #rdj #robert downey jr #movies #albert einstein #robert oppenheimer #world war 2

[shinishmermaid]

#history #poland #israel #jumblr #ישראבלר #ww2 history #ww2 #world war 2 #antishemisem

[thesixthduke]

Spitfire pilots of No. 43 Squadron RAF keeping warm in their dispersal hut at Drem airfield, East Lothian.

#england #wwii #raf #world war 2 #royal air force #vintage #pilots #gentlemen #style #higginsandcole

[pattern-53-enfield]

Lydia Spivak, "Ballerina of the Brandenburg Gate"

#red army #soviet union #world war 2 #victory in europe day #brandenburg gate #historical footage #history #ukrainian