Second World War allies and Germany mark 75th anniversary of Battle of the Bulge

The Battle of the Bulge Was Hitler’s Last Gamble

Second World War allies and former enemy Germany have gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which stopped Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch offensive to turn the tide of the war.

At dawn on December 16, 1944, more than 200,000 German soldiers began the most unexpected breakthrough through the dense woods of Belgium and Luxembourg’s hilly Ardennes.

Making the most of the surprise move, the cold, freezing weather and wearied US troops, the Germans pierced the front line so deeply it came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Initially outnumbered, US troops delayed the attack enough in fierce fighting to allow reinforcements to stream in and turn the tide of the battle by Christmas.

After a month of fighting, the move into Germany was unstoppable.

At a ceremony at the Mardasson memorial in Bastogne, Belgium, US secretary of defence Mark Esper paid tribute to more than 19,000 US troops who died in one of the bloodiest battles in the nation’s history.

“Their efforts not only defended America but also ensured that the peoples of Europe would be free again,” Mr Esper said, calling the Battle of the Bulge “one of the greatest in American history”.

Even though German deaths also exceeded well over 10,000 in the battle that stretched deep into January, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier took special time to thank the US troops.

“On this day, we Germans would like to thank the United States of America. The American armed forces, together with their allies, liberated Europe and they also liberated Germany. We thank you,” Mr Steinmeier said.

“Those who died were victims of hatred, delusion, and a destructive fury that originated from my country,” he said.

Germany is now an ally of the United States and its wartime partners, united in the Nato alliance.

Veterans pay tribute during a ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge

During the poignant ceremony under leaden skies and rain at the star-shaped memorial, the current discord between the United States and several European allies over trade and security were never mentioned.

Even if it was relatively warm 6C compared with the shivering conditions 75 years ago, there was also a fog hanging low.

Hitler had hoped the advance would change the course of the war by forcing US and British troops to sue for peace, thus freeing Germany to focus on the rapidly advancing Soviet armies in the east.

Out of the blue at dawn, more than 200,000 German troops counter-attacked across the front line in Belgium and Luxembourg, smashing into battle-weary US soldiers positioned in terrain as foreign to them as it was familiar to the Germans.

Yet somehow, the Americans blunted the advance and started turning back the enemy for good, setting Allied troops on a roll that would end the war in Europe less than five months later.

This battle gained fame not so much for the commanders’ tactics but for the resilience of small units hampered by poor communications that stood shoulder to shoulder to deny Hitler the quick breakthrough he so desperately needed.

Even though the Americans were often pushed back, they were able to delay the German advance in its crucial initial stages.

“It was ultimately the intrepid, indomitable spirit of the American soldier that brought victory,” Mr Esper said.

When the fortunes of war turned, it was most visible in the southern Ardennes town of Bastogne, where surrounded US troops were cut off for days with little ammunition or food.

When Brig Gen Anthony C. McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne received a December 22 ultimatum to surrender or face total destruction, he offered one of the most famous – and brief – replies in military history: “Nuts.”

Four days later, US troops broke the Nazi encirclement.

Battle over Britain’s historic bell foundry far from over

Whitechapel Foundry, home of Big Ben and the Liberty Bell Whitechapel Foundry, London, UK - 15 Oct 2014

A white-hot sliver of molten bronze slides down a channel into a ceramic mould, its 1,000C-plus heat warming the faces of surrounding visitors. A short while later, the mould’s rough surface is hacked away to reveal the unmistakable structure of a bell.

This display of the ancient craft of bell-making, held in December at the high-tech manufacturing arm of University College London in the former Olympic Park in Stratford, is part of a long-term campaign to save one of the UK’s oldest manufacturing companies.

UCL is among a group of institutions and individuals battling to revive the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, as a full-scale bell manufacturer in the heart of London as well as an art foundry and a crucible of skills for a high value manufacturing economy.

The centuries-old business forged Big Ben and the original Liberty Bell in Pennsylvania and was run for four generations by the Hughes family. But in 2017 they sold off the premises occupied by the business since 1747, citing the declining market for large bells, and moved the business elsewhere in a slimmed-down form.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 15: Prince Charles, Prince of Wales (Patron of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant) strikes the the Royal Jubilee Bell named 'Charles' during his visit to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Whitechapel Road on May 15, 2012 in London, England. The Royal Jubilee bells will be rung from a floating belfry at the head of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant on June 3. The eight bells, cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry, are named after the eight senior members of the royal family; 'Elizabeth', 'Philip', 'Charles', 'Anne', 'Andrew', 'Edward', 'William' and 'Henry'

The campaign for the site’s revival is being led by the UK Historic Building Preservation Trust, a heritage group that saved the Middleport potteries in Stoke with a £9m redevelopment, and Factum Arte, an international business making sculptures for artists and copies of ancient sites such Tutankhamun’s tomb.

But their alternative plan for a bell-making renaissance faces formidable obstacles — not least the fact that the building’s new owners already have their own well-developed scheme. The buyer, US investment group Raycliff, founded by the New York-based entrepreneur Bippy Siegal, aims to convert the Grade II listed building and its adjoining site into a boutique hotel, café and studios for creative businesses.

In November, planning permission for the hotel scheme was voted through at a heated public meeting of Tower Hamlets council’s development committee, attended by supporters from the rival camps, where the decision swung in Raycliff’s favour after the chairman exercised the casting vote. The Raycliff plan also has the support of Historic England, the statutory body, which has pointed to its inclusion of a small bell production unit, where hand bells made by the Hughes family under the Whitechapel Bell trademark will be cast, finished and sold.

A spokesman for Raycliff said that critics of the hotel scheme had often ignored the fact that the plan will reunite the building’s original bell-making business with its old premises. “The new owners recognise the significance of bringing back the original tenants and giving them a new home — in their old home,” the spokesman said. 

The vote was a big setback for the campaign for an alternative, but its hopes have not been entirely extinguished. Robert Jenrick, housing secretary, made an unexpected move earlier this month by asking Tower Hamlets council to temporarily suspend its decision while he considered whether or not to “call in” the decision. Following the Conservatives’ election victory, Mr Jenrick is back in his job. He is likely to weigh both the historic importance of the site and the effect of the hotel scheme before his decision is expected early in the new year.

New voices are also being added to the list of well-known figures who have lent their support to the campaign, which already includes former Turner Prize winning artist Antony Gormley, Charles Saumarez Smith, former chief executive of the Royal Academy, and Tristram Hunt, head of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

LONDON - MARCH 25: Queen Elizabeth II (L) speaks to Alan Hughes, the owner of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, on March 25, 2009 in London, England. The Queen and Prince Philip visited three businesses in east London on Wednesday, including the Bell Foundry, which has been producing bells since 1570 and is recognised as Britain's oldest manufacturing company

Rory Stewart, the former Conservative minister who is now running as an independent candidate to be the next Mayor of London, has also thrown his weight behind the campaign, telling supporters gathered outside the foundry site on Whitechapel Road: “Anyone with any imagination seeing the possibilities of bell making, training . . . and a digital future could not possibly turn this down.”

He said the council’s decision was a “failure of planning imagination” and pointed to support from members of Whitechapel’s Bangladeshi community, as well as cultural figures and artists, for a full-strength foundry scheme. “In all the culture wars, right against left, and all the other wars of identity in London, this project is a very powerful symbol of identities coming together.” 

At the UCL event, Peter Scully, technical director at UCL’s Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange, said the bell had been made with a modern technique called “ceramic shell casting” — used by aerospace companies for making the high-precision exit blades on jet turbines — rather than the more labour-intensive, traditional technique of loam casting. 

The former is a highly adaptable technique — and crucially repeatable — that gives technicians and students a window into advanced skills in areas such as 3D printing, computer-controlled milling, harmonics and metallurgy.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 15: Prince Charles, Prince of Wales (Patron of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant) (L) views bells being cast during his visit to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Whitechapel Road on May 15, 2012 in London, England. The Royal Jubilee bells will be rung from a floating belfry at the head of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant on June 3. The eight bells, cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry, are named after the eight senior members of the royal family; 'Elizabeth', 'Philip', 'Charles', 'Anne', 'Andrew', 'Edward', 'William' and 'Henry'. During his visit, Prince Charles struck the bell named after him.

The plan to revive the Whitechapel Bell Foundry would provide a link between the ancient craft of bell-making and these technologies. Mr Scully said: “This is heritage going back 500 years. It’s an enormous opportunity for us to take that forward with all the disruptive technology that’s being used here.”

He also points to the cleanliness of modern manufacturing. The diesel oil that previously fuelled the furnaces of the bell foundry would be abandoned in favour of electrically powered furnaces using renewable sources, and electrostatic air filters used to scrub clean the fumes created in casting. “There’s no need to associate this with a filthy out-of-town industry,” he said.

Nonetheless, Raycliff’s plan has advanced in the face of these arguments. Its announcement that it would continue bell-making on the site, as well as carrying out fine art foundry work, came in February during the course of consultation on the scheme.

Such efforts allow the hotel scheme to argue its corner as a preserver of the site’s unique industrial heritage. Mr Jenrick’s move, however, suggests arguments over the Whitechapel foundry’s future are far from concluded.

'They say I killed my baby': Woman who inspired Chernobyl TV character says abuse has sent her into hiding

The real Lyudmila Ignatenko, whose story is depicted in HBO/Sky series Chernobyl, has spoken out

The Ukrainian woman whose real life story was depicted at the heart of HBO/Sky's critically-acclaimed retelling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster says she has been so hounded by criticism since the series aired that she is living in hiding.

Lyudmila Ignatenko's husband Vasily was a firefighter and one of the first responders on the scene when the reactor exploded on 26 April, 1986. The show depicts how Lyudmila - who was in her early twenties and pregnant at the time - cared for him in hospital until he died from radiation poisoning shortly afterwards, unwittingly exposing herself and her unborn child.  

                     

Their baby later died just hours after being born and Mrs Ignatenko has never remarried.

She recounted what happened for the 1997 book Chernobyl Prayer, which recorded 500 eyewitnesses accounts. The book is thought to have inspired some of the story lines and details in the TV series, which often centres on the Ignatenkos as played by Jessie Buckley and Adam Nagaitis.

However, in her first interview since it aired, Mrs Ignatenko told BBC Russian that she never gave permission for her story to be depicted.

"When I found out there would be a film about me I felt hurt and uneasy ... There were people hounding me at my flat," she said, adding that she had been the target of harassment and abuse for staying in the hospital despite being pregnant. The show suggests that medical professionals told her not to get too close to her ailing husband.

People say "that I had killed my baby," she said. But "I thought my baby was safe inside me. We didn't know anything about radiation then," adding that she couldn't bear to leave her husband's side.

Mrs Ignatenko says she has only watched snippets of the series, which "was very hard to watch", and claims the first time she heard from the production company was after filming had already wrapped up. However, HBO/Sky dispute this, saying the production company was in touch with her before, during and after filming, and that she never asked for her story to be left out.

The five-part series proved hugely popular when it aired earlier this year, winning 10 Emmy Awards. It is up for four Golden Globes in January.

Scientists Present Best Images Yet of Ionosphere From Space

A strange spiralling aurora, as seen by an all-sky camera in Norway.

Fresh findings about the edge of Earth's atmosphere are puzzling scientists affiliated with two missions that launched this year, and then some.

This zone, at an altitude of roughly 50 to 400 miles (80 to 645 kilometers), is full of strange physical phenomena that scientists are only beginning to understand. In the ionosphere, charged particles released by the sun interact with gases at the top of Earth's atmosphere in intriguing ways.

Take, for example, the "aurora seashell." During a NASA internship, Jennifer Briggs spotted images of an Arctic aurora, or northern lights, that had a strange spiral. This whirlpool suggested a large disturbance in the magnetosphere, which is the zone bordering the ionosphere. Weirder still, the sun did not release any eruptions before the disturbance.

Briggs, an undergraduate physics student at Pepperdine University in California who was in search of the cause of the formation, scoured data from multiple sources: all-sky cameras, radars and NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission that studies this part of the atmosphere. And the result was surprising, according to a NASA statement.

Briggs and her colleagues found that a region called the foreshock seemed to cause the aurora seashell, rather than an outburst from the sun, according to a NASA statement. The foreshock occurs where energetic particles from the sun bounce off Earth's magnetic field.

NASA has more data about the ionosphere than ever before; the agency has launched two new missions targeting the region within the past year. 

The agency's Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) satellite launched in January to geostationary orbit, roughly 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth. (For comparison, the International Space Station orbits about 250 miles [400 kms] up).

GOLD has made several discoveries in the past year. For one, it showed scientists that when a solar storm hits Earth, atomic oxygen becomes more common at low latitudes and rarer at high latitudes. At the same time, molecular nitrogen prevalence does the opposite, decreasing at low latitudes and increasing at high latitudes.

The spacecraft also showed what happens to the ionosphere during nights and solar eclipses, when the sun's energy is not striking a particular region of Earth. Here, the atmosphere cools down, the ionosphere thins and charged particles eventually clump into crests around the Earth's magnetic equator.

Stranger still, this clumping process varies from night to night, for reasons that are still unclear. "These were very surprising findings to me, and to the rest of the team who's been looking at this stuff for many years," GOLD principal investigator Richard Eastes, a research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in the same statement. "It's not something we anticipated at all."

A second NASA mission targeting the ionosphere dubbed the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) launched on Oct. 10 and began science observations on Dec. 1.

At the same news conference where Briggs and Eastes discussed their work on the ionosphere, the ICON principal investigator, Thomas Immet of the University of California Berkeley, showed off some of the earlier data from the mission, gathered while engineers with commissioning and calibrating the spacecraft.

All told, ICON carries three different imagers to study the way the different gases that make up Earth's atmosphere glow in the light of our sun. So far, those instruments have returned exactly the sort of information scientists expected, Immel added, but that's what's supposed to happen during commissioning.

"The first thing we see is a bit boring, but I'm excited nevertheless," he said in the same statement. "It's exactly what you would expect if the instrument were working perfectly."

The three scientists presented their findings on Dec. 10 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

• ICON: NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer Satellite Mission in Pictures
• Earth's Colorful Atmospheric Layers Photographed from Space
• NASA Rockets Launch to Unveil Mysteries of the Northern Lights

Oldest family snap at Stonehenge revealed

The family group appear dressed in their Sunday best

English Heritage says it has unearthed what is believed to be the earliest family photo ever taken at Stonehenge.

The charity had asked the public to send in pictures of the famous neolithic Wiltshire monument to mark 100 years of publlc ownership.

Among the 1,000 plus snaps are some from 1875, which experts believe are the oldest family photos at Stonehenge.

The oldest picture without a family dates from 1853.

One picture shows the group sitting on the stones - which is now only allowed on special occasions - with a picnic rug and what appears to be a bottle of champagne.

Access to the stones is more tightly controlled now than in the 1800s

In another, some of them are in a horse-drawn carriage.

"They're wearing fashionable outfits and hats," said English Heritage historian Susan Greaney.

"Right up until the 1920s and '30s people did dress up for days out like this, in their Sunday best, suits and hats."

The pictures will feature alongside more than 140 others, in the Your Stonehenge exhibition which runs from today to late August 2020 at Stonehenge.

Also included will be more modern pictures, such as the snap by photographer Martin Parr of a couple kissing in front of the stones during the 2019 Autumn Equinox. He now wants to track down the pair.

This couple were snapped at this year's Autumn Equinox

Ms Greaney said: "The exhibition shows how photography has changed - the rise of the selfie stick and the smartphone and how taking a photograph is a very different thing now.

"The way that people pose - people's faces have got closer to the camera until they are taking a picture of themselves more than they are of Stonehenge."

Of the possibility of finding an older family photograph, she said: "It would be quite nice if somebody comes forward and says 'We've got an earlier one'."

Sabra and Chatila taught me all massacres become 'alleged massacres' if we don't pay attention

Not that long ago, I spotted a report in an American newspaper which referred to the “alleged Sabra and Chatila massacre”. Up to 1,700 civilians, most of them Palestinians, were slaughtered in the two refugee camps in Beirut in just three days in 1982.

They were killed by Israel’s Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies. The Israelis watched – and did nothing. Even Israel’s own commission of enquiry admitted this. With two colleagues, I entered the camps before the murderers had finished committing their war crimes. I hid with an American reporter in the back yard of a hut beside a newly executed young woman. I climbed over heaps of corpses. That evening, I burned my clothes because they smelled of decomposition. Photographs and film of the dead were later broadcast around the world.

Yet more than two decades later, this mass killing was merely “alleged”. And when I spoke to a younger colleague scarcely a year ago, he did not know the location of Sabra and Chatila, nor the number killed – almost 400 more than those who were murdered in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. But no international or world leaders visit the mass grave at Sabra and Chatila on the anniversary of the massacre of the Palestinians.

The greatest enemy of all journalists – and all politicians – is the failure of institutional, historical memory. It’s one thing to claim that a Middle East war is imminent because Iran threatens America or America threatens Iran or because Israel warns that Iran is making nuclear weapons. But if you count up all the previous threats of war between Iran and the US – not to mention Israel’s eight warnings over 15 years, each giving different dates for the ‘doomsday’ of Iran’s nuclear possession — you would do well to downgrade the threat of war.

These warnings are issued for us to trumpet like clowns on radio, television, on social media and in newspapers – which we are usually obedient enough to do. They do not represent any kind of reality. They are issued because the supposed warmongers believe – quite rightly – that we either do not remember the identical and equally fraudulent figures they issued years ago. Or because they are convinced (again, I fear, correctly) that we don’t care very much to ‘keep them to the record’.

But we should. If we want to remember the dead of two world wars with poppies – a genuinely felt remembrance, albeit through the provision of fashion accessories to pop stars, television presenters and politicians – then there is no reason to ignore or forget the history that came after 1945. Or the history of the Arabs. Or the Israelis – or the Jews who struggled to create a state of Israel.

This is one reason why I have spent – cumulatively – years of my time as a Middle East correspondent cataloguing the accounts of survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1917 (all, of course, now dead), the deliberate ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the one and a half million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. They were shot into mass graves, suffocated in caves in the Syrian desert, the women raped and forced into marriage, the children spitted on bayonets or stakes or hurled into rivers. Most major scholars of the Jewish Holocaust agree that the Armenian Holocaust – Israelis themselves use the same word – was real. This worst of all First World War crimes was denounced at the time and afterwards by American diplomats, by Western missionaries, even by Winston Churchill.

Yet the Turkish government today still refuses to recognise the Armenian genocide as a genocide. So, alas, does the Israeli government. So does President Trump (as did Obama and George W and their predecessors). Many European nations have stood by the truth of this ghastly historical event. So, despite Israel’s lamentable denial, have many Israeli civilians and Jews throughout the world. Indeed, German witnesses to the Armenian slaughter – diplomats and soldiers of the Kaiser’s Reich who were training the Turkish army – turn up 25 years later in Belarus and the Ukraine, busy exterminating tens of thousands of Jews. They learned their evil craft in the killing fields of the Middle East.

One holocaust leads to another, you see. And if you deny one, then you give fuel for racists to deny another. Turn your back on the Armenian genocide and you will, eventually, turn your back on the truth of the Jewish genocide and the greatest mass murder in modern history, perpetrated by the Nazis. There are, incredibly, films of the starving Armenian survivors of 1917. Some of the most harrowing photographs were taken by a German military officer who was appalled at what he witnessed in Turkey at the hands of his allies.

Journalists, I have always thought, must also be historians – not just fulfilling the old cliché about being ‘the first witnesses to history’ – but by retelling, with ever more detail, the stories of the past, even when no survivors are left alive, and when powerful nations deny the truth of Armenia’s suffering, just as Holocaust-deniers continue to taunt the Jews over the most tragic years of their history.

Before you write, I always say to myself, read books. Reflect on these terrifying events and write about them – from newly discovered and incriminating Turkish documents, crackling tape-recordings, even by visiting the gorges and rivers in modern-day Turkey where the Armenians were done to death – and always attack those who deny these facts of history. Reporters must investigate the past as well as the present.

Name the bad guys, I always say – and that applies to long-dead Turkish army officers who slew the Armenians just as it does to German SS officers who gassed the Jews. And, yes, the same applies to all the massacres of the Middle East. Name the still-living bad guys. And don’t be afraid of those who claim that this is not objective. Mass murder is a war crime and we journos surely oppose such iniquities. Looking back on it, that’s why I was padding across those mass graves in the Sabra and Chatila camps 37 years ago