* By the end of 1944, OSE had rescued more than five thousand Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe, sending them to safety in the United States, England, Switzerland, and Spain.
* Between 1939 and 1944, more than 75,000 Jews were rounded up and deported from France to Nazi death camps in Poland, where an estimated 72,500 of them perished in the camps.
* Four months later, on January 23, 1942, the Navemar was torpedoed and sunk in the Strait of Gibraltar by the Italian submarine Barbarigo, which the following year disappeared with all fifty-eight officers and crewmen while transporting war materiel from Germany to Japan.
* Lewis L. Strauss (1896–1974) was a Jewish American businessman and philanthropist. A leader in Jewish causes and a member of the American Jewish Committee, he was committed to helping relieve the plight of Jewish refugees. During World War II, he worked in the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance and later as a troubleshooter for Navy Secretary Frank Knox. In 1947, Strauss was appointed to the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, and he became a major figure in the development of nuclear power in the United States.
* The Second War Powers Act of March 27, 1942, provided for the “expeditious naturalization” of persons in the armed forces of the United States. Under this legislation, immigrants (including enemy aliens) who had served honorably in the armed forces for at least three months were eligible for naturalization. Previously, all immigrants, even those in the military, were required to be residents of the United States for five years before they could obtain naturalized citizenship.
* Some IPW students were able to interrogate real German POWs captured in North Africa and shipped to Camp Ritchie.
* U.S. Military Academy class of 1915: known as “the class the stars fell on” because 59 of the 164 graduates—some 36 percent—attained the rank of general, a record that will likely never be surpassed.
* Virginia Irwin was the first American reporter in wartime Berlin, which she reached on April 27, 1945, three days before Hitler shot himself and ten days before Germany’s surrender. With Russians and Germans still engaged in street-to-street fighting in the devastated capital, she dashed out her story on her portable typewriter and raced back to U.S. lines to file the copy for her worldwide scoop. Furious that she had gone to Berlin without authorization, army press censors sat on her story.
* The “V” came from the German word Vergeltungswaffen, meaning “weapons of reprisal.” They were developed by German scientists at the Peenemünde research facility on the Baltic Sea. Over the next eighty days, more than eight thousand V-1s were launched against England, killing thousands of people.
* The 82nd Airborne Division casualties in Normandy included 5,245 killed, wounded, or missing. The division’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, to which Werner Angress was assigned, dropped 2,056 troopers into Normandy on D-Day, many in the wrong locations. Of that total, 307 were killed and 754 wounded, a 50 percent casualty rate.
* Gavin’s chief of staff, Colonel Robert Wienecke, told visiting journalist Martha Gellhorn rather plaintively: “We have a wonderful system worked out. I stay home with the telephones and my general goes out and fights with the troops.”
* From “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” by Alan Seeger, an American killed in action on July 4, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, while serving with the French Foreign Legion before the U.S. entered the war.
* The 28th Infantry Division entered the Hürtgen Forest campaign with a battle strength of 13,932 men. According to Headquarters Unit Report No. 6 (12/44), during nineteen days of fighting—from November 1 until it moved to the Ardennes Forest on November 19—the 28th suffered more than six thousand casualties, which included killed in action, wounded, missing, and captured.
* Including the men of the 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments who surrendered on December 19, 1944, the 106th Infantry Division and its attached units lost within days 6,879 men captured, one of the largest mass surrenders in American military history.
* Orval Faubus served as the thirty-sixth governor of Arkansas, from 1955 to 1967. He is best remembered for his 1957 stand against the desegregation of the Little Rock schools in which he defied a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. He became less confrontational with the federal government during the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, with each of whom he remained cordial and both of whom carried Arkansas.
* Detours along the way delayed what would become known as the Dachau Death Train. Upon its arrival nineteen days later, only thirteen hundred inmates were able to walk the short distance from the rail spur into the Dachau compound. Three days later, units of the Seventh Army’s 42nd and 45th Infantry Division, after a brief battle with the camp’s guards, liberated Dachau’s more than thirty thousand survivors. At the train yard, U.S. troops found thirty rail cars filled with decomposing corpses. All told, from April 6 to 10, approximately 25,400 prisoners were evacuated from Buchenwald; many of them died before or after reaching their final destinations.
* A U.S. Army report of April 16, 1945, tallied approximately 20,000 surviving prisoners at Buchenwald on the day of its liberation. This number included 4,380 Russians, 3,800 Polish, 2,900 French, 2,100 Czechs, 1,800 Germans, and 1,200 Hungarians; about 4,000 were Jewish.
* The total death toll at Ravensbrück is unknown, but estimates put the figure at between thirty thousand and fifty thousand women.
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