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Contact Info
Home Town Jackson, Michigan
Last Address St. Joseph or Berrien, Michigan
Date of Passing Oct 14, 2009
Location of Interment Hillcrest Memorial Park - Jackson, Michigan
On Aug 24, 1944, B-24 "Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma'am" of the 854th Bomb Sq., 491st Bomb Gp. was shot down over Germany on their 1st combat mission. All 9 crew members parachuted safely to the ground even though 1 had been wounded in the stomach and another injured his ankle upon landing. They were soon captured, beaten somewhat, interrogated, and locked up in Greven near where they had landed. The wounded man was sent to a hospital and the other 8 were put on a train to take them to the Dulag interrogation center. They had to stop in Rüsselsheim because the tracks ahead had been damaged by allied bombing. On the morning of Aug 26, while being marched through Rüsselsheim to catch a train on the other side of town, they were viciously attacked and brutally beaten by a mob of townfolk who were furious that their city had been severely bombed by the RAF during the night. One local Nazi leader even shot some of them. They were assumed to be dead and were put in a cart and taken to the cemetery for burial. One German was giving them the coup de grace with a 2-by-4 when he was interrupted by an air raid alarm, which allowed 2 of the crew to survive and escape. However, they were recaptured several days later and sent to a POW camp and survived the war.
After the war, 13 Germans were tried for these murders. All but 1 were found guilty and 9 were sentenced to hang, 3 to prison terms. However, the 2 sisters who were the main instigators of the attack had their death sentences commuted and served 8 years in prison. One condemned man was released on a technicality. The lead prosecutor in the case was Leon Jaworski, who later gained fame as the special prosecutor in the Watergate case.
Forrest Brininstool was the wounded man sent to the hospital. He survived the war.
He was the flight engineer on his crew.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of people in the United States and around the world.
