During World War II, there were the partisans. The Partisans were member of a domestic irregular military forces that fought against the Nazis. They wanted to combat the Axis enemy. Many of them destroyed the Axis infrastructure, disrupt the transport of soldiers and water materials, etc. They fought in many ways like blowing up nazi supply trains, ambushing patrols, attacking strategic strongholds, and destroying bridges plus communication lines. They acted in guerilla warfare regularly by fighting in forests, swamps, and mountains. These groups include The French Maquis, The Italian partisans, the Belgian Underground, the Russian partisans, the Polish partisans. The Yugoslav partisans, the Ukrainian partisans, Lithuania partisans, and other groups fought the Axis Powers decades ago too. In Poland, there were partisan groups promoted by the Marshal of Poland Rydz Smigly on September 16, 1939. There was the peasant Batliony Chlopskie created for a self-defense policy against Nazi German abuse (the armed ring of the Polish Socialist Party). The Polish Jewish partisans of the Jewish Military Union worked with the Home Army when the leftist and pro-Soviet Jewish Combat Organization didn't. Both the Jewish Military Union and the Jewish Combat Organization created the Ghetto Uprising in 1943 to try to stop the Holocaust in Poland and liberate people from Nazi oppression. Armia Krajowa created the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and other events. The Polish partisans fought the Nazis, the Ukranian nationalists, the Lithuanian Nazi collaborators, and even the Soviets. The Polish partisans defeated the Lithuanian Nazi collaborators in the Battle of Murowana Oszmianka in My 1944. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was an evil nationalist paramilitary group who worked with the Nazis, they fought the Soviets, and committed ethnic cleansing of the Polish population of Volhynia and East Galicia. The Italian paristans helped to defeat the Nazis in Italy too. There was the French Resistance to fight the Nazi occupation of France and the teasonious Vichy regime in France. French men and women used intelligence to help Allied soldiers and conducted guerilla warfare. Some published underground newspapers. The French Resistance included emigres, academics, aristocrats, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jewish people, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, etc. The Cross of Lorraine was the symbol of the Resistance (they worked to help facilitate the Allies' victory of the Normandy invasion that started on June 6, 1944). Andre Tocme and Magda were a couple in France who preached against discrimination by the Nazis and wanted his Protestant Huguenot congregation to hid Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II. Many members of the Frence Resistance were Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, Ariadna Scriabina, Abraham Polonski, Rouben Melik, Madeleine Riffaud, Germaine Tillion, etc. Josephine Baker worked as a spy for the French Resistance. In 1944, Josephine Baker joined a woman group in the Air Force of the French Liberation as a second lieutenant. Baker would also be a civil rights and human rights advocate in America, France, and throughout the world.
The Ratlines were systems of escape routes where German Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in the Americas, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Switzerland. High-ranking fascists and Nazis who escaped from Europe via the ratlines after World War II were Ante Pavelić, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Mengele including other wicked folks. There were two primary routes: the first went from Germany to Spain, then Argentina; the second from Germany to Rome, then Genoa, then South America. The two routes developed independently but eventually came together. The ratlines were supported by rogue elements in the Vatican, particularly an Austrian bishop and four Croatian clergy of the Catholic Church who sympathized with the Ustaše. Starting in 1947, U.S. Intelligence utilized existing ratlines to move certain Nazi strategists and scientists. While consensus among Western scholars is that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler died by suicide in 1945, in the late 1940s and 1950s the U.S. investigated claims that he survived and fled to South America. The American government also used Nazis to promote NASA and the intelligence community to oppose the Soviet Union during the Cold War too.
It is always important to not only cite events of World War II, but it is vital to recognize the unsung black women who made the Allied victory possible in the Second World War too. Dovey Johnson Roundtree was one of the first 39 black women Officers. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, and Mary McLeod Bethune to draft the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) resolutions that was presented to Congress. The resolution was supported by General of the Army George Marshall, so the bill passed both the House of Representatives and then the Senate in May of 1942. With the WAC in place, the War Department said it would follow Army policy and admit black women with a 10 percent quota. Harriet Ida Pickens was one of the first African American women commissioned in the United States Navy in 1944 along with Frances Elizabeth Willis. Later, Adm. Michelle Howard, who became the first black woman to command a U.S. Navy combatant ship, USS Rushmore (LSD 47) in 1999. Cathy Williams was the first black woman in the U.S. Army back in the 1800s. During WWII, Charity Adams, the first Black woman US Army officer and commander of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Olivia J. Hooker was a pioneer and the first black woman to join the U.S. Coast Guard. By November 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into a law that established the United States Coast Guard Women's Reserve. Later, we shall wee the first black woman to fly in the Air Force named Captain Theersa Claibrone. Samuel L. Gravely Jr. was the first African American in the U.S. Navy to serve abroad a fighting ship as an officer, the first to command a Navy ship, the first fleet commander, and the first to become a flag officer, retiring as a vice admiral. He was in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
One of the most bizarre events of World War II was Operation Paperclip. Many people didn't know about this operation until many decades ago. Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or the SA. The effort began in earnest in 1945, as the Allies advanced into Germany and discovered a wealth of scientific talent and advanced research that had contributed to Germany's wartime technological advancements. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff officially established Operation Overcast (operations "Overcast" and "Paperclip" were related, and the terms are often used interchangeably) on July 20, 1945, with the dual aims of leveraging German expertise for the ongoing war effort against Japan and to bolster U.S. postwar military research. The operation, conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), was largely actioned by special agents of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). Many selected scientists were involved in the Nazi rocket program, aviation, or chemical/biological warfare. The Soviet Union in the following year conducted a similar program, called Operation Osoaviakhim, that emphasized many of the same fields of research. The operation, characterized by the recruitment of German specialists and their families, relocated more than 1600 experts to the US. It has been valued at US$10 billion in patents and industrial processes. Recruits included such notable figures as Wernher von Braun, a leading rocket-technology scientist. Those recruited were instrumental in the development of the U.S. space program and military technology during the Cold War. Despite its contributions to American scientific advances, Operation Paperclip has been controversial because of the Nazi affiliations of many recruits, and the ethics of assimilating individuals associated with war crimes into American society. The operation was not solely focused on rocketry; efforts were directed toward synthetic fuels, medicine, and other fields of research. Notable advances in aeronautics fostered rocket and space-flight technologies pivotal in the Space Race. The operation played a crucial role in the establishment of NASA and the success of the Apollo missions to the Moon. Operation Paperclip was part of a broader strategy by the US to harness German scientific talent in the face of emerging Cold War tensions, and ensuring this expertise did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union or other nations.
The U.S. Government wanted to use the German V-2 technology and other forms of their jet, rocket, naval equipment, secrete writing chemicals, and other technologies. Operation Paperclip was not initially against the Soviet Union at first. The USSR also relocated 2,200 Nazi scientists and their families (or more than 6,000 people) with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night on October 22, 1946. In a secret directive circulated on September 3, 1946, President Truman officially approved Operation Paperclip and expanded it to include 1,000 German scientists under "temporary, limited military custody." New media revealed the program by early December 1946. Von Braun was a Nazi scientist who surrendered to Americans in 1945 with more than a thousand of his colleagues. Many of these Operation Paperclip German scientists helped America with space flight, rocket technology, and other forms of aeronautics. The operation's legacy has remained controversial in subsequent decades. In a 2014 book, Annie Jacobsen investigated 21 prominent scientists and technicians recruited by Paperclip. She found that 15 of them were active Nazi party members, 10 served in the paramilitary groups like the SS or SA, 8 worked directly with major Nazi leaders, and 6 were tried in Nuremberg. Similar operations existed by the West to deal with German scientists from TICOM to Operation Surgeon.
The legacy of fashion is extension. Fashion is more than about how we wear our clothes. It represents the essential expression of our diverse cultures in the world from accessories to the type of vehicles that we ride in. From ancient times, the civilizations found in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and Oceania had human beings who organized structures of culture, music, language, writings, literature, family structures, and fashion. From ancient Egyptians wearing staffs to gold being used on clothing in ancient Mali, fashion is massively diverse. As the thousands of years of human history has passed, many people have made more complicated forms of fashion from tunic to suits, dresses, pants, shoes, and belts. Along the way, we have seen new colors, new fabrics, and unique forms of designs to make fashion more vibrant. Back in the day, many multinational corporations had a near monopoly of international fashion expression. Today, we have seen a decentralization of fashion culture where regular men and women have sold fashion products on the Internet and other avenues for a profit. It is important to recognize black fashion designers who have changed fashion history forever too as many people don't know these unsung heroes. Ann Lowe was the first black woman to own a store on Madison Avenue, and she designed the wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Stephen Burrows is an icon who made collections used by Diana Ross and Cher. Patrick Kelly created clothing used by Grace Jones, Princess Diana, and other people. We know about Dapper Dan, Tracy Reese, Virgil Abloh, Stella Jean, Patrick Robinson, Victor Glemaud, Zelda Wynn Valdes, and other people like Ruby Bailey who made the world better with their own fashion designs. I will say that that 20th century had the most diverse amount of fashion in human history. From the Victorian style of the early 1900s to the more hip-hop fashion motif of the 1990s, there were never dull styles in the 20th century. Today in 2025, we see fashion being a mixture of old school and new school imagery. That is what life is. Life is meant to be lived in an unapologetic way filled with excitement, joy, culture, resiliency, and love.
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