World War II was a short affair for Joseph Horace “Jim” Greasely. Conscripted on the first draft, the Ibstock, Leicestershire native trained for seven weeks with the 2nd Regiment, 5th Battalion Leicestershire, landing in France at the end of that eight-month mobilization period known as the “Sitzkrieg”. The “Phoney War”.
Over 80,000 British, French and allied troops were taken into captivity during those calamitous days in June 1940, leading up to the final evacuation from Dunkirk. On May 25, 1940, Horace Greasely became one of them.
He would spend the next 5 years as a German POW.
When he was eighty-nine, Greasely wrote the story of those five years with the help of “ghostwriter” Ken Scott. The book is called “Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell?” It tells the story of a 10-week death march across France and Belgium and into Holland, followed by a three-day train trek into captivity in Polish Silesia, then annexed to Germany.
Stalag VIIIB 344, Greasely’s second PoW camp, was a marble quarry/labor camp near Lamsdorf, where PoWs worked marble to form German headstones. There he met Rosa Rauchbach, the 17-year old daughter of the quarry’s owner. Rosa was a German girl working as camp interpreter, successfully hiding her Jewish roots in the Belly of the Beast. Greasely was 20 and single, at the time. The pair was soon romancing under the nose of prison guards, snatching time for trysts in camp workshops and anywhere else they could find.
Later on, Greasley was transferred to an annex of Auschwitz called Freiwaldau, 40 miles away. The only way to carry on the romance was to break out of camp, so that’s what he did. He met Rosa no fewer than two hundred times in the nearby woods, creeping back to camp under cover of darkness, every time.
There is some dispute about whether Greasely “escaped”, or not. This particular camp was so remote that security was lax, the guards believing escape to be suicidal.
Furthermore, while Nazi captivity was notoriously savage toward eleven million victims of the holocaust and Russian POWs, German attitudes seemed relatively benign toward fellow signatories to the Geneva Conventions of 1929, particularly their fellow “Anglo-Saxon”.
British historian Guy Walters has called the escape story “fantasy”, citing ‘old men with failing memories teaming up with sharp-elbowed ghost-writers to ‘recall’ increasingly fantastical stories of ‘derring-do during the war’.
Walters goes on to explain that “Working camps for NCOs such as Greasley were not the tightly-guarded places conjured up by our collective imagination, which is weaned on images from Colditz and The Great Escape. In fact, bunking out of one’s camp to fraternise with local girls was hardly unusual, and certainly not ‘escaping’ in the sense most of us understand it.”
The camp to which Greasely was assigned was liberated on May 24, 1945. He later heard that Rosa had died in childbirth, along with the baby. He would never learn, if the baby was his.
There is a striking image of a prisoner of the era. Skinny and bare chested, a lone captive glares in defiance through barbed wire into the eyes of Heinrich Himmler.
On seeing the 1941 photograph, Greasley asked: “Who is that with me?” There is some question as to whether the image is Greasely’s, the cap is Russian, but Ken Scott insists it is he. Greasely’s widow Brenda agrees, explaining that POWs wore whatever they could get. Besides, she says, “Although he was very thin then, I definitely recognize Horace without his shirt on!”
The identity of the man in the image may never be known, for certain. Horace Greasely passed away on February 3, 2010. In a greater sense, it may not matter.
The image may be captioned “The Last Great Act of Defiance”. Whoever it is has summoned the totality of all contempt and engraved it across his face. The man is symbolic, the POW faced off through barbed wire, with one of the most powerful men of the Third Reich. As if to demand of this former chicken farmer turned wannabe Ubermensch, “Who are YOU, you Son-of-a-Bitch”.
The Telegraph newspaper, would seem to agree. The Himmler image was published with the former POW’s obituary, along with the caption: “Greasley confronting Heinrich Himmler (wearing the spectacles) in the PoW camp”. Once one of the most feared visages of the thousand-year Reich, the Nothing had returned, to Zero.
Afterward
American film producer/director Stratton Leopold, executive producer of Mission Impossible III and The Sum of All Fears is working on a film with Silverline Productions, depicting the Jim Greasely story. Ghostwriter Ken Scott tells the UK Mirror: ‘I can say it will be a mix of German and British actors and they are A-listers’. I’ll keep an eye out. That’ll be fun to watch.
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The male line of the Spanish Habsburgs came to an end on November 1, 1700, when Charles II died without heir, five days before his 39th birthday. The will named 16-year-old Philip of Anjou successor, grandson of the Bourbon King Louis XIV of France and Charles’ half-sister, Maria Theresa.
Vessels came twice to the island, but both proved to be Spanish. A Scottish privateer could count on torture and worse at the hands of his enemy, and so he hid. Selkirk was spotted one time and chased by a Spanish search party. Several stopped for a leak under a tree in which he was hiding, but they never knew. In time they became bored, and sailed away.
The Forgotten World War
Operation E.C.1 was a planned exercise for the British Grand Fleet, scheduled for February 1, 1918 out of the naval anchorage at Scapa Flow in the North Sea Orkney Islands.
The illness seems to have afflicted George III alone however, casting doubt on an hereditary condition. George III’s medical records cast further doubt on the porphyria diagnosis, showing that he was prescribed medicine based on gentian, a plant with deep blue flowers which may turn the urine blue. He seems to have been afflicted with some kind of mental illness, suffering bouts which occurred with increasing severity and for increasing periods of time. At times he would talk until he foamed at the mouth or go into convulsions where pages had to sit on him to keep the King from injuring himself.
48 days later, at Hunter Field in Savannah, Georgia, the Eighth Bomber Command was activated as part of the United States Army Air Forces. It was January 28, 1942.
Re-designated the Eighth Air Force on February 22, 1944, at its peak the “Mighty Eighth” could dispatch over 2,000 four engine bombers and more than 1,000 fighters on a single mission. 350,000 people served in the 8th Air Force during the war in Europe, with 200,000 at its peak in 1944.
The hyoid bone at the floor of the mouth serves as a connecting-point for the tongue and other musculature, giving humans the ability to speak. A delicate structure likely to be lost in most fossilized specimens, the first Neanderthal hyoid was only discovered in 1989.
The idea isn’t as strange as it sounds. Last year, Sir Richard Branson was in the news, claiming he’d looked into his family ancestry. Forty generations back, turns out Branson is related to Charlemagne. It’s no big deal, according to Geneticist Adam Rutherford. Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival, Rutherford explained: “Literally every person in Europe is directly descended from Charlemagne. Literally, not metaphorically. You have a direct lineage which leads to Charlemagne,” adding “Looking around this room, every single one of you … is directly descended between 21 and 24 generations from Edward III.”
If you have European or Asian ancestry, the following traits might be a sign of your inner Neanderthal:
The naturally large eyes of individuals such as Ukrainian model Masha Tyelna are believed to have been useful to Neanderthal, making their way in the dim light of northern latitudes. In fact, Neanderthal may have used more brain power processing visual input: an evolutionary disadvantage compared with early modern humans.
Freckles? Fair skin is more efficient at producing vitamin D from weak sunlight, an advantage for those living at northern latitudes. Freckles result from clusters of cells which overproduce melanin granules, triggered by exposure to sunlight. Freckles are found in a wide range of skin colors and ethnicity, but are most prevalent on fair complexions. It is a Neanderthal gene most common in Eurasians, among whom 70% are believed to carry the gene.
Redding joined STAX Records in 1962, a portmanteau of the founding partners and siblings Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (STewart/AXton = Stax).
Dr. Curtis Welch practiced medicine in Nome, Alaska, in 1925. Several children became ill with what he first diagnosed as tonsillitis. More came down with sore throats, early sufferers beginning to die as Welch observed the pseudomembrane of diphtheria. Dr. Welch had ordered fresh antitoxin the year before, but the shipment hadn’t arrived by the time the ports froze over. By January, all the serum in Nome was expired.
20 mushers and 150 dogs or more had covered 674 miles in 5 days, 7½ hours, a distance that normally took the mail relay 2-3 weeks. Not a single serum ampule was broken.
“The once tight fabric covering the wings and fuselage was weak from all the rough landings as well as the wind and rain. Dirt and oil caked the engine and prop. Wires for the rudders and elevators hung from the sides of the fuselage.” Even in such disrepair, the pilots and mechanics thought one of the planes could be ready to go Nome in just three days, a flight they thought would take no more than 6-hours”.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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