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Quinine is a product of cinchona tree bark that was used by South American indians to treat malaria by, unbeknownst to them, killing the malaria parasite. Spanish priests first brought it to Europe by 1631 in small, wildly expensive quantities where the tightly controlled monopoly product was known as Jesuit's Bark.  By the mid-1800's cinchona trees were spread across the world in modest numbers primarily for colonial military purposes, but the Dutch were first to build commercially successful plantations on Java and by the 1930's they produced 97% of the world supply.  

Malaria has melted many armies away literally to nothing, so access to treatment was a serious strategic concern.  The Japanese captured the vast majority of the world quinine supply when they invaded the Dutch East Indies and also took American cinchona plantations in the Philippines, where 1/3rd of the US forces retreating to Bataan were struck by malaria before surrendering.  Digging the Japanese out would require highly vulnerable armies to slog through a great many malarial swamps.  From 1942-1945 the US launched expeditions manned by foresters and botanists into the trackless heart of Ecuadorian jungles to hunt down every stand of cinchona for natives to harvest and started a crash program building huge plantations in Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru.  
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Meanwhile atabrine would have to do for most troops - a synthetic quinine developed in the 1930's by the Germans, who would have highly doubtful access to natural quinine in wartime, that could be mass produced while the plantations grew.  Atabrine was better than dying of malaria but is no longer in use because "common side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, sleep disorders, and a rash.  Serious side effects include potentially long-term mental health problems such as depression, hallucinations, and anxiety and neurological side effects such as poor balance, seizures, and ringing in the ears."  Which may sound familiar to those who knew WWII vets.


DDT, which is also better than dying of malaria, was invented in 1939 and was used to attack malaria from the other end by killing off mosquitos.  The Air Force flew many mosquito suppression missions such as this one, spreading DDT from A-20 Havoc's over Italy:

Filling the hopper
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Slipstream powered agitator:
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Dust chute:
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Dusting:
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Cameraman about to get a face full:
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Not the only one.








DDT saved the lives of many Holocaust survivors
Allied soldiers liberally sprayed survivors to stop the spread of deadly typhus.
Here’s a photo of a Bergen-Belsen survivor being sprayed with DDT by a British soldier.
A British soldiers sprays DDT (to combat insect-born typhus) on a recently liberated female prisoner from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp while others wait in line behind her, near the towns of Bergen and Calle, Germany, May 1945. (Photo by George Rodger/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

B-17G 463 Bomb Group, 773 Squadron, 15th Air Force, Celone, Italy, 1944
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Post-WW II, Stalin didn't return our Shermans but had the turrets removed to convert them to tractors:




Tracks are unmistakable (probably Canadaistan):

And in the UK

Supposed to have been a utility vehicle for the Siberian RR:
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A-20 (RAF Boston III) Turbinlite/Hurricane night fighter hunter/killer team - radar equipped Havoc with a 2,700 million candela searchlight in the nose.  Theory was radar would get the A-20 close enough, then they'd light up the contact and escorting fighters would dash in and kill the hostiles.  Problem was the bad guys always shot the hell out of the illuminating A-20.  The searchlight lens gave it an unusual flat nose.

http://www.vintagewings.ca

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Mosquito prototype did not reach deployment:
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Colorized photo of a B-17 crew in 1943.


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1945 Germany, colorized by a Hollywood professional and AI restoration by a large team (embedding blocked, direct Youtube link): https://youtu.be/Hwy8SzVmWGc

Fantastic, thanks for sharing!

A remote control model of the Maus demonstrated to Hitler, 1943.  The officer operating it has the control box set on top of a short post, cable running to the model
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And a full scale wood mock up being inspected by Hitler:
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"PBH-1H 43-4700 (BuNo 35277) [the US Navy's designation for the B-25H] was modified for aircraft carrier catapult launch and arrest retrievals. The first landings and catapult takeoffs took place aboard the USS Shangri La (CV-38) on November 15, 1944. Although the experiment was successful, no further work on a carrier-based Mitchell took place since American advances in the Pacific made such an aircraft unnecessary. " Joe Baugher's American Military Aircraft

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A few more Maus photos:

















Tank corps vets:  Can you imagine changing out a tread on this thing?

Cadaverous Ernst Kupfer, Luftwaffe ground attack pilot, Stuka wing commander.  636 combat missions, shot down three times, ironically killed in a weather related crash while a passenger on a consultation tour:
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Comrade Leader Joseph Stalin examines sniper rifle:

Cadaverous is a perfect description of him!

ca·dav·er·ous
/kəˈdav(ə)rəs/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
resembling a corpse in being very pale, thin, or bony.

I liked his later work in Heavy Metal.

Europe 1947.  Must have been eerie as hell.

Omaha Beach:
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A field in France:
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A crossroads in Belgium:
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American cemetery at Margraten, Netherlands:
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A German grave in the Hurtgen Forest:
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A boy guards the Siegfried Line:
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Is the boy carrying an Enfield?

Yes, No 4 Mk 1 (could be a 1* need to see the right side of the receiver).

Volksturm with Mauser 88 and panzerfausts:




Hitler was an idiot who should have done German a favor by offing himself.  Instead young and old alike were thrown in a  last ditch effort to defend Nazism.

Privately owned prototype Mitsubishi Ki-15/C5M reconnaissance plane named "Kamikaze" piloted by Iinuma Masaaki (clean shaven) with Tsukagoshi Kenji as navigator (mustache), welcomed at Croydon Aerodrome London 1937.  
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Kamikaze, or "divine wind", at that time was most commonly associated with a pair of typhoons that destroyed Mongol invasion fleets, and was otherwise a poetic inspirational term with no relation to suicide; it was co-opted by the Japanese military in much the same way the Nazis hijacked the swastika, a widely used good luck symbol.  As another example, Kamikaze was the name of the first Akita dog brought to the United States, gifted to Helen Keller in 1937 by the Japanese government in recognition of a series of inspirational speeches she gave in the country.

The second prototype Ki-15, briefly the fastest production plane in the world, Kamikaze was purchased by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun for a long distance/high speed world record/advertising stunt for the coronation of King George VI.  Kamikaze took the 9,600-mile route in a flying time of 51 hours 19 minutes (total actual time about double that including time on the ground).  They flew with a chart stained by the blood of French pilot Andre Japy, who gifted it to them from his hospital bed following a crash on Kyushu he suffered while attempting the opposite course.  The aircraft was used to photograph coronation celebrations, gave a joy ride to attending Japanese royalty, and the crew were awarded the Legion of Honor by the government of France.

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Kamikaze ditched in the ocean just off Taiwan pre-war with a different crew.  It was recovered and put on display near Osaka until 1947, when the U.S. Army destroyed it.  Recovery:
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Extreme long range flight by exceptionally skilled crew was the defining characteristic of early WWII Japanese naval aviation.  Ki-15's were used to guide the attack on RN's Force Z on December 10th 1941, resulting in the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales.  Obsolete by mid-war, many Ki-15's and poorly trained replacement pilots were expended as kamikaze suicide attackers.

Iinuma Masaaki joined the Japanese Army air force before the war.  Depressed and "distracted" shortly after Pearl Harbor, he walked into a spinning propeller on an airbase in Cambodia and was killed instantly.  The Japanese government told the people he was killed in an epic dog fight against superior numbers.

Asahi Shimbun got into a distance flight record breaking contest with another newspaper and commissioned an ultra-long range aircraft, the Tachikawa Ki-77:
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It was incomplete by the beginning of the war and the project  was taken over by the military.  Tsukagoshi Kenji disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 1943 in the prototype Ki-77 in an attempt to reach Germany.  The British decoded messages planning the trip and sent fighters to intercept it, the aircraft didn't survive but oddly I can't find anything definitive as to whether it was shot down or presumed lost due to accident.  (Perhaps the Brits felt a bit conflicted about killing the guy a few years after giving him a hero's welcome?)

Italian M13/40 tank and an Pavesi P4/100 in Libya

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Wrecked Wespe &  Hummel

Another harmless Wespe

Wrecked Tiger I

Those craters make it easier to understand the videos of vehicles being dug up in the metal detecting Russian videos on YouTube.

Were they taken out by a mine?
I would expect more damage if they were bombed or hit with artillery.

Guessing, but maybe artillery hit on the left side of the Tiger, judging by the way the brush of blown into the crater with the light vehicle, (Horch kfz 15?), a hit that blew the thin skinned into the previous crater,  lifted the Tiger up on it's side, then dropped it right back in the hole. Wild ass guess, of course.
Of course, the Tiger driver might have been REALLY bad and slid in by accident....

Sometimes vehicles were pushed into the nearest crater because it was the easiest way to dispose of 70 immobile tons and it made filling the crater a lot faster.  A road in France built over a King Tiger was recently dug up to recover the wreck.

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Never thought of that, good idea.

That's a King Tiger in the crater. The tracks and the wheels give it away.

The craters look as if they where made with 16" shells or something similar..

The writing on the side of the turret is interesting. "Russian" 15 CM  (15 Centimeter Main gun?) "Stuka"  Perhaps A Stuka JU87 "Kannon volgel" was used to take it out?  And 72 ton weight?

Could also be aerial bombs.
With a plethora of airplanes, the Allies were flying carpet bombing missions on the German lines.

KV-2
52 tons,
152mm howitzer

I have seen propaganda kompanie photo groupings with markings like that of what did the damage to the "kill"

You are also correct about the road wheels on the King Tiger.

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Flak-88

I agree with Wing Commander Bob Tuck that it would have been even better with 20mm cannon than the .303 Vickers.

It was sometime ago, and I made that same comment. Ruffled someones feathers.

The 20mm was really the answer for a lot of WW2 aircraft, the performance and round count. The 30 caliber guns on the Hurricanes were of course convenient for war time munitions commonality. I can only imagine the pilots frustrations of getting into position, and knowing your getting hits, to only get a probable kill.

I really like the Hurricane, standing next to one just provides something very different than the Spitfire.

Could very well be.

Though they would have to be heavier than 500lbs I would think, to make a crater as large as that one that has swallowed the king tiger.

Its hard to imagine just how startled/impressed that the Germans must have been when they encountered their first KV tanks.

They must have been disappointed at their lack of weapons at first to deal with the KV. So, all of their kills where special in many ways.

The Propaganda Kompanies (PK) where on overdrive to make the Russian tanks appear to be "no big deal" especially at the start of Barbarossa.

Yep. The Germans where surprised by so many of the Russian tank designs that they encountered especially during the early stages of Barbarossa. They should have known what the Russians possessed by that time. Yet they went in "blind" and paid dearly for their blunder.

The PK units must have had to hurry to get the propaganda out that the Russian tanks where not scary.

The Russians for their part, made the mistake of using the KV's and their T 34's piecemeal and their lack of radio communications between tanks etc. Resulted in the loss of many tanks and ground to the Germans after the shock of the first KV's/T34's wore off.

Folkestad's book Panzerjager: Tank Hunter (bio of a German AT gunner) describes the adaptations necessary. The Soviets would send the T-34s forward in a line, with the KVs backing them up. The Germans would heavily camouflage their AT guns, and remain silent and motionless as the tanks rolled past. Once the last KV was past them, they'd swing the guns around and start killing the KVs and T34s from the rear, working their way forward. Because the Soviets had few or no radios, were buttoned up, and were concentrating to their front, they had very little situational awareness, and would not notice the tanks behind them brewing up.

Yep.

The Soviets had many advantages in their tanks especially later in the war as the Germans lost so many of their strength after Unternehmen Zitadelle.  

Kursk as we know it, was apparently a setup by the Soviets to destroy as much of the Wehrmacht's armored and personnel strength as possible using carefully prepared positions and minefields.

About 20 years ago my grandmother gave me three old wooden cigar boxes full of metals ribbons and three or four rolls of negatives in the silver aluminum Kodak film canisters. They belonged to one of her friends brothers. He had recently passed away and did not have anyone to leave them to so my grandmother thought I would be interested in them.  I don’t know what he did in the army but he took some photos in Europe of a motor pool and a train yard full of damaged equipment. I will post them here. I apologize because he’s are just iPhone pictures of the black and white photos that I had developed many years ago.

No apologies needed here.

And yes I believe the technician who made the photos for me did them in reverse so these are a mirror image as you can tell by the numbers and letters are all backwards

I hate to admit it but I don’t know what I’m looking at here I think in this picture and maybe the next one you can see a German 88 and some other Axis weapons