WW2
Your World War II Resource
Encyclopedia
MDSWW-- The Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War
OCWW2--The Oxford Companion to World War II
OEGWW2--The Oxford Essential Guide to World War II
RMEWW2--Rand McNally Encyclopedia of World War II
WW2AVE--World War II: A Visual Encyclopedia
WW2AW--World War II: America at War, 1941-1945
Aachen
(Aix-la-Chapelle) First German city captured by Allied forces. Despite orders from Hitler to hold the city at all costs, the German commander retreated from Aachen when US troops reached German soil, near Trier, on Sept. 11, 1944. As the Americans began attacking the West Wall defenses around the city, they were not aware of the German withdrawal. While fighting raged at the outlying defenses and stalled the US advance, German reinforcements poured into Aachen. By Oct. 16, US troops had surrounded the city and began fighting street-by-street. German defenders, using the city sewer system to harass the US invaders, held out until Oct. 21, when the Germans surrendered the heavily damaged city. [WW2AW]
AB AKTION
(Ausserordentliche BefriedungsAKTION, or Extraordinary Pacification Action.) Nazi codename for the liquidation of Polish intellectuals and other leaders which took place during and after the Polish campaign. It has been estimated that about 3,500 were killed from September 1939 to June 1940. [OCWW2]
ABD-1 Plan
The outcome of secret American-British-Canadian military discussions in Washington which took place from January to March 1941. The plan, which had already been recommended to Roosevelt as part of the Rainbow plans, envisaged that if the USA entered the war a joint strategy would be pursued in which Germany would be the prime target. A war of attrition would be waged against Japan until Germany had been defeated. The primary measures to be taken against Germany were blockade, aerial attack, and subversion. The plan bound no one at the time, but it was confirmed at the first Washington conference in December 1941 (ARCADIA) and resulted in the US Navy reinforcing the Atlantic at the expense of the Pacific, while British units were sent to reinforce Singapore. [OCWW2]
ABDA Command
Allied command for forces in the Far East (American, British, Dutch and Australian) established in December 1941, and commanded by British General [Sir Archibald] Wavell, C-in-C India. In control of forces in Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, and charged with the defence of Malaya, Burma and Australia, Wavell had neither the forces, logistical support nor the authority to mount any effective defence against the Japanese offensive in the Southwest Pacific, launched before the start of the new year. The command was dissolved in February 1942. It was reconstituted as Southwest Pacific Command in March 1942 with headquarters in Australia. [MDSWW]
Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Unit of American volunteers who fought on the Republican (Loyalist) side against the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Recruitment, by anti-Fascist groups as well as the Soviet-operated Comintern and the Communist Party of the United States, produced about 3,000 volunteers. Recruitment and activities of the brigade had to be clandestine because participation in the war violated US neutrality acts. The first group of about ninety sailed as "tourists" to Europe on the liner Normandie from New York City in Dec. 1936. Although information on the brigade remains scanty, recent historic studies indicate that about half of the volunteers were Jews, reacting to Nazi Germany's support of Franco. Many of them were sons of immigrants who had fled Hitler's Germany or who knew relatives and friends there. [WW2AW]
Abwehr
The German military intelligence organization. Before the war, the Abwehr came into frequent conflict with Nazi intelligence departments, the Gestapo and SD. Following his appointment as Abwehr chief in 1935, Admiral [Wilhelm] Canaris reached an agreement with Gestapo chief [Reinhard] Heydrich which resolved the conflicting spheres of interest. The two organizations ran in parallel -- both had spy schools and ran spies overseas. After the outbreak of war, Abwehr stations, based on army districts, opened throughout occupied Europe and in tolerant neutral countries including Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. The Hamburg office supervised agents in Britain and the US.
As a military rather than party organization, the Abwehr attracted non-Nazi and anti-Nazi members. With the encouragement of Canaris, whose chief assistant Hans Oster actively promoted resistance activities using Abwehr contacts, Abwehr personnel were an important element of the opposition to Hitler's regime. They were deeply involved in the preparations for the ... attempt on Hitler's life in [July] 1944, although by this time the organization's loyalty was crucially compromised and its functions heavily eroded by the SD. Finally, in 1944, the defection of two German agents to the British in Turkey following the Abwehr's failure to predict Allied moves in Northwest Europe gave [Heinrich] Himmler an opportunity to take over. In June [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner absorbed the Abwehr into his SS RSHA department and the Abwehr was formally dissolved. [MDSWW]
Ace
World War I term that originated in France and carried over into World War II for fighter pilots who shot down five or more aircraft. The term ace was also used to designate the top-scoring U-boat commanders during the war; however, there were no clear-cut criteria for the submarine aces.
The United States had 1,214 fighter aces in World War Ii -- 688 Army, 350 Navy, 123 Marine Corps, twelve flying with the RAF, five shooting down five or more planes with the RAF and US AAF, five with the Royal Canadian Air Force, twenty-four with the Flying Tigers (including Gen. Claire Chennault), and seven flying with the Flying Tigers and US AAF.
[Maj. Richard I.] Bong was credited as the top-ranking US Army ace while the highest ranking Navy ace was Capt. David McCampbell with thirty-four victories, and the top Marine was Maj. Joseph J. Foss with twenty-six victories .... Marine Lt. Col. Gregory (Pappy) Boyington shot down twenty-eight Japanese aircraft, six of which while he was with the Flying Tigers.
US AAF fighter ace Albert J. Baumler is credited with shooting down eight enemy aircraft while flying for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; he then shot down five additional planes in World War II flying with the Tenth Air Force. (There was one other American ace in the Spanish Civil War: Frank G. Tinker, who also flew as a fighter pilot for the Republican side and was credited with shooting down eight enemy aircraft.) [WW2AW]

The Top Fighter Aces of WW2
(and their credited victories)
Australia: Group Capt. Clive R. Caldwell (28)
Austria: Maj. Walter Nowotny (258)
Canada: Sq. Ldr. George F. Buerling (31)
Finland: Flight Master E.I. Juutualiainen (94)
Germany: Maj. Erich Hartmann (352)
Hungary: 2nd Lt. Dezjo Szentgyorgi (43)
Italy: Maj. Adriano Visconti (26)
Japan: Chief W/O Hiroyoshi Nishiwaza (103)
Poland: Jan Poniatowski (36)
Rumania: Capt. Prince Constantine Cantacuzino (60)
S. Africa: Squadron Ldr. M.T. St. J. Pattle (41)
UK: Group Capt. James E.Johnson (38)
US: Maj. Richard I. Bong (40)
USSR: Guards Col. Ivan N. Kozhedub (62)
Action Groups
SS Einsatzgruppen units of 800 to 3,000 men that followed the German Army during the initial advance of the German campaign in the Soviet Union. The units rounded up civilians and shot them down in massive slaughters. The action groups were conceived by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Central Security Office.
Although "Bolshevik leaders" were supposedly the major target, most of the victims were Jews. Other categories were "Asiatic inferiors," Gypsies, and "useless eaters," mainly mentally ill or terminally ill people. One of the action group's reports specifically mentions the killing of 6,400 Polish mental patients.
Historian John Toland, in his biography of Hitler, noted that many of the action group officers were professional men. "They included," he wrote, "a Protestant pastor, a physician, a professional opera singer, and numerous lawyers. The majority were intellectuals in their early thirties ... [T]hey brought to the brutal task their considerable skills and training and became, despite qualms, efficient executioners."
The extermination units, according to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on War Crimes, killed 2,000,000 men, women, and children in occupied countries. As the chief of one of the groups described the method, victims were rounded up and taken in trucks to the execution site, usually an antitank ditch. "Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the corpses thrown into the ditch." A witness told of seeing "a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing," at one mass grave in the Ukraine. "The pit," he said, "was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people."
After SS chief Heinrich Himmler, visiting an execution, was upset at the sight of women and children being killed in this way, another method was ordered for them: They were put in "gas vans ... so constructed that at the start of the motor the [exhaust] gas was conducted into the van, causing death in ten to fifteen minutes." [WW2AW]
Adlertag
(Eagle Day) was the 13 August 1940, the day Goring started operation Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack). a two-week assault on RAF Fighter Command's aircraft, airfields, and installations as a preliminary to the invasion of the UK. Poor weather and muddled orders made Adlertag itself less than a resounding success, but Adlerangriff nearly brought the Luftwaffe the supremacy in the air it was seeking. For German historians it is also the day that marks the beginning of the battle of Britain. For the British it started on 10 July. [OCWW2]
Admin Box (Battle of the)
Fought in February 1944, the first major British success against the Japanese during the Burma campaign. On 4 February 1944 the 55th Japanese Division, commanded by Lt. General Hanaya Tadashi, launched an operation designed to defeat Lt. General Christison's British 15th Corps which had advanced from India as far as Maungdaw, and to pin down any British reinforcements which could be used against the Japanese Imphal offensive due to start that March.
To support Christison's own offensive -- its objective was to capture the Akyab airfields, a vital requisite for retaking Rangoon -- an administrative and supply base had been constructed near Sinzweya. It was this box, just 1,000 m. (1,100 yd.) square, that gave the battle its name, for it was here that a regiment from Hanaya's division attacked. Although the British were aware of his plan, Hanaya achieved total tactical surprise. The HQ of the 7th Indian Division under Major General Messervy was overrun and the Box was soon surrounded. But the British stood their ground and were soon reinforced. Tanks, which Hanaya did not have, regular airborne supplies, superior air power, and better artillery kept the Japanese at bay.
What won the day for the British, against the swift encircling tactics that had always previously defeated them, was the three-dimensional nature of the their defences. The Box, defended and supplied as it was from the air, was really a cube, while the Japanese, short of fire-power and aircraft, had to rely on a two-dimensional attack. It failed, and once additional Indian Army forces had closed in from the north and west, the Japanese were themselves encircled and then destroyed. Hanaya's failure at Sinzweya enabled [Gen. Sir William] Slim to fly in reinforcements to defend Imphal at a crucial moment in the Japanese offensive against it. British casualties amounted to 3,506; the Japanese, according to their own sources, had 5,335 including 3,106 killed. [OCWW2]
Admiralty
The British naval administration comprised of a civilian side and a naval side; the former was headed by a political nominee, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the latter by a naval officer, the First Sea Lord. The Board of Admiralty was composed of the following members:
First Sea Lord -- Chief of the Naval Staff
Second Sea Lord -- responsible for personnel, pay, recruiting and reserves, etc.
Third Sea Lord --  (the Controller) responsible for shipbuilding, research, armament, etc.
Fourth Sea Lord -- responsible for stores and victualing
Fifth Sea Lord -- responsible for naval air
Civil Lord -- responsible for civilian labor in dockyards and contractors
Parliamentary Secretary -- responsible for contracts and purchasing
In 1939 Admiral Sir Dudley Pound took over as First Sea Lord, an office which he held until his death in 1943. His regime was marked by excessive centralization, and his most bitterly criticized decision was the order to the PQ-17 convoy to scatter in 1942. His succesor was Sir Andrew Cunningham, the former Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.[RMEWW2]