Every war has events where the tide changes, turning points where the conflict's endgame comes into focus.

That moment for the Second World War's European theater was June 6, 1944, the day Allied forces crossed the English Channel and began to reclaim the European mainland.

Friday marks the 71st anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

Here are images that bring to life one of the most consequential military operations in modern history.

Robert Johnson contributed to this report.

It was overcast and foggy on June 6, 1944, when 160,000 troops landed on this French coastline.

Beaches along a 50-mile stretch of coastline in Normandy were given five names — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. German troops heavily defended each of them.

Cloud cover prevented Allied bombers from accurately targeting the German forces and softening up their defenses.

German military leaders expected an Allied invasion on the English Channel coast in late May 1944, when there was high tide, a full moon, good visibility, and little wind. When it did not come, and when the weather turned in June with a depression bringing storms, they felt they could relax.

“There were all the less doubts that an invasion might happen in the meantime as the tides are very unfavorable in the following days and no air reconnaissance of any kind had given any hints of an imminent landing," Field Marshall Erwin Rommel wrote on June 4, 1944, before leaving France for Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday.

But while German weather forecasters saw no possibility for invasion, Allied forecasters were frantically looking for an opening. They found one on June 6 — and on the 71st anniversary of the pivotal invasion, we're looking at how they did it.

How the Allied forecasters found the opening is a subject of controversy, and they almost screwed it up. For an authoritative account, we've sourced a 2004 article from James R. Fleming, professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College.  

Looking at the weather maps shown above on June 3, two meteorologists at US base Widewing in England, Irving Krick and Ben Holzman, said the planned invasion on June 5 was possible. However, teams of meteorologists at the British Admirality and the British Meteorological office, including most notably the Norwegian Sverre Petterssen, said an attempted landing would be unsafe. Chief meteorologist James Stagg persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower at the last moment to cancel the June 5 invasion.

It's a good thing he listened — stormy weather would likely have made the landing a disaster.

“With some justification I could have been criticized for not being sufficiently ‘gloomy,’ for the weather and winds during the night of June 4th-5th turned out to be even more severe than Douglas and I had predicted," Petterssen wrote later.

But on June 4, the three teams recognized an opportunity on June 6 as storm 'F' was leaving and storm 'E' appeared to have stalled (at least according to Petterssen; according to Krick, Petterssen's team still refused to clear an invasion).

“A sudden and major reorganization of the atmosphere over the Atlantic sector” on June 4 “threw the forecasters into confusion” but by the end of the day the three teams “reached a state of harmony that had hardly ever been attained since February when conference discussions began,” Petterssen wrote (as contextualized by Fleming).

The Normandy landings were a go.

Around midnight on the evening of June 5, the Allies began extensive aerial and naval bombardment as well as an airborne assault. The intricately coordinated attack continued in the early morning, as minesweepers cleared the channel for an invasion fleet comprising nearly 7,000 vessels. Allied infantry and armored divisions began landing on the coast of France at 06:30.

By the end of that day, they had gained a foothold in German-occupied Western Europe that proved critical to winning the war.

SEE ALSO: The D-Day invasion in photos

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Putin is the most powerful man in the world

Today marks the 71st anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy during World War II — also known as D-Day — that led to the liberation of France from Nazi control and contributed to the Allied victory.

An estimated 60 million to 80 million people died before the war officially ended in 1945. A new data visualization created by Neil Halloran and posted on i09 attempts to make this vast sum comprehensible, conceptualizing the fatalities using charts and graphics that convey the toll of war.

The 15-minute video is divided into three sections: an analysis of soldier fatalities by nation, civilian deaths (which includes the Holocaust), and, finally, a visualization of World War II deaths within the context of past and future conflicts.

Here is the full video:

SEE ALSO: Here's the weather prediction that won D-Day for the Allies

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Two models in Russia just posed with a 1,400-pound bear

In July 1944, 19-year-old Tom Scardino was wounded twice in one day fighting the Germans in Normandy.

Seventy years later, when Business Insider talked to him in the summer of 2014, he still found it too painful to talk about some of the things he saw during his month in combat, which is why even his immediate family members know almost nothing about his experience during one of the pivotal events of the deadliest conflict in history.

At 89 years old, Scardino agreed to share his story for the first time in an emotional interview with Business Insider last year.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a 16-year-old Scardino was too young to enlist with the older boys in his neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“A couple of guys joined the Marines right away,” Scardino recalled. “We were happy for them. This was ’42, and in the latter part, at the end of the year, we got word that both got killed in Guadalcanal.”

Their deaths made him more eager to join up, but his father refused to sign papers that would have allowed him to volunteer at 17 years old. A tailor by trade, he was desperate to keep his son home to help with his business. When Scardino was drafted at 18, his father convinced an optometrist to write a note to draft officials falsely claiming that Scardino, who wore glasses, was going blind.

He gave Scardino the note in an envelope to deliver, but Scardino had other plans.

“When I passed [the draft review] I came home to my sister and father. I said, ‘I’m 1A, I gotta go,’” Scardino recalled, referring to a classification term meaning that a draftee is available immediately for military service. “[My father said,] ‘What do you mean you’re 1A? Didn’t you show them the envelope? I said, ‘Yeah, but the officer said don’t worry about it, if he’s blind we’ll put him in the front.’ I made that up. I was gung ho. I wanted to go.”

Assigned to the US Army’s 90th Infantry Division, 359th Infantry Regiment, Scardino arrived in Britain on March 23, 1944, after a 22-day voyage across the Atlantic. For two months, his unit continued training with frequent marches and maneuvers — while wondering where and when they'd land in France to wrest the continent out of German hands.

D-Day

On June 1, 1944, the unit transferred to a ship that was oppressively hot and cramped.

“We were in a goddamn sardine can,” he recalled. They were supposed to embark on their mission June 5, but bad weather prolonged the invasion until the following morning.

By then, Scardino and his comrades were willing to do anything to get out of the close confines of the crowded ship they’d been stationed on for six days, even if it meant being thrown into battle.

“We were really hopped up and glad to go,” he said. “There was no second thoughts.”

The ship stopped a short distance from the shore of Normandy, where the soldiers, seasick from the rough current in the channel, climbed down ropes to small landing craft that would deliver them to the beaches for the assault.

It was a five to seven-minute ride in the landing craft to Utah Beach, where the first waves of troops with the 4th Infantry Division had already landed.

Scardino expected that  some of the 42 soldiers in his landing craft would become casualties that morning.

“No one talked, not a word, but you used your eyes,” Scardino explained of that short trip to the beach. “A couple times I stared at a guy and this is my thought as I’m looking: ‘Is it you or is it me?’”

Scardino's first sergeant ordered the soldiers in his landing craft to run as fast as they could toward the top of a hill at the end of the beach. He urged them not to stop for any reason, not even to assist a fallen comrade. Their rifles were no match for the German machine gun emplacements firing down at the beach.

“My first thought was, ‘Tommy, you’re not coming back, but you’re going to go down fighting,’” Scardino said. “I just didn’t want to show I was scared, but I was.”

When the craft landed, Scardino ran through ankle-deep water onto the sand as fast as he could, dashing the 50-75 yards across the beach. He was scrawny and only 140 pounds, yet lugged an eight-pound rifle and 90 pounds of equipment on his back.

The German guns were firing from a rise above the beach. They were shrouded in thick smoke, and Scardino saw some Americans fall, including one man he trained with who got struck in the head. But Scardino made it safely to a ditch along a road that provided him temporary cover.

“I still have the smell in my nose," Scardino said. "Of death – the flesh, the blood.”

One of the first soldiers to join Scardino was a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division, who jumped in the ditch from the inland direction after parachuting behind enemy lines hours earlier. Scardino's first sergeant also joined him there, in addition to his best friend since basic training, a street-smart 18-year-old from Chicago named Donald.

They reorganized and then crossed a marshy area, where they saw more carnage. “The guys that went before us, there were Germans all over that goddamn creek, on the roads. They [the Americans] all were killed.”

Hedgerows

After that, a “mixed bag” of infantry soldiers, paratroopers, and even armed farmers advanced across flooded fields and an endless succession of six-foot high hedgerows, lines of dense shrubs and trees dividing various farmers’ properties. 

Out of the 42 men in his outfit who had come ashore with him, 14 were killed or wounded by the afternoon of June 6th, according to Scardino.

Because the hedgerows were sharp with thorns, the soldiers had to move single-file through small openings. 

"Now, if the Germans were on the other side, they would gun you down, but we used to send guys out to see if it was clear," Scardino recalled. "The scouts used to go out and say, 'That row is clear.' Okay, we moved up another hedgerow.”

For roughly 15 days, the unit spent the majority of its time in hedgerows, guarding the perimeters in shifts at night while the others slept. Scardino stuck close to his friend Donald, who grew so frustrated from German shelling that he threw away his shovel rather than use it to dig foxholes.

“He said, ‘I don’t need this. I’m not going to dig my grave,’” Scardino recalled.

The only respite from the hedgerows came when the soldiers reached occasional villages, where they would spend a day or two clearing buildings of German snipers before moving onward.

“This is what was hurting: You didn’t stop for a minute," Scardino said. "You didn’t take a deep breath and say, 'OK.' You figured any minute you're going to get killed. That was our thought. Donny used to say, 'Keep going Scar, keep going.'”

But Donald was killed 10 days after D-Day. “When I heard he got it I cried,” Scardino said. “Now I’m pissed off and then the only one that calmed me down was the first sergeant. He said, 'Yankee, you have to wipe it off. It was not your turn, it was his turn.' But I didn't believe that. I was mad.”

Around June 22 the unit reached a village that was more stubbornly defended by the Germans than all the rest. "It was like a headquarters to them or something," Scardino said. The Americans became pinned down for so long that they were holding up the supply lines behind them and running low on ammunition. They finally cleared the town by fighting house-to-house.

This part of his story Scardino will always keep to himself; he choked up immediately upon mentioning the battle and couldn't continue.

“That hurts so bad when I think about it,” he said. “How do you kill a man you never knew?"

Scardino declined to say anything more about this. “This is why I never told anybody or my kids," he added. "I keep seeing that guy, his whole face all the time.

“I’ve never confessed that as long as I’ve lived, and I lived with it,” he finally said after a long pause, before agreeing to skip to later parts of his story. 

St. Lo

Scardino's unit had two men assigned to a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) light machine gun, one to operate it and another soldier to carry the ammunition. After the BAR gunner was killed in a firefight, the ammunition man, who had been separated from his own division since D-Day, didn’t pick up the BAR.

Seeing the need for someone to give covering fire from a pile of stones where the BAR gunner had fallen, Scardino abandoned his rifle and took up the light machine gun himself. From then on, he served as the unit’s BAR gunner.

On July 3, the unit advanced on the Normandy town of St. Lo, a key objective for the Allies on their way to central France.

The Germans at St. Lo relied on a notoriously effective 88-millimeter artillery gun, a class of weapon called "eighty-eights" by the Americans who had gotten used to its distinct sounds since D-Day. "When that came, man you hit that ground fast,” Scardino said. 

“It was worse than D-Day,” he said of St. Lo. “I mean, on D-Day we were worrying about the big bunkers and all that stuff. Now you’re fighting tanks, you’re fighting artillery, the eighty-eights were coming in and they were deadly."

Scardino remembers it as a rainy day, filled with the sound of the eighty-eights. “It's always raining in France,” Scardino recalled.

He was running through the grass to get into position with his BAR when a German bullet struck his hand.

A medic bandaged him up in a farmhouse alongside other wounded Americans. But after an enemy counterattack left the farmhouse behind enemy lines, a French civilian evacuated the walking wounded to another building, where Scardino and six other Americans crowded into a hiding space in a basement filled with cognac.

From the hiding spot, Scardino could hear the distinctive sound of the German eighty-eights impacting nearby. The last thing he remembers is the house caving in from a direct hit and someone cutting away at his pants, which were then on fire.

“I thought I was gone. That’s the day I always visualize in my mind – that burning feeling on my legs and all,” he said.

Scardino doesn’t remember being conscious again until the following morning, when he woke up naked on a stretcher atop a jeep, with a blanket shielding him from the rain. Another wounded man lay on a stretcher next to him.

The next thing he remembers is waking in a hospital with his right arm and right leg covered in a cast. Shrapnel from the German eighty-eight round had embedded in both limbs and shattered bone. “I said, ‘Okay, I know I’m going home,’” Scardino recalled of his first thoughts. “But the other part, the infuriating part, was the fact that I’m a cripple.”

Home

But Scardino was wrong; he made a full recovery. Although his hopes of playing major league baseball were gone, doctors installed metal in his arm that allowed him to bend his elbow enough to become a professional bowler later in life. 

While stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland late in the war, Scardino befriended a sergeant named Fred who had a very different reason for leaving France after D-Day.

When military officials learned that two of Fred's brothers had been killed in action and a third was a prisoner of war, they ordered him to return to England for a period of rest. After his arrival, they broke the news and told him he’d never go back to the front.

Fred also had a sister named Flora, who he introduced to Scardino. The trio went to dances together, sparking a relationship that culminated in Scardino's marriage to Flora.

After he was discharged from the army in January 1946, he went back to work as a tailor with his father. But he later regretted that he didn’t stay in the army.

The Scardinos had six children and settled in Mineola, Long Island. He still doesn’t know the fate of the six Americans he hid with in St. Lo when the eighty-eight round struck.

“Everything was so fast. It was 1, 2, 3,” he recalled of that moment 70 years ago. He never kept in touch with any of his comrades.

In 2009, Scardino was walking in an airport in Italy on vacation when he saw a face he instantly recognized.

He stopped. I stopped. And I just walked over to him," Scardino said of that encounter. "I said, 'Is your name Murdott? He said, 'Yeah, are you the kid from New York? I said, 'Yeah.' I grabbed him. I thought he was dead. I thought they blew his head off at the beach. That morning when I was running up I turned my head, he was to my left. I saw the helmet fly off.

Murdott explained that a bullet had indeed struck him at Utah Beach, but his helmet somehow saved his life.

Nowadays, Scardino feels proud that he participated in D-Day. “I truthfully feel very honored to know that I was part of history,” he said.

But when a local school principal recently introduced him as a war hero to a gathering of students, Scardino felt embarrassed.

"This is their generation, that's it. This is their life. I don't know if they care or not."

Corey Adwar contributed to this report.

SEE ALSO: A young army officer copes with the brutal opening days of Iraq's insurgency

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Putin is the most powerful man in the world

This weekend marks the 71st anniversary of the Allies' D-Day landing at Normandy, France, which ultimately led to the liberation of France from Nazi control.

But what if the Allies had never launched their seaborne invasion, leaving Europe in the hands of Hitler and Nazi Germany?

Amazon Studios provides the answer with "The Man In The High Castle," a new original series that was recently greenlit by Amazon for a full season after becoming the most watched show since Amazon's original-series development program began. The show is smart, fun, and polished, and it sports a five-star user rating.

Produced by Ridley Scott, the show is based on a 1962 Philip K. Dick novel about a world in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. Of all of Dick's classics, it was the only one to win science fiction's preeminent Hugo Award. Scott, who directed another Dick adaptation in "Blade Runner," started developing in 2010 what would surprisingly be the book's first screen adaptation.

It takes place in 1962 in a conquered America that has been divided into the Greater Nazi Reich, from the Atlantic to the Rockies, and the Japanese Pacific States, on the Pacific Coast.

The opening scene shows a propaganda film about life in America, which chillingly demonstrates how Americans might come to accept Nazi overlords.

"It's a new day," the narrator says. "The sun rises in the east. Across our land men and women go to work in factories and farms providing for their families. Everyone has a job. Everyone knows the part they play keeping our country strong and safe. So today we give thanks to our brave leaders, knowing we are stronger and prouder and better."

Only the end of the film explicitly references the Nazi takeover:

"Yes, it's a new day in our proud land, but our greatest days may lie ahead. Sieg heil!"

 Here's a look at Nazi Times Square: 

Here's Japanese San Francisco:

As the propaganda film suggests, aspects of life in Nazi/Japanese America are not bad, even as the overlords brutally repress all resistance. The winners of the war — particularly the Germans, who in the show's alternate history developed the first atomic bomb — are living in a technological and economic boom as great as anything America saw in the real postwar era.

Given this rosy portrayal, it's all the more shocking when there's a reminder of how inhuman the Axis powers could be. In one scene, a volunteer for the resistance is driving through the middle of the country for the first time. He is talking with a Nazi police officer, who helped him change a flat tire, when ashes began falling like snow.

"Oh, it's the hospital," the cop says. "Tuesdays, they burn cripples, the terminally ill — drag on the state."

Amazon Studios is putting out some of the best new TV. There's "Transparent," starring Jeffrey Tambor as a father who comes out as transgender, which won the Golden Globe for best TV series, musical, or comedy. I haven't watched that one yet, but I can personally recommend the underrated "Alpha House," a political comedy by Garry Trudeau, and the fantastic new "Mozart In The Jungle," a comedy based on a book about "sex, drugs, and classical music" in New York City.

NOW WATCH: This 20,000-Calorie Burger Is The Craziest Thing We've Ever Eaten

SEE ALSO: Netflix Is Also Kicking Ass When It Comes To Original Content

DON'T MISS: Here's The Weather Prediction That Won WWII

Join the conversation about this story »

.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Elon Musk saved Tesla in just two weeks when Google was about to buy it

Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport wasn't allowed to defend her doctoral thesis in 1938 under the Nazis because she was part-Jewish. Nearly eight decades later, she became Germany's oldest recipient of a doctorate at age 102 on Tuesday.

The neonatologist, a specialist in caring for newborns, cleared the final hurdle last month by passing an oral exam. She received her doctorate in a celebratory ceremony at the University of Hamburg.

"After almost 80 years, it was possible to restore some extent of justice," Burkhard Goeke, the medical director of the university's hospital, said in his speech. "We cannot undo injustices that have been committed, but our insights into the past shape our perspective for the future."

Syllm-Rapoport stressed in her acceptance speech that she went through all the efforts of getting the degree at her advanced age not for herself, but for all the others who suffered from injustice during the Third Reich.

"For me personally, the degree didn't mean anything, but to support the great goal of coming to terms with history — I wanted to be part of that," Syllm-Rapoport told German public television station NDR.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they gradually disenfranchised Jews, expelling them from universities, schools and many professions, before eventually deporting and killing them in death camps across Europe.

When Syllm-Rapoport handed in her doctorate thesis, her supervisor at the time, Rudolf Degkwitz, wrote in a letter in 1938 that he would have accepted her work on diphtheria if it hadn't been for the Nazis' race laws which, he said, "make it impossible to allow Miss Syllm's admission for the doctorate."

Syllm-Rapoport emigrated to the United States in 1938 without a degree. After applying to several American universities, she eventually finished her degree in Philadelphia and worked as a pediatrician, before moving with her husband, a socialist like herself, to East Berlin in 1952. The mother of four was the first head of the neonatology department at Berlin's Charite hospital.

Asked about how Syllm-Rapoport did in her oral exam last month — which was on the topic of diphtheria, just like her original Ph.D. thesis — Uwe Koch-Gromus, the university's dean of the medical faculty said, "She was brilliant, and not only for her age."

"We were impressed with her intellectual alertness, and left speechless by her expertise — also with regard to modern medicine," Koch-Gromus said.

Almost 80 years after Syllm-Rapoport had to flee from the Nazis' terror, she concluded her studies with the overall grade of magna cum laude

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 70 people were injured while filming this movie with 100 untamed lions

On the heels of his Oscar-nominated performance as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in last year’s hit, “American Sniper,” Bradley Cooper looks to be returning to the war-drama genre.

Deadline reports that 22 & Green, Cooper and his "The Hangover" director Todd Phillips' production company, has teamed with Warner Bros. to adapt the book “The Ghost Army Of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived The Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, And Other Audacious Fakery.”

The book title kind of says it all.

In World War II, the US Army recruited artists to make up the secret 23rd Headquarters Special Troops with the mission to fool the Nazis in thinking the US Army was larger than it actually was.

They would become known as the “Ghost Army.”

To pull this off the unit created inflatable tanks and rubber airplanes and delivered phony radio messages to make Nazi forces think there were US forces in the area (when, in fact, they were not). 

Ghost Army members who went on to have glowing careers in the arts included painter/sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, wildlife artist Arthur B. Singer, and fashion designer Bill Blass. 

The film will also use the 2013 documentary “Ghost Army” (directed by coauthor of "The Ghost Army" book, Rick Beyer) as resource material.

There’s no word yet if Cooper will also star in the film.

See the elaborate creations made by the Ghost Army in this trailer for the doc below:

SEE ALSO: Bradley Cooper's movie "Limitless" is getting turned into a TV show — Here's the first trailer

Join the conversation about this story »

On the heels of his Oscar-nominated performance as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in last year’s hit, “American Sniper,” Bradley Cooper looks to be returning to the war-drama genre.

Deadline reports that 22 & Green, Cooper and his "The Hangover" director Todd Phillips' production company, has teamed with Warner Bros. to adapt the book “The Ghost Army Of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived The Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, And Other Audacious Fakery.”

The book title kind of says it all.

In World War II, the US Army recruited artists to make up the secret 23rd Headquarters Special Troops with the mission to fool the Nazis in thinking the US Army was larger than it actually was.

They would become known as the “Ghost Army.”

To pull this off the unit created inflatable tanks and rubber airplanes and delivered phony radio messages to make Nazi forces think there were US forces in the area (when, in fact, they were not). 

Ghost Army members who went on to have glowing careers in the arts included painter/sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, wildlife artist Arthur B. Singer, and fashion designer Bill Blass. 

The film will also use the 2013 documentary “Ghost Army” (directed by coauthor of "The Ghost Army" book, Rick Beyer) as resource material.

There’s no word yet if Cooper will also star in the film.

See the elaborate creations made by the Ghost Army in this trailer for the doc below:

SEE ALSO: Bradley Cooper's movie "Limitless" is getting turned into a TV show — Here's the first trailer

Join the conversation about this story »

Pope Francis on Sunday denounced what he called the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.

He also decried the deaths of Christians in concentration camps in Russia under the Stalin dictatorship, which followed the war.

The pope’s harsh assessments came in impromptu remarks during his visit to Turin, northern Italy, when he told young people he understands how they find it hard to trust the world.

“The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to the concentration camps, like Auschwitz, to kill the Jews, and also the Christians, and also the Roma, also the homosexuals,” Francis said, citing the death camp in Poland. “Tell me, why didn’t they bomb” those railroad routes?

Referring to concentration camps that came “a little later” in Russia, Francis wondered aloud: “How many Christians suffered, were killed” there?

Lamenting the cynicism of world players in the 1930s and 1940s, Francis said: “The great powers divided up Europe like a cake.”

He also cited what he called the “great tragedy of Armenia” in the last century. “So many died. I don’t know the figure, more than a million, certainly. But where were the great powers then? They were looking the other way,” the pope said.

In April, the pope angered Turkey when he referred to the slaughter of Armenians by Turkish Ottomans as “genocide.”

In today’s world, he told the young people: “Everything is done for money.” He criticized those advocating peace while manufacturing or selling arms.

Francis reiterated his view that conflicts in the world today are tantamount to “a Third World War in segments.”

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 scientifically proven features men find attractive in women

National Public Radio has announced the U.S. Department of Defense has finally admitted they carried out race-based tests on American troops during WWII as part of its research on the effects of mustard gas.

Exposure of soldiers to chemical, biological and radiological agents or devices during a war has always been a concern, not just in the U.S., but with other countries.

During WWI, the most notable substance used was mustard gas, and later, in Vietnam, the U.S. used Agent orange, a defoliant that has since been attributed to numerous illnesses, many of them with long-term effects.

It could be said that WWII was one war where dangerous chemicals were seldom used on the battlefield. But, it has now been revealed that 60,000 U.S. military personnel were exposed to mustard gas, and not at the hands of the enemy.

A total of 60,000 enlisted men were part of a secret government program that wasn't declassified until 1993 that tested mustard gas and other chemical agents on U.S. troops during WWII.

Veteran's Administration says Volunteer soldiers and sailors were participants

The Defense Department admits it used African-American, Puerto Rican, and Japanese-Americans in tests to determine if darker-skinned people had different reactions to mustard gas than did white-skinned people. White troops were used as controls.

On the Veteran's Administration website, it says, "that 'volunteer' soldiers and sailors were participants in Department of War experiments during the war. The experiments were for purposes of testing clothing, skin ointments and other protective apparatus to determine their efficacy in the event of enemy mustard gas attacks. More than 60,000 servicemen were affected, some seriously."

Nothing is said about testing these chemicals to see if different races were affected to different degrees. but one man, 93-year-old Rollin Edwards, told NPR that he and a dozen other men were put into a wooden chamber and the door was locked. A mixture of mustard gas and another chemical, Lewisite was piped it.

Lewisite smells like geraniums but is an extremely toxic, arsenic-containing blister agent (vesicant) that affects the lungs and causes systemic effects. It was manufactured in the U.S., Germany and Japan. In WWII, the U.S. made up 20,000 tons of this chemical, keeping it on-hand "just in case."

“They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins,” Mr Edwards told the NPR broadcaster. “It felt like you were on fire.”

Harvey Denton, 28, Mr.Edwards' grandson told the Independent, "It looks like burns on his arms, even though it happened 75 years ago."

Army Col Steve Warren, director of press operations at the Pentagon, confirmed the NPR's finding, but insisted that what happened 75 years ago is not the way the military is today. “The first thing to be very clear about is that the Department of Defence does not conduct chemical weapons testing any longer,” he said.

The secret race experiments were discovered by a Canadian researcher, Susan Smith, who in 2008 published an article in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

Smith explains in her paper that after conducting nine different projects, the researchers concluded that race matters were less significant than they had anticipated. She also points out that during WWII, Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. all did research on the effects of mustard gas, out of fear the chemical would be used by the enemy against their soldiers.

Experiments kept a secret by the participants

Almost to a man, every one of the 60,000 participants kept his mouth shut about what had gone on in the secret projects. Then, in the late 1980s, those who had been affected more severely sought compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for health problems that they believed were caused by their exposures to mustard agents or Lewisite.

But interestingly, it was discovered that poor recordkeeping of the experiments and little documentation or follow-up of the participants had been done. In other words, veterans were forced to provide proof they had been a participant and had to prove their illness was because of the testing. It took until 1991 before the VA announced guidelines for the handling of these cases. This including the loosening of normal requirements for documenting individual participation in the experiments, and the identification of seven diseases to be considered as caused by mustard agents or Lewisite.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How LeBron James spends his money

"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life," one of the world's most brutal tyrants reportedly said after touring the newly Nazi-occupied French capital.

The day after Germany signed an armistice with France, Hitler and his cronies toured Napoleon's tomb, the Paris opera house, Champs-Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur, and the Eiffel Tower on June 23, 1940.

Hitler's friend and architect Albert Speer was instructed to take note of the city's design to recreate similar yet superior German buildings.

"Wasn't Paris beautiful?" Hitler reportedly asked Speer.

"But Berlin must be far more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow."

While sightseeing, Hitler also ordered the destruction of two French World War I monuments that reminded him of Germany's bitter defeat.

The Führer's first official visit to the "City of Light" was also his last.

In all, Hitler spent three hours in Paris but spent four years occupying northern France.

SEE ALSO: This is the last known photo of Hitler

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 scientifically proven features men find attractive in women

"Keep calm and carry on" is to Brits what "I heart NY" is to New Yorkers. 

The phrase is plastered on every printable surface and remixed hundreds of ways.

Bring it up in conversation with a Brit and you'll probably be met with an eye-roll — as noted in Fraser McAlpine's new book, "Stuff Brits Like."

But McAlpine, who lives in Cornwall, says the British secretly love the phrase because of its history.

Year: 1939

The phrase originated as a slogan in the spring before World War II. Anticipating the dark days ahead, the British government designed a poster to hang in areas being targeted by German bombers. 

Around 2.5 million copies were printed, but not one of them was posted, as officials had last-minute doubts about whether the content was too patronizing or obvious. They also couldn't settle on an appropriate time to hang the posters. Save for a select few, the majority of the posters were destroyed. 

Year: 2000

Fast-forward six decades and one of the remaining posters was discovered by a bookseller who bought a box of old books (where the poster was hidden) at auction. It was put up over the cash register in the seller's bookshop, Northumberland's Barter Books. 

Pretty soon, customers were asking about where they could buy a similar poster, and the shop's owners, Stuart and Mary Manley, decided to print copies. Little did they know how fast the "Keep Calm" craze would spread.  

Why Brits actually love the phrase 

In his book, McAlpine breaks down the phrase, further explaining why the British have grown to love it.

There is something quintessential in the way the posters do not say "Don't Panic" or "We Will Prevail"... They say "Keep Calm," and what that means is, "We may be suffering something of an invasion at the moment, but that's no reason to start acting in a rash and hot-headed manner. We may be a subjugated nation — temporarily — but we are not about to start acting like savages."

And what of the "Carry On?"... As a nation, we have been trained to look past the bad behavior of our rudest guests, especially the uninvited ones, and rather than cause a scene, we shall just go about our daily business as if nothing has happened.

The slogan, in its purest form, is a symbol of nationalism. While the British may loathe its exploitation, they adore "Keep Calm" for its historical roots. 

SEE ALSO: The 9 best summer reads under 400 pages

FOLLOW US: BI Lifestyle is on Twitter

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to speak with a proper British accent

June 19, 1942, is not a familiar date to most. But members of the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment know it well. It’s the date of activation of the 1st Ranger Battalion, under the command of Lt. Col. William Darby.

Colloquially known as “Darby’s Rangers,” 1st Battalion and several subsequent Ranger battalions formed during World War II represented the genesis of the modern Ranger role of performing large-scale objective raids and direct-action missions.

The 1st Ranger Battalion was created in order to address a daunting problem faced in 1942 by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall: The American troops fighting in Europe had no combat experience. Marshall needed a force extender — a method to gain combat experience early in the war and disseminate that expertise to other units.

He looked to the British for inspiration. They had developed the legendary Commando units, designed to strike back early in the war and gather intelligence on German forces. The American equivalent would have a similar mission, but would not be a permanent formation.

As author Ross Hall relates in his comprehensive history of the Rangers, The Ranger Book, this was done to “mollify stubborn commanders when they figured they would get their soldiers back with a lot more education.” Darby was selected to head this new special unit named after a particularly elite group of soldiers from the early day of the American colonies: Rangers. On June 19, 1942, the 1st Ranger Battalion was activated. 

As Darby’s Rangers trained with Commando teachers in Scotland, separate Ranger training facilities were being established back in the United States. Aside from a few Rangers who participated in the Dieppe raid in August 1942, as detailed by James DeFelice, Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion would not face its first action until North Africa.

The Ranger involvement in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of the North African coast, provided the first indication that American military commanders did not fully understand or grasp the capabilities that Darby’s unit provided. After the Torch landings, no suitable Ranger missions presented themselves.

As Hall explains, American commanders had little clue on how to employ the new unit. “In fact, the whole concept of raiding Rangers, a quick-strike force without heavy weapons, was so new that most of the field commanders had little knowledge of how to use them properly. In many cases they were fed into the mill, and did so well they kept being sent back,” Hall writes. The beginning of this meat-grinder mentality foreshadowed eventual tragedy.

The Allied advance on Tunisia would finally give the Rangers a raid objective: Sened Station, guarded by elite elements of the Italian army. 

According to Darby’s own account — which he shared with West Point classmate William Baumer for a book eventually published in 1980 — the raid’s objective was to gather intelligence, shake up the Italian forces, and convince the Germans and Italians a much larger force was operating in the area. The hope was that the Germans troops would divert their reserve forces away from the Allies’ planned advance.

Inserted by trucks, the 500 Rangers marched 12 miles to the station and spent the day observing Italian movements until they began their night attack. Rangers advanced in a skirmish line and infiltrated within 200 yards of enemy positions until they were compromised. They then swept through the camp while mortar teams blasted the rear of the Italian elements, killing at least 75 while only suffering one killed and 20 wounded, according to Hall. The Sened Station raid was a textbook demonstration of Ranger capabilities.

After Sened, the Rangers participated in a few more operations as rearguards or supporting elements, then moved back to train in Algeria, with the newly formed 3rd and 4th Ranger Battalions (the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions were being stood up separately in training camps back in the United States). These new battalions, as well as the original, would help lead the way in the Sicily landings. First, 3rd and 4th Battalions all operated essentially as elite infantry in the Sicily campaign.

According to Hall, many commanders simply continue to send to Rangers into regular infantry roles because they were generally successful: “The ability for Rangers to fight well under any circumstances made it easy for commanders to use them at the front, especially since seasoned troops were getting hard to come by. The Rangers were too good to be left idle.”

The Ranger battalions operated under conventional infantry commands, continuing the trend of Rangers being used contrary to their original purpose as an independent raid force. This would have tragic consequences as Darby’s Rangers moved on to Italy.

In 1944, after the Anzio landings on the Italian coast, the 1st and 3rd battalions, with support from the 4th, were tasked with taking the town of Cisterna, a few miles from Allied lines. The town was supposed to be only moderately defended. That intelligence was wrong; Cisterna was actually an assembly area for the German line, with dug-in defenders including elements of the vaunted Hermann Göring division.

Hall describes the German force in Cisterna as “men with plenty of experience and plenty of ammunition.” The 1st and 3rd tried to fight through the city, but they had little chance against what was later estimated to a 12,000-strong enemy force. The 4th attempted a rescue, but could not break through.

Of the 767 Rangers in the 1st and 3rd battalions, only six came back; the rest were killed or captured. Most of the original Darby’s Rangers were finished.

The Cisterna debacle is emblematic of the problems faced by the Rangers and other special operations units during the war. There was no command to delineate these units to missions and objective that took advantage of their capabilities.

The conventional headquarters that oversaw them did not understood the role of special operations, and simply treated them as an infantry unit with a higher level of training. The disaster at Cisterna was simply the culmination of this pattern of misuse, reinforced by the Rangers’ previous successes in battle.

The surviving 4th Ranger Battalion was attached to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment along the stalled front in Italy, where they held the line against German probing attacks. As Hall notes, the Rangers blunted these attacks with minimal losses: “Supposed to be ‘in reserve’ and ‘on the line’ simultaneously, the Rangers held for 52 days against heavy attacks with a loss of just eight men. During the same time, the Paratroopers were often losing a like amount— per day.”

While Darby’s Rangers were fighting in the Mediterranean, three more Ranger battalions were being formed and training back in the United States. The 2nd and 5th Ranger battalions were tasked with supporting the Normandy landings; mixed elements of the 2nd and 5th landed at Omaha beach (where the famous Ranger motto, “Rangers Lead the Way,” was born), while the rest of the 2nd landed at the sheer cliffs of nearby Pointe du Hoc.

The 2nd’s task was to destroy several 155mm coastal guns that threatened the landings at Omaha on D-Day. The Pointe mission was a clear Ranger mission; the forbidding cliff face required their specialized training in order to scale the Pointe and destroy the guns.

Upon the landing, the Rangers of 2nd Battalion discovered that the guns were gone, wooden dummies in their place. Despite this setback, they were able to locate the guns nearby and destroy them. Pointe du Hoc remains the one of most iconic European theater battles of the war, immortalized in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and videogames like “Call of Duty.”

Other Ranger units would be stood up to fight in the Pacific; the 6th Ranger Battalion conducted the famous POW rescue at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. But it was Darby’s Rangers, the 1st Ranger Battalion, who created the model for an independent, direct-action unit.

While the 75th Ranger Regiment would not become a unit until 1986, there were Ranger-style units in both Korea and Vietnam, and in 1974, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Ranger battalions were reconstituted.

The mission of the modern Ranger has evolved in scope and technology, but the spirit is the same: When there’s a objective raid to be done, Rangers lead the way.

SEE ALSO: The Kremlin wants Texas to secede from the US

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: An Abandoned Red Army Base In Hungary May Have Once Stockpiled Nukes

Troops from Russia and Mongolia will march together with Chinese forces in a parade in Beijing in September to commemorate the end of World War Two, the government and state media said on Thursday, confirming the first two foreign participants.

China has been coy about which countries it plans to invite to the parade, but says it will also likely invite representatives from the Western Allies who fought with China during the war.

President Xi Jinping could be left standing on the stage with few top Western officials, however, diplomats have told Reuters, due to Western governments concerns over a range of issues, including the expected presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Xi attended a parade in Moscow in May to mark 70 years since the end of the war in Europe. Western leaders boycotted the Moscow parade over Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis.

Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said that a "certain number" of country's militaries had already responded to the invitation for the Beijing event, which will be held around Tiananmen Square.

"Russia and others have already clearly said that they will send representatives to participate and watch the parade," Yang told a regular monthly news briefing, without providing details.

The Global Times, published by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, said that Mongolia, sandwiched between China and Russia, will also send a 75-strong military delegation to march.

The Beijing parade will be Xi's first since he took over as Communist Party leader and military chief in late 2012 and as state president in early 2013.

Sino-Japan relations have long been affected by what China sees as Japan's failure to atone for its occupation of parts of the country before and during the war, and Beijing rarely misses an opportunity to remind its people and the world of this.

In April, U.S. President Barack Obama's top Asia adviser, Evan Medeiros, said that he had questions about whether a large military parade would really send a signal of reconciliation or promote healing, drawing a rebuke from China.

This week, a senior Chinese official complained about what he said was a lack of appreciation in the West about China's sacrifices and contributions during the war.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 scientifically proven features men find attractive in women

Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling novel, All The Light We Cannot See, was the subject of Business Insider's book club this June. It follows a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

The brief synopsis of the book sounds compelling, and after reading it we can vouch the literary accolades it has received are not for naught. 

In search of that next great read? A few on-staff bibliophiles are sharing their thoughts on Doerr's page-turner here in case this is it; we encourage anyone who's also read it to share theirs in the comment section. 

"For me, the plot was interesting but it's the characters who will stay with me. The two main characters lead separate but equally fascinating lives for most of the novel, and it was refreshing to find myself rooting for both of them to survive the horrors of World War II even thought they're on opposite sides of the conflict. The supporting characters are also so well developed that I was equally concerned for their fates." 
— Lyndsay Hemphill, Assistant Managing Editor

"Absolutely incredible. Such an amazing humanization of the different characters living through World War II. The writing was stunningly poetic and compassionate and breathing with life — I really loved the short chapters, they made for great commuting read." 
— Kim Renfro, Operations Coordinator/Digital Culture Reporter

"Doerr’s writing style drew me in from the beginning. He gives us these brief vignettes into the character’s lives and alternates them in a way that also makes the timeline seem so natural. Even though we have a cast of characters so wholly different from each other, he drew such beautiful, intricate connections between them all, which made their individual development more deeply felt."
— Nancee Halpin, Research Associate, BI Intelligence

"Doerr finds a way to seamlessly integrate historical events, like the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, into a story full of depth and uncharacteristic beauty. You can't help but feel invested in the fates of its two protagonists, Marie-Laure and Werner, and its supporting characters, Uncle Etienne, Jutta, and Madame Manec, and Frederick. After having just finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, I picked this book up over Memorial Day weekend and didn't put it down."
­— Ellen Hoffman, Commerce Editor

"I loved it. Complex characters, beautiful prose, and a little magic to keep you guessing — I've been recommending it to everyone I know."
— Jenna Goudreau, Deputy Editor

'All The Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr, $13.87, available at Amazon.

SEE ALSO: You can pre-order Amazon's all-new Kindle Paperwhite now

READ THIS: 20 under $20: The best affordable buys to shop right now

Join the conversation about this story »

On December 3, 1938, a British stockbroker made the impromptu decision to cancel his skiing vacation and join his friend, Martin Blake, in Prague, who had desperately asked for his help. The decision changed his life and saved the lives of 669 people in the process.

Nicholas Winton, 106, died earlier on Wednesday on the anniversary of the departure of a train in 1939 carrying 241 children, the largest number of children he saved.

His story is nothing short of incredible.

Winton, who is of German Jewish ancestry, had heard of the violence against Jewish communities in Germany and Austria, especially the infamous Kristellnacht. After hearing about the Kinderstransport, an effort of British Jewish agencies to bring 10,000 Jewish children to Great Britain, Winton knew he had to arrange a similar operation in Czechoslovakia.

Winton explained how the operation got started in "The Power Of Good: Nicholas Winton," a documentary on his efforts:

"I found out that the children of refugees and other groups of people who were enemies of Hitler weren't being looked after. I decided to try to get permits to Britain for them. I found out that the conditions which were laid down for bringing in a child were chiefly that you had a family that was willing and able to look after the child, and £50, which was quite a large sum of money in those days, that was to be deposited at the Home Office. The situation was heartbreaking. Many of the refugees hadn't the price of a meal. Some of the mothers tried desperately to get money to buy food for themselves and their children. The parents desperately wanted at least to get their children to safety when they couldn't manage to get visas for the whole family. I began to realize what suffering there is when armies start to march."

Winton set up his rescue operation at his hotel in Prague, taking applications from parents and registering the children. The response was huge, with thousands of parents lining up.

Surprisingly, Winton received little resistance from the Nazis on his effort to move the children out of the country. 

"We were getting rid of those people Hitler wanted to get rid of," Winton told ABC News in 2008. "I mean, you even had the Gestapo at Wilson Station helping the children onto the trains."

After a few weeks, Winton left Trevor Chadwick in charge of the Prague operation and returned to London to negotiate where the children would go. Only Great Britain and Sweden agreed to take the children.

To get foster families willing to pay the £50 fee for each child, Winton advertised in newspapers, churches, and synagogues with pictures of the children. The effort worked. 

The last train of children left Prague on August 22, 1939. By the time it was all said and done, he had saved 669 children.

His greatest regret is that he could not save more. There was to be another train of children on September 1, but Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland that day. All borders were closed. The children were never heard from again.

Winton never told anyone of his mission, not even his wife, Grete. Fifty years later, in 1988, his wife found a scrapbook with photos, documents, and the list of children. She brought it to a Holocaust historian, who arranged for Winton’s story to appear on the BBC’s "That’s Life." Unbeknownst to him, the audience at the taping was filled with his “children.”

You can see his emotional reaction here:

During an interview in 2008, Winton told a Slovakian teenager his philosophy on life: “You need to be prepared always to help other people if there is an opportunity to do so.”

“Winton’s children,” as they are called, have gone on to extraordinary lives. Here are just a few:

• Karel Reisz, film director of "The French Lieutenant's Woman,""Isadora," and "Sweet Dreams"
• Joe Schlesinger, journalist and news correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Company
• Lord Alfred Dubs, who was a minister in the cabinet of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair
• Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, a patron of the arts whose father, Rudolf Fleischmann, saved Thomas Mann from the Nazis
• Dagmar Símová, a cousin of the former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
• Tom Schrecker, a Reader's Digest manager
• Hugo Marom, a famous aviation consultant and a founder of the Israeli Air Force
• Vera Gissing, the author of Pearls of Childhood and coauthor of Nicholas Winton And The Rescued Generation

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Putin is the most powerful man in the world

BEIJING (Reuters) - China plans to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Asia, and its fight against Japan, with a stream of movies, concerts, performances and exhibitions, officials said on Monday, in an effort to strengthen "nationalism and culture".

The centerpiece of the events is a military parade through central Beijing in September, although few top Western officials are likely to attend, for fear of sending the wrong signal in a region fraught with territorial disputes and bitter war memories.

China-Japan relations have long been affected by what China sees as Japan's failure to atone for its occupation of parts of the country before and during the war. Beijing rarely misses a chance to remind the world of its suffering at the hands of Japan.

Over the next three months, the Chinese government will promote 20 documentaries, 12 television dramas and three animated programs. Items already presented include more than 180 children's shows, dramas and musicals.

"By highlighting the spirit of patriotism, uprightness and heroism in their creations, artists can help the public to strengthen their values on history, nationalism and culture, (and) therefore increase their self-confidence and dignity as Chinese," Vice Minister of Culture Dong Wei said in written remarks before a news briefing.

At least five new films have finished shooting and will be screened at major cinemas beginning in early September, Tian Jin, vice minister at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, told reporters.

Dong, Tian, and several other officials, including those from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the State Archives Administration, declined to answer a Reuters question on concerns whether the works would stoke regional tension.

Many of the works will highlight the efforts of China's ruling Communist Party in the war against Japan.

An exhibition organized by the PLA will focus on the Party's "critical role" in the war and a concert titled "The Great Wall Built by Flesh and Blood", will show the spirit of China's armed forces "under the leadership of the Communist Party", Li Zhensheng, deputy publicity chief of the PLA's General Political Department, said in a statement.

President Ma Ying-jeou of self-ruled Taiwan said on Saturday it was Nationalist Chinese forces which won the war against Japan, challenging Beijing's official line, which focuses on the heroics of the Communist army.

After the war, Chinese Communists and Nationalists resumed a civil war that resulted in Nationalist forces withdrawing to Taiwan in 1949, though China still claims the island as its own.

(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Take a tour of the $367 million jet that will soon be called Air Force One

As German leaders continue to pressure Greece over its debt, French economist Thomas Piketty says Germany "has no standing to lecture other nations" when it comes to repaying creditors.

In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit (translated by Gavin Schalliol on Medium), Piketty chided Germany for what he called 
"their shocking ignorance of history."

Piketty said that while Germany never repaid its massive debts after both world wars, it has continuously demanded that other nations, especially Greece, pay theirs.

After Hitler’s defeat in 1945, Germany's debt was more than double the country's GDP. After ransacking their way through Europe and causing the deadliest war in the history of mankind, Germany had to pay billions to the rest of the world, on top of their outstanding reparations from World War I.

However, as Piketty — who last year rose to prominence with the publishing of his book on inequality "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"— pointed out, a great amount of German debt was forgiven over the years.

This includes the cancellation of 60% of the country’s foreign debt at the London Debt Agreement of 1953.

Today, however, Germany is certainly not going as easy on Greece.

"When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke!" Piketty said.

More from Piketty:

Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt… However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

Greece tried raising this issue in April, when it's leaders unsuccessfully demanded Germany pay them €278.8 billion ($303 billion) for Nazi war crimes.

Piketty believes that Greece should receive the same package that Germany got: inflation, a tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

He says that current measures being recommended to Greece mimic the reparations and "strict budgetary discipline" imposed on the British Empire in the 19th century after starting wars with France.

"For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education," Piketty said.

When Die Zeit reporter Georg Blume explained that Germany’s reparations were eased after World War II because the enormous debt from the previous war helped Hitler rise to power, Piketty strongly disagreed, saying:

This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead.

Piketty called for a conference to address all of Europe’s debt, like after World War II. He believes that legislators should be given a more substantial role in their countries’ budgetary processes.

"To undermine European democracy, which is what Germany is doing today by insisting that states remain in penury under mechanisms that Berlin itself is muscling through, is a grievous mistake," he said.

Read the full interview with Piketty over at Medium »

SEE ALSO: Greek banks are closed until Thursday

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 mind-blowing facts about Greece's economy

Though his service in the military preceded the formation of the Navy SEALs by nearly twenty years, Navy Lt. j.g. Jack Taylor is thought to be the first U.S. commando to operate in the sea, air, and land.

His exploits in World War II included boat operations off the coast of Greece, land operations in Central Albania, and a parachute drop into Austria. He also experienced life in the Mauthausen, Austria extermination camp and was a victim of war crimes there.

An orthodontist becomes a commando

Taylor was an orthodontist in Hollywood, Calif. when the U.S. joined World War II. He joined the Navy, originally expecting to teach boat handling skills to U.S. and Allied service members. But he certified on the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit — a SCUBA device adopted by the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 — and was ordered to serve in the OSS.

He was then assigned to the first Underwater Swimmer Group, but was redirected to become the Chief of the Office of Strategic Service Maritime Unit.

Service in the Middle East

In the Maritime Unit, Taylor personally commanded fourteen missions into the enemy-occupied Greek and Balkan coasts. He and his team delivered spies, weapons, explosives, and other supplies to friendly forces from Sep. 1943 to March, 1944.

For three months during this period, he commanded a team on land in Central Albania, reporting important information like enemy troop movements and the locations of enemy fortifications, supply dumps, and artillery positions. The team was nearly caught by enemy search parties at least three times, but Taylor and his men slipped the net each time. He was nominated for an Army Distinguished Service Cross by Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan for this service, but received the Navy Cross instead.

Parachuting into Austria

As Allied forces made their way through Europe in 1944, they were assisted by partisan groups in countries occupied by German forces. Allied planners realized they had no contact with partisan groups in Austria, and Taylor was chosen to lead a four-man team into Austria to find allies and collect intelligence ahead of the advance north from Italy.

Taylor parachuted into Austria with three Austrian corporals liberated from a POW camp. It was on this troubled jump that Taylor satisfied the “air” requirement of a sea, air, land commando and became the first U.S. service member to conduct commando missions in all three domains.

Unfortunately, the “Dupont Mission” ran into trouble early when the pilots were unable to drop the team’s radios and other equipment. Taylor was injured while the team retrieved what equipment did make it to the ground and one of the Austrians became very ill in the first days.

Despite the setbacks, the team began collecting intelligence and seeking out Austrians friendly to the Allied cause. They photographed German defensive measures, ascertained the loyalties of individual cities and groups, and formed a network of supporters that could be counted on to aid the Allies. Since they had no radio with which to send the intelligence out, the team had to organize a plan to escape past German lines to American forces in Italy.

Capture and internment at an execution camp

The night before their attempt to escape to Italy, Taylor and the rest of the team were captured and sent to a Vienna prison on Dec. 1, 1944. There, the jailers attempted to make Taylor confess to being a civilian though he was captured while wearing his officer’s insignia. After four months of austere conditions and mistreatment, Taylor was transferred with other prisoners to Mauthausen.

Taylor was warned by another prisoner with experience at Mauthausen and other camps that Mauthausen was one of the worst. The prisoners arrived at the camp by ferry on April 1, 1945. Though it was a violation of the Geneva Convention and his rights as a prisoner of war, Taylor was dressed and treated as a political prisoner. He was also beaten and witnessed the executions of fellow prisoners.

Scheduled execution and eventual liberation

Taylor was twice scheduled for execution. The first time, he was rescued when a friendly worker in the camp’s political office saw his papers in a stack of prisoners to be executed. The worker removed Taylor’s papers and burned them.

The Nazi guards eventually realized Taylor was supposed to have been executed and again ordered his death. Only a few days before the sentence was to be carried out, the 11th Armored Division liberated the camp. A few hours after the camp was liberated, an American film crew documenting the camps arrived at Mauthausen and recorded Taylor’s description of life in the camp.

Taylor would go on to testify at the Nuremberg Trials and other court proceedings against Nazi perpetrators of war crimes. His testimony is credited as being the most damning for the camp personnel at Mauthausen, leading to the convictions of all 61 defendants.

Taylor’s full report on the Dupont Mission, his capture, and his time in captivity can be found in an archive maintained by Pica Community College.

SEE ALSO: The Philippine Navy has been finding strange Chinese buoys in their part of the South China Sea

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 11 game-changing military planes from the last 15 years