World War II: People

Allies

Britain's Home Secretary following the outbreak of the Second World War (moved from Lord Privy Seal on 4 September 1939) – name remembered through a pre–fabricated domestic air raid shelter		John Anderson
Commander–in–Chief of the British Army's Middle East Command in July 1942, when it halted the advance of Rommel's Afrika Corps in the First Battle of El Alamein (having succeeded Sir Archibald Wavell twelve months earlier)		General (later Field Marshal) Claude Auchinleck
RAF flying ace: lost both legs following a flying accident in 1931 and was retired (against his will) on medical grounds; returned to the RAF on the outbreak of WWII (aged 29), scoring 22 aerial victories (plus 11 shared and probables); baled out over German–occupied France in 1941, and was captured – ending up in Colditz; subject of the 1954 biography Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill (filmed in 1956 starring Kenneth More)		Douglas Bader
British civil servant who designed a type of portable, pre–fabricated truss bridge for military use		Donald Bailey
Made Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940		Lord Beaverbrook
Minister of Labour in Britain's coalition government, 1940–5		Ernest Bevin
Commander of I Airborne Corps, and deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army during the Arnhem landings, September 1944: said (during planning of the operation) "I think we might be going a bridge too far." Also an Olympic bobsleigh competitor in 1928, and married to Daphne du Maurier; played in the film by Dirk Bogarde		Frederick Browning
Double agent – falsely believed by the Nazis to be their top spy in Britain: known to the British as Agent Zigzag and to the Germans as Fritz; died in 1997, aged 83, but has been the subject of various books, films and television documentaries		Eddie Chapman
One of the RAF's most highly decorated pilots of World War II (VC, OM, DSO & two bars, DFC): was one of two British observers of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki in September 1945; after the war he set up a hospice for disabled servicemen, which grew into a national charity whose mission is to help disabled individuals to live independent lives; created a life peer in 1991; died in 1992, aged 74, of motor neurone disease		Leonard Cheshire
Leader of Chinese forces against the Japanese in World War II		Chiang Kai–Shek
Leader of the government in exile known as Free France, during the German occupation of France, from London (1940–4); made a broadcast on BBC Radio in 1940, which became known as The Appeal of 18 June		Charles de Gaulle
Leader of the first US air raid on Tokyo (18 April 1942)		Lt–Col James Dolittle
Commander–in–Chief of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain		ACM Lord Dowding
Governor of the Bahamas, 1940–5		Duke of Windsor
Supreme Commander, allied forces – invasion of North Africa (1942) and Europe (1944 – the Normandy Landings, a.k.a. D–Day)		Dwight D. Eisenhower
British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of World War II		Lord Halifax
Commander–in Chief of RAF Bomber Command, 1942–5: commonly known in the press as 'Bomber', and reportedly in the RAF as 'Butcher'		Sir Arthur Harris
Name shared by the US ambassador to the UK, 1938–40 (he resigned after being perceived as defeatist during the Battle of Britain) and his eldest son, who was killed in action in August 1944 when the bomb on his plane exploded prematurely, over Suffolk; they were respectively the father and brother of a future US president		Joseph Kennedy
US five–star general, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, prominent in the Pacific theatre: took the Japanese surrender on board USS Missouri, 2 September 1945		Douglas MacArthur
Leader of Finland's army throughout the war – created Marshal of Finland 1942		Carl G. E. Mannerheim
Commander of the Yugoslavian Chetniks (guerrilla movement, which opposed communism and eventually collaborated with Axis forces against the Allies)		Colonel Draza Mihailovic
Soviet foreign minister 1939–49, and effectively Stalin's deputy		Vyacheslav Molotov
Commander of the British Eighth Army in North Africa, 1942–3 (including El Alamein), and in the subsequent Allied invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland; commander of all Allied ground forces during D–Day; principal field commander for the failed airborne attempt to bridge the Rhine at Arnhem (September 1944); took the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath in Northern Germany, on 4 May 1945		Bernard Montgomery
Appointed Supreme Allied Commander South–East Asia, 1943		Mountbatten
Commander in Chief of Allied forces in the Pacific, including Midway; signed the Japanese surrender documents in 1945		Chester Nimitz
Director of the Los Alamos laboratory that built the first atom bomb, as part of the Manhattan Project (1942–6); often (erroneously) described as the leader of the project		J. Robert Oppenheimer
Commander of the 'forgotten' 14th Army in Burma, 1943–5		General William J. Slim
Anglo–French spy, captured and executed by Germans while serving in occupied France; played by Virginia McMenna in the 1958 biopic Carve Her Name with Pride (based on the book of the same title by R. J. Minney); posthumously became the second woman to be awarded the George Cross		Violette Szabo
Leader of the Communist–backed Partisan troops in Yugoslavia – opposed the Axis forces more rigorously than Mihailovic's Chetniks		Josip Broz Tito
Commanding Officer of the British Army's 1st Airborne Division (which fought with great distinction, although suffering very severe casualties) at Arnhem		Maj–Gen 'Roy' Urquhart
Swedish diplomat, rescued over 100,000 Jews in Nazi–occupied Hungary; in 1981, became the second person (after Winston Churchill) to be granted honorary US citizenship		Raoul Wallenberg
Creator and leader of the Gideon Force and the Chindits		Brigadier Orde Wingate
Soviet Chief of Staff: liberated the Soviet Union from Nazi occupation, and led the offensive that eventually led to the fall of Berlin		Georgy Zhukov

William Joyce

Axis

Private secretary (deputy) to Hitler: believed to have escaped from the fall of Berlin 1945, sentenced to death in absence at Nuremberg, but a skeleton dug up in Berlin in 1972 was found (from dental records) to be his. Now believed to have committed suicide, and may already have been dead when sentenced		Martin Bormann
Hitler's long–term companion – married him less than 40 hours before their double suicide on 30 April 1945		Eva Braun
Head of the German military intelligence service (the Abwehr), 1935–44: dismissed on the insistence of Himmler, on suspicion of plotting against Hitler and his regime; executed in April 1945		Wilhelm Canaris
German admiral, commander of the U–boat fleet during the Battle of the Atlantic. Served as President of Germany for 20 days following Hitler's suicide; government dissolved by Allied powers 23 May 1945. Controversially imprisoned for war crimes 1945–56; died 1980 aged 89		Karl Dönitz (Doenitz)
Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, 1933–45. Committed suicide in Berlin along with his wife, one day after Hitler; his wife had murdered their six children the previous evening. Believed to be the model for Squealer in Orwell's Animal Farm		Joseph Goebbels
Commander of the Luftwaffe – given the unique title Reichsmarshall, 1940. A former member of the Red Baron's flying circus. One of 12 sentenced to death at Nuremberg, but committed suicide hours before he was scheduled to be hung (October 1946)		Herman Göring (Goering)
Deputy Führer under Hitler from 1933 until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the UK; the last prisoner of the state to be held in the Tower of London (1941); also the last prisoner in Spandau (he hanged himself there in 1987, after which it was demolished)		Rudolf Hess
Nazi governor of Moravia and Bohemia from 1940; Director of the Reich Main Security Office from 1939, and as such head of the Gestapo, also the Criminal Police (Kripo) and the Security Service (SD); nicknamed 'the Hangman', or 'the Butcher of Prague'; assassinated in 1942 by a bomb thrown at his car in a suburb of Prague		Reinhard Heydrich
Reichsführer of the SS 1929–45; Chief of German Police, 1936–45 (as such he had control of the Gestapo, but see Heydrich); committed suicide after being captured by British troops in Bremen, May 1945		Heinrich Himmler
Described by Churchill as "that bloodthirsty guttersnipe"		Hitler
The last person to be executed in the Tower of London (German spy, 15 August 1941)		Josef Jakobs
Captured and executed by the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade (Communist Italian partisans) at Dongo, near Lake Como, April 1945, while attempting to escape to Switzerland. He is believed to have been carrying a considerable amount of gold and currency, including four or five crowns looted from Ethiopia, none of which has ever been seen since		Benito Mussolini
Led the German attack on Stalingrad, 1942; surrendered to Soviet forces 31 Jan 1943; Hitler expected him to commit suicide, but he became a prisoner of war and a vocal critic of the Nazi regime; released 1953		Friedrich von Paulus
Leader of the German Afrika Korps; known as the Desert Fox; commanded the German forces opposing the D–Day landings; suspected of involvement in a plot against Hitler, he took his own life in October 1944 rather than face trial		Erwin Rommel
The Butcher of Riga: commander of the Riga ghetto, Jan–Oct 1943 – exposed by Frederick Forsyth's 1972 novel The Odessa File (particularly the 1974 film version)		Eduard Roschmann
Nazi party member who is nevertheless credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in Krakow (in occupied Poland)		Oskar Schindler
Hitler's Armaments Minister, 1942–5: an architect by profession, he acted as Hitler's (and the Nazi Party's) architect from 1932, and was one of Hitler's "inner circle"		Albert Speer
Russian Marshal who defeated Finland, 1939–40		Timoshenko
Japanese prime minister 1941–5; hanged as a war criminal 1948		Hideki Tojo
German designer of the V1 and V2 rockets; worked for NASA after WWII, designed Saturn rockets		Werner von Braun
Hitler's Foreign Minister, 1938–45; hanged for war crimes after Nuremberg		Joachim von Ribbentrop
Leader of the '20 July Plot' – a 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler		Col. Claus von Stauffenberg
Commander of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor		Admiral Yamamoto

Other

German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti–Nazi dissident: hanged by the Nazis on 9 April 1945, along with Canaris and others, after being found guilty of involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler		Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Hero of World War I, appointed Prime Minister of France in June 1940, led the collaborationist (Vichy) government until the liberation of France in 1944; tried and convicted for treason in July–August 1945; his original death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment due to his age and World War I service; died in 1951, aged 95		Philippe Pétain
Norwegian Fascist leader who declared a coup d'etat following the Nazi invasion in April 1940 (his government lasted only five days, after which the German Josef Terboven was made Reichskommisar; Quisling was appointed Minister President in 1942); convicted of high treason and executed by firing squad, October 1945		Vidkun Quisling

© Haydn Thompson 2017–24