This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1305 William Wallace, who led Scottish resistance to England, is captured by the English near Glasgow and transported to London for trial and execution.

1864 US Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay won by the Union led by Rear Admiral Farragut with the cry "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

[Jimbuna]

1942 Canadian destroyer HMCS Assiniboine sinks U-210.

1945 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay"

1991 Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.

[Jimbuna]

1940 Churchill recognizes De Gaulle's French government in exile.

1942 First American offensive in Pacific in WW2, Guadalcanal, Solomon Island.

1944 IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).

[Jimbuna]

1815 Napoleon Bonaparte sets sail for exile on St Helena on board British ship the Northumberland.

1898 Rudolf Diesel of Germany patents the diesel internal combustion engine.

1914 German U-15 was sunk by the British cruiser, HMS Birmingham.

1915 David Beatty is confirmed in the rank of vice-admiral.

1945 US drops 2nd atomic bomb "Fat Man" on Japan destroys part of Nagasaki.

1974 Richard Nixon resigns as US President and VP Gerald Ford swears the oath of office to take his place as the 38th US President.

[Mr Quatro]

During the final stage of World War II, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The United States had dropped the bombs with the consent of the United Kingdom ... The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.

[Jimbuna]

1942 General Bernard Montgomery appointed commander British 8th Army in North Africa.

1943 Dutch submarine attacks Hertenbeest Island, NW Bali.

1943 Hitler watches lynching of allied pilots.

1944 Battle for Guam ends, US troops recapture Guam from the Japanese.

1945 Japan announces willingness to surrender to Allies provided status of Emperor Hirohito remained unchanged.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1943 Hitler watches lynching of allied pilots.

The German and Hungarian governments carried on an extensive domestic propaganda campaign regarding Terrorfliegers and encouraged the populace to vent their anger against these down airmen. The Allied goverments did not do the same. In Hungarian propaganda, for example, the American airmen were protrayed as "Chicago gangsters" whom the Americans had released from jail to conduct these missions, and that the gangsters were paid $50,000 per flight One American POW who was shot down over Hungary and who was injured and could not flee told me that the first Hungarian who came upon him was a Hungarian girl who went through the pockets of his flight jacket looking for the $50,000. Now, propaganda such as this dramatically increases the anger of population against airmen bombing their cities, and in a sense, legitimizes the harming of the airmen as they are in the mind of the population only "gangsters" anyway.

Widespread, understandable,...and most distressing; Just to be perfectly fair and 'aboveboard' however (attn Catfish) ....Never mess with enraged English Lady Blitz firefighters:

Gladys Edwards, from South London, is 83 now, but was an eight-year-old girl when she witnessed an extraordinary event two weeks after the outbreak of the Blitz.
'A great shout went up from outside the flats where I was living in Westminster. A Luftwaffe pilot had been shot down in nearby Victoria and had baled out in his parachute, landing in Kennington.
'That pilot was pursued by a huge crowd of angry women wielding shovels, brushes, sticks and whatever weapons they could grab. They were hellbent on his annihilation. One woman reached him and hit him with her coal shovel with an angry cry of “That's for my boy at Dunkirk.”
'He tried to run but his harness was too much for him. Suddenly, an Army lorry drew up and half a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets jumped out and forced a way through the crowd. They rescued the airman and the last I saw of him was when, looking battered, he climbed into the back of the lorry.
'You have to understand how much we hated them. The Germans started it, but we sure as hell finished it.

My Grandmother lived in the idyllic little village of Ringwood, for most of her life. In 1940; the villagers took in a number of women and children, who had been bombed out, during the Luftwaffe raids on Southampton. A city situated on the Southern coast, some 20 miles away.
Some of these women had lost loved ones, some had lost friends and all of them had lost their homes.
Within days of their arrival; A parachute was seen decending into a field close to the village. Why a German plane, tasked with bombing Southampton, would be so far off course and so far inland and why this airman had to bail out over Ringwood, my Grandmother couldn´t say. What she did say however, was that these women grabbed kitchen knives and anything else they could lay their hands on, and then ran straight over to the field and hacked the poor sod to death.
The incident (according to my Grandmother) was hushed up by the authorities and nobody was prosecuted, but the story didn´t end there. Two of the women later commited suicide and several of the others ended up in mental institutions.
A quick search on the net showed plenty of Ju 88s, He -111s, Bf 110s and others German aircrafts being shot down all over Hampshire in 1940. And I suppose there are instances of crippled planes that kept on flying for some distance, before finally crashing, even after the crew had bailed out. But the fact is; the only plane that crashed anywhere near Ringwood in 1940 was N2703, a Hurricane 1, belonging to 145sq, which crashed NW of the Village due to engine failure on the 12th of july 1940. And yes; Several of the sqaudrons pilots were indeed Polish.
However any further inference based on these facts alone, would be pure speculation on my part. That said, a man, where ever he came from, was hacked to death in Ringwood, 1940.
So in responce to your question; Yes, British women at the very least, were quite willing to exact revenge on an enemy that bombed them from above.

On 20 May 1940 a Messerschmitt Bf110 of 9 Staffel Zerstorergeschwader 26 was shot down by French fighters near Luchy, France. Its pilot, Uffz Wilhelm Ross (born 27 Jan 1917 at Duisburg) and gunner both baled out, the gunner landed injured and both were captured by French soldiers and civilians. The Pilot was pushed around a little and then shot in the head and killed.

On 26 Aug 1940 a Heinkel He111 of 4 Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 55 based at Chartres in France was shot down by RAF fighters and was crash landed by its wounded pilot Leutnant Albert Metzger on the beach at East Wittering in Sussex. Metzger couldnt get out of the bomber due to wounds but his crew Uffz. Rudolf Schandner (Observer), Fw. Julius Urhahn (Flight Mechanic), Uffz. Rudi Paas (Radio Operator) and Flgr. Rudolf Fessel (Gunner) climbed out to surrender to A Company, 2nd Battalion, Duke of Cornwalls Light Infantry. They were all shot dead on the beach.

On 15 Sep 40 a Dornier Do17Z of 1 Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 76 was shot down over London, it crashed on Victoria Station after some of the crew baled out. Oberleutnant Robert Zehbe (born 9 Dec 1913 Kiel) landed by parachute in Kennington, London. He was captured and beaten to death by a mob of civilians.

These incidents were by no means unique. The most notorious case in my opinion remains the Rüsselsheim massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCsselsheim_massacre The bitter irony is the aircraft was named 'Wham!, Bam!, Thankyou Ma'm'...

While being marched through town, two women, Margarete Witzler and Käthe Reinhardt, shouted out, "There are the terror flyers. Tear them to pieces! Beat them to death! They have destroyed our houses!" (they received 30 years imprisonment ) One of the crew-members replied back in German, "It wasn't us! We didn't bomb Rüsselsheim!" Nevertheless, one woman threw a brick at the crew and that precipitated a riot during which the townspeople attacked the prisoners with rocks, hammers, sticks and shovels...

http://b-29s-over-korea.com/Russelsheim/Russelsheim02.html The citizens of Russlesheim have since erected a memorial to the six murdered airmen:

[Jimbuna]

1942 British aircraft carrier HMS Eagle torpedoed & sinks.

1944 Klaus Barbie, Gestapo head of Lyon France leaves for Auschwitz.

1945 Allies refuse Japan's surrender offer to retain Emperor Hirohito.

[Jimbuna]

1959 First ship firing of a Polaris missile, Observation Island

1960 USAF Major Robert M White takes X-15 to an altitude of 41,600 m.

1972 Last American combat ground troops leave Vietnam.

[Jimbuna]

1913 Invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley, Sheffield, England.

1932 Hitler refuses President von Hindenburg's proposal to become vice-chancellor of Germany.

1940 Hermann Goering's "Adler Tag" (Eagle day); 45-48 German aircraft shot down over Southern England (Battle of Britain).

1961 Construction of the Berlin Wall begins in East Germany.

[Jimbuna]

1915 British transport Royal Edward sank by German U boat kills 1000.

1945 V-J Day, Japan surrenders unconditionally to end WW II (also August 15 depending on time zone).

1980 17,000 workers go on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, marking the beginning of the Solidarity movement.

[Jimbuna]

1620 Mayflower sets sail from Southampton, England, with 102 Pilgrims.

1863 Submarine "HL Hunley" arrives in Charleston on railroad cars.

1914 Dinant, Belgium, destroyed by German bombs. Lt Charles de Gaulle (24), injured.

1944 German field marshal Günther von Kluge vanishes for one day; he killed himself on the 19th in the aftermath of the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

1957 USAF Capt Joe B Jordan reaches 31,513 m in F-104 jet fighter.

[STEED]

19th August, Hungerford 30 years on..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/...rford_massacre

[Aktungbby]

1932 :the German artist Kathe Kollwitz unveils the monument,"The Parents," at the German military cemetery near Vladslo in Flanders, Belgium. She created to memorialize her son, Peter, along with the hundreds of thousands of other soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Western Front during WW I. She became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but was forced to resign after the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933. Three years later the Nazis classified Kollwitz’s art—like that of so many others during that period—as “degenerate,” and barred her from exhibiting her work. In 1942, her grandson, also named Peter, was killed at the Russian front during WW II. The monument has not been defaced nor torn down...

Originally Posted by Kollwitz

Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.”

[Jimbuna]

1908 America's Great White Fleet arrives in Sydney, Australia, to be greeted with a tremendous welcome; 221 American sailors desert to remain in Australia.

1913 First pilot to parachute from an aircraft (Adolphe Pégoud, France).

1940 British PM Churchill says of Royal Air Force, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".

1966 Beatles pelted with rotten fruit during Memphis concert.