Continuing from >>33280212
All Axis oriented countries, militias and just plain traitors - in uniform.
A fiver on Italian soldiers.
1/5 I feel the pic should have had a funny caption. "Guess who won the 'El Alamein' office raffle."
2/5 Italian paratrooper, 1944. I have no idea what he looks so happy about.
3/5 Italian ack-ack in North Africa.
4/5 This one is complicated. It's dated 19th December 43. The soldiers to the left are Italian but the guy to the right is American. They are now on the Allied side, but these aging guys were probably on the other side earlier.
5/5 Italian forces parading possibly in Ukraine. I am assuming the drummer is having a stroke.
Rumanians marched in the Axis ranks too. With mixed results.
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4/5
5/5 Good grief. Guess who was the class clown.
>>33291858
>I have no idea what he looks so happy about.
damm anon, now i'd like to know why
>>33292208
am I the only one that think it was quite nice that almost every nation had its own helmets, weapons etc? Not that itally wouldn't benefit from just buying germna guns and focusing maybe on other things but.. yeah, you get the picture.
>>33293117
It was an odd time for the world. Each country was still caught into the idea that their soldiers should be easy to recognize by their own population. But the world was also reeling from a period of rough economy, and were using older stuff because they either lacked the funds to renew, or had new stuff but wanted to wear out the old gear first. My country, Norway, faced the war with equipment so old and outdated that there was no armor, no hand grenades, and maybe one in five soldiers had a helmet at all - we had managed to pick the 'baltic' model for our army but they were expensive, so there were more WW1 vintage English type helmets than the new ones. Which explains why postwar, the new Army and Home Guard received vast numbers of German ww2 helmets.
As for the other countries, many had nasty helmets - I think I'll nominate the Danish one as the worst abomination. I'll find a pic for that one.
Danish Army of ww2.
Bulgarians. These helmets have an unique shape, some times being confused with German ones. Which is not so odd, as they were produced for Bulgary in Germany iiirc.
>>33291815
Poland found a good pic for you today OP
>Poland confirms Minnesota man as Nazi commander
Poland will seek the arrest and extradition of a Minnesota man exposed by The Associated Press as a former commander in an SS-led unit that burned Polish villages and killed civilians in World War II, prosecutors said Monday.
Prosecutor Robert Janicki said evidence gathered over years of investigation into U.S. citizen Michael K. confirmed "100 percent" that he was a commander of a unit in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion.
He did not release the last name in line with privacy laws but the AP has identified the man as 98-year-old Michael Karkoc, from Minneapolis.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/poland-confirms-minnesota-man-as-nazi-commander/ar-AAogp8Y?OCID=ansmsnnews11
>>33293651
Holy shit, I live in Minneapolis and I had no idea about this happening.
>>33293333
pardon my ignorance, but didn't the danish was part of germany/axis something?
btw, nice helmets but.. doesn't look nordic inspired at all xD
>>33293834
No, we just surrendered really fast and collaborated until 1943.
The gang's all here: German, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian and Italian military attaches visiting the front in Finland, 1943.
Denmark and Norway, in spite of being occupied countries, spawned about 6000 SS volunteers each during the war. The actual number of volunteers were 2 to 3 times as many but the selection process was very strict. I don't know much about the Danes. But here in Norway, the chosen ones were put into The Norwegian Legion. The unit was eventually sent to the eastern front as a ski batallion, where something like 600 fell. Of the rest, many were wounded and those who survived returned to Norway. Some small groups, I think, were transferred to SS Wiking and survived into the last battles for Berlin. But this stuff is from memory so I might get some details wrong.
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5/5
Vichy France was a strange being. Not quite occupied, not quite free. They weren't so hot about fighting for the Germans - but fighting the Free French over French territories was a different thing.
1/5
2/5 in Indochina.
A very small number of Frenchmen went into the French Volunteer Legion. (Not to be confused with the French Foreign Legion).
3/5
More Vichy
4/5
Wrapping it up. Papers!
5/5
>>33294754
thanks for the info