The Siege of Castle Itter - the strangest battle in WWII

[Brian G Turner]

One of the strangest battles in WWII - when American GIs, German Wermacht, French Resistance, and a SS Colonel, fought together against the SS:
The Last Battle - Book Review

Apparently, the only known example of the American and German armies fighting alongside one another during WWII.

 

[svalbard]

This looks really interesting. I am going to have to read it.

 

[Foxbat]

Definitely looks interesting.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Not really my period, but it does sound intriguing.

[I like odd snippets, like Wojtek the soldier bear, or Mad Jack Churchill, the only man in the Second World War to kill the enemy with a longbow].

 

[Brian G Turner]

I'm sure I've heard of this piece of history before - however, it popped up on my radar again in my WWII research. There are other articles about it, such as Wikipedia:
Battle for Castle Itter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The book linked to in the OP itself gets mixed reviews on Amazon, not least because it's apparently more heavy with biographical information than the fighting itself. However, that's still valuable for me.

Also, I took a liberty describing the French as "French Resistance", as apparently it was a bunch of French politicians who all hated one another - and a French tennis star.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'm sure I've heard of this piece of history before

I'm convinced you are correct, there was definitely a feature on this event on at least one news web site this year (2015). Likely because it was the 70th anniversary.
Sadly from the beginning, HTTP/HTML (Websites) have lacked a metatag for date created and last updated. Searching Websites by date is pathetic, also numeric searched < , >, <=, >= and = doesn't work. Even decent boolean logic string searches are poor.

 

[Harpo]

Here’s another strange one - Belgrade was captured in 1941 by six German soldiers, one officer, and a tourist

Fritz Klingenberg - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Danny McG]

I got a vague memory of some Royal Navy boarding party in WW2 who were the last ones to use cutlasses to take over a German ship - I've had a quick look online but I can't find anything about it.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Royal Navy boarding party in WW2 who were the last ones to use cutlasses

Wiki calls it the Altmark incident. On board the German tanker Altmark were roughly 300 Allied prisoners (officially internees), whose ships had been sunk by the pocket battleship Graf Spee in the Southern Atlantic Ocean between September and December 1939, . The British destroyer HMS Cossack boarded the Altmark in February 1940 near the Jøssingfjord, Norway and liberated all the prisoners. It was quite a lead up to the boarding and would make an interesting movie. Cutlasses were on the British ship but hard to say if they were used during the boarding though one person said they saw a member of the boarding party carrying a cutlass. Bayonets were used in hand to hand fighting and seven German sailors were killed, and eleven wounded during the fighting, six seriously. After the incident, the Germans accused the British of being "sea-pirates".

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

One of the best podcasts ever -- fully researched with a full bibliography:

Podcast Episode 128: The Battle for Castle Itter​

Futility Closet Episode 128

Podcast Episode 128: The Battle for Castle Itter - Futility Closet

The closing days of World War II witnessed a bizarre battle with some unlikely allies: American and German soldiers joined forces to rescue a group of French prisoners from a medieval castle in the Austrian Alps. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the Battle for...

www.futilitycloset.com