Many Contributed To Hitler's Defeat

Recently I decided to watch the 1965 movie "Operation Crossbow," a movie I've seen several times over the years.* This World War Two film is "loosely" based on history and the British efforts to disrupt Hitler's rocket program. There is an important scene at the end of the film that shows the head of Britain's forces to combat German rockets, Duncan Sandys (played by English actor Richard Johnson), speaking with Prime Minister Winston Churchill (played by English actor Patrick Wymark)** about how so many unknown people were contributing to defeating Hitler. Many people have heard the names of political leaders and generals who became famous during World War Two, but these leaders would have been nothing without the men and women who took on Hitler and the Nazis on a smaller and a more personal level: from the Allied military personnel who helped to attack and defend against Hitler's forces, to the Allied personnel who monitored and decoded enemy messages, to secret agents who risked their lives to get information to help the Allies plan military operations, to resistance members who worked in a variety of ways to get information, to pass information along or to actively sabotage Nazi military installations and facilities, to other resistance members, including Jews, who rose in armed conflict against Nazi occupiers, to workers in factories producing Nazi military goods who sabotaged Hitler's war effort by slowing production or by weakening the quality of the goods they produced. It's almost impossible to know how much of the latter sabotage went on, but it did happen. Remember, as I said above, we'll never know all of the little bits and pieces that went into efforts to defeat Hitler, but they happened, and likely taken together, they did substantial damage to the fanatical, furious Führer, also known as the, "Wacko-in-Chief." 

The movie shows one man, a Dutch sailor, who becomes an Allied agent who makes it into Germany to get information on the Nazi rocket program. He ends up being arrested, and after torture, he faces execution, but he never gives up the names of his accomplices. Just before he is executed, a Nazi officer tries one more time to get the badly beaten man to give him information, telling the Dutchman that if he doesn't cooperate, he will die and no one will ever know even how he died, that his heroism will be for nothing. He tells the Nazi NOTHING, and he is then executed. Later in the film, two other Allied agents inside the Nazi rocket facility, located underground in Germany, are supposed to open the facility launch doors to provide light to guide Royal Air Force bombers to the Nazi rocket center. Their heroics make the mission a success, although both men are killed. While the movie has much fiction to it, I can't help but believe that there were real incidents of a similar nature throughout the war, and these things all helped to drive nails into the coffin of the Nazi nutcase. Just as the Nazi official threatened the Dutchman in the movie that no one would ever know how brave he had been, or even know how he died, so many people likely really did fit into that category in real life, but they all did things to help defeat Hitler and fascism. We owe so many a debt of gratitude.

* For my article about "Operation Crossbow," this is the link: http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2017/04/operation-crossbow-george-peppard.html

** Just as a point of information, Duncan Sandys was married to Winston Churchill's eldest daughter, Diana.

WORD HISTORY: 
Sabotage-This is a tough word in its meaning development, and its ultimate origin is uncertain. First, forget about the modern meaning completely at the moment. There are forms of the word in Turkic and Arabic, as well as in some Indo European language branches like Persian, Latin-based languages and some Slavic. While some believe it spread FROM Persian, Turkic or Arabic INTO Latin and then into other Indo European languages, that is not a certainty. Anyway, one of the Latin-based languages to have a form was French, which originally acquired the word as "savate" (perhaps first as, "chavate?"), which meant, "shoe, slipper, old shoe," a meaning similar to forms of the word in other languages, all of which had to do with "shoes, slippers." This then became "sabat," and then "sabot," with the "bat" part being altered in spelling (perhaps mistaken by French speakers for "bot," the French word for "boot"), by which time (1200s) it meant "wooden shoe." A French verb form developed from the noun as "saboter," which seems to have at first meant, "to bungle something," and from this came the idea of "workers in a dispute with employers remaining on the job, but doing shoddy work to make customers angry, and thus, hurt the employer." Why a word for "wooden shoe" spawned a verb with this meaning is not understood and there are various theories, including, "workers throwing or putting shoes into machines to cause malfunction," but the reason is just not known. French later developed the word as "sabotage," by taking the root "sabot," and then adding the noun forming ending "-age," which indicated a state of action or being. The meaning also broadened to "obstruction, interference, disruption by non official military personnel of a nation's military forces, infrastructure or means of production," but the labor dispute meaning also persisted into the 1900s. The word is a relative newcomer to English, as it was just  borrowed in the early 1900s, and at first, it had both meanings in English too.