London:  A sensational entry in a newly discovered diary of a soldier has added weight to the claims that Adolf Hitler had fathered a lovechild with a 16-year-old French woman while serving as a corporal during World War I.

For decades, the tatty pocket diary of former Royal Engineer Leonard Wilkes had gathered dust in a box on top of a wardrobe among a war hero’s possessions. His sons, Alan and Gordon, discovered it after death of their mom 10 years ago.

Mr. Leonard was one of the first soldiers to land on the Normandy beaches on D-Day in June 1944.

Over the following months, he kept a diary as the Allies fought to liberate France and among the pages filled with neat writing in capital letters is a sensational reference to the alleged liaison between Hitler and Charlotte Lobjoie in the summer of 1917, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.

On September 30 in 1944, Leonard, who was from Small Heath, Birmingham, wrote: “An interesting day today. Visited the house where Hitler stayed as a corporal in the last war, saw the woman who had a baby by him and she told us that the baby, a son, was now fighting in French army against the Germans.”

Mr. Leonard worked as a machine presser. The grandfather of five and great-grandfather of 18 died in 1991, aged 76.

His son Alan said: “It was kept in a box. We were going to throw it out. I was shocked when I read it. My father never spoke to me about the war and, until he died. I never even knew the diary existed.”

The brothers did not think the diary would be of interest to anyone outside the family until new claims emerged in French magazine ‘Le Point’ last month that Hitler may have had a son, Jean-Marie Loret, while serving in France.

Mr. Loret was born in March 1918 and his mother told him about his father shortly before her death in the late 1950s.

He died in 1985, aged 67, having never been able to prove his heritage. But his lawyer, Francois Gibault, gave ‘Le Point’ documents to support his claims.

The lawyer said Ms. Lobjoie told her son the relationship with Hitler began in 1917 when the future Nazi leader was aged 28 and fighting the French in Picardy. The pair met when Hitler travelled to the town of Fournes-in-Weppe, near Lille, for leave.

According to Mr. Gibault, she later told her son: “One day I was cutting hay with other women, when we saw a German soldier on the other side of the street. He had a sketch pad and seemed to be drawing. All the women found this interesting, and were curious to know what he was drawing. I was designated to approach him.”

The pair started a brief relationship and she said Jean-Marie was conceived after a “tipsy” evening in June 1917.

He was born the following year.

When Julie Gianettino, a student at Prescott Mile High Middle School, asked Lucy Hanson how they cooked after the Nazis took over her hometown of Hilversum in the Netherlands during World War II, Hanson told her she and her grandfather cut firewood from the forest.

“We had no gas, no electricity, water for an hour in the morning and little food,” said Hanson, who was 10 years old when her country was occupied. “Thank goodness we had a garden. Everybody was growing their own vegetables in their front and backyards. We made lots of soups, but we were all very skinny.”

Mile High Middle School teacher Robin Andre asked Hanson to speak to her eighth grade social studies class, which had just finished studying World War II, so they could learn what it was like from someone who survived the war.

“Nowadays you hear so much about how things are so bad. Well, I am going to tell you how bad it can get,” said Hanson, who has lived in Prescott for the past 10 years.

On May 10, 1940, Hanson’s family woke up to the whole house shaking and the windows rattling. She said she thought it might be a thunderstorm, so she and her little sister ran to the windows.

“My mom came running from upstairs and said, ‘Get away from the windows. This is a war,’” Hanson said. “We didn’t know what war was. We went downstairs to sit and wait. We didn’t know what was happening.”

They later learned their house had been shaking from the Nazi bombing of the Amsterdam airport. Life became more miserable over time, and resistance to the Nazi occupation grew, Hanson related.

“After a few weeks, we were told that we had to bring in all our radios to a certain place downtown,” Hanson said. “Many people didn’t do that, so they hid them in their wood floors under the carpet. At night there were broadcasts from England about what was really happening in the world, and you sat there and listened.”

People were forced to give their cars and bicycles to the Nazis, who melted down every metal item to make bullets and bombs.

“Toward the end of the war, they even took the bells out of the church steeples,” Hanson said.

The people gave up their silver money for “paper money, which was not worth anything,” and Hanson’s grandfather made her a bracelet of silver dimes, which they hid away.

With no food in the stores, ration coupons were no good, so Hanson’s mother would go to farms to trade for food.

“She brought a tablecloth, her nice sterling silver, whatever she had, because the farmers didn’t want to take her money. They wanted goods,” Hanson said. “She would come back with a little bag of whole wheat. I would use our coffee grinder and grind it into a mush; she would add water and make pancakes in the big iron skillet.”

The Germans rounded up all the men between the ages of 18 and 40 years old, sent them to Germany, and forced them to work in factories making ammunition, bombs and tanks.

“People went underground trying to hide,” said Hanson, noting her father hid in their attic.

Since the harbors were blocked, no food, clothing, or other items could come into the country. After three years, Hanson and her two sisters needed new shoes, so Hanson’s mother made wooden platforms and cut an old belt to fit them to their feet.

“We let out old clothes; we ripped out old sweaters and knitted new ones,” she remembered.

The Dutch thought they’d be liberated soon after D-Day in France, but it took another year for the Canadians and Americans to get over the rivers the Nazis defended. In May 1945, the Canadians liberated Hanson’s town, and planes dropped crates of food for the starving people in a field outside town.

“One morning, I was looking for crates in the heather fields, and I saw a big tank coming down the road,” Hanson said. “The German tanks were grey and black, but this tank was a green color.”

A soldier saw her hiding in the bushes and spoke to her. She learned he was from Liverpool, England, and he gave her two cigarettes for her father.

After the presentation, students Gianettino, LaRissa LaMaster and Emily Sparks listened to Hanson describe the food the Canadian soldiers prepared for them in kitchens they set up in the fields.

“They gave us bread pudding and raisins – no fat, because our stomachs were so weak we couldn’t handle it,” Hanson said. “I’m telling you this because we see many things in the newspapers and televisions about war. But it’s not only the soldiers who suffer during a war – it’s the people who live in the (occupied) country who really suffer.”

SEYMOUR, Ind. – Searchers in Seymour, Indiana look underground for some of the secrets of World War II — Nazi secrets, to be precise.

The Allies shipped Nazi planes to Freeman Field so pilots and engineers could fly them, take them apart, and put them back together again.

What they learned was important, because American planes weren’t as advanced.

What happened to those planes after the war is still a mystery.

Today’s Freeman Field airport looks — and feels — a lot quieter than the busy Army airfield that operated 67 years ago at the end of World War II.  Hundreds of soldiers and civilians worked at Freeman Field to study Germany’s airplanes and rockets.

Scott Cooper is part of the Freeman Field Recovery Team, a group of aviation and military historians learning the planes’ — and the field’s –  history.  “At that point in the war, in the fighting, the Germans were years ahead of us in the areas of technology,” Cooper said.

The Allies seized the aircraft in Europe and then shipped them to Seymour for what’s called “reverse engineering.”

“They were actually developing the first jet aircraft over in Germany, so we had a chance to bring that aircraft over here, break it down, examine the engine, examine the aircraft, and find out things that we might be able to use on the aircraft that we were building at the time,” Cooper said.  “About 81 different types of aircraft were brought here, including V-1 and V-2 missiles.”

The Army showed the public the enemy planes during an open house in 1946, as the work wound down.  Eventually, everyone wanted to forget about the war.

But what happened to those planes?  “What they didn’t want to take away for museum purposes or display purposes, they would just dig these big pits and dump everything in and cover them up and just leave it there,” Cooper said.  Workers buried them on the edges of the airfield.

Cooper and fellow volunteers have since recovered hundreds of plane parts.  “In some cases you can still see the German words on there,” Cooper said, as he showed ID tags and metal stampings to a reporter.  “The one day when we found 12 propeller blades, that was pretty exciting.”

He held one of them, clean, shiny and pock-marked.  “This one still is pitted, but we’ll take it out and we’ll restore it, we’ll bend it back into shape. We will put some putty over it, smooth it out and repaint it, and make it look almost like it is new.”

The Freeman Field Recovery Team is at least the third group to search for parts at Freeman Field since the early 1990s. It’s in the midst of a five-year contract with the city of Seymour. Should its members decide to sell anything they’ve found here, they’ll split the proceeds with the city.

But there’s still something the team wants to find.  Parts are good, but something whole is better.  “We would love to find an airplane fuselage. The eyewitnesses that we have spoken to and the second hand stories that we have heard say that there are at least three that are buried in and around the airfield,” Cooper said, confirming local lore.

The searchers are using what’s called a Blood Hound to scan the place where those planes might be, a small patch of farm field at the end of a runway.  “We’re looking for any signs of a previous excavation, previous burial,” said Brian Clem of Blood Hound Under Ground Utility Locators.

A radar unit on wheels connects to a GPS and a computer mapping program.  It surveys the ground, much like weather radar or an ultrasound.  Those colorful blobs tell a lot.

“If I have some bright oranges that are only a few inches down, I can be pretty sure that isn’t an airplane fuselage. If I have some big area that’s bright orange at four-and-a-half, five feet down, we’re going to get a whole lot excited about that,” Clem said, with a grin.

Perhaps the JU-88 bomber, or a Messerschmitt jet fighter is there?  Those were planes popular in the 1946 open house.

The latest images are promising, but no one will dig further until warmer weather and drier ground arrive in the spring.  “To realize that history, to be able to touch it and feel it and restore it and bring it back so other people can see it, is pretty exciting.  In some cases it probably helped us to win the war,” Cooper said.

Searchers say the mud has helped to preserve the metal plane parts over the years.

Not everything’s rusty.  Many of the finds are on display at the Freeman Field museum at the airport.

BURLINGTON, Wash. — Lynn D. “Buck” Compton, a veteran whose World War II exploits were depicted in the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died, his family said.

Compton died Saturday in Burlington, Wash., after having a heart attack last month, the family told the Los Angeles Times in a story Tuesday.

In January, nearly 200 guests, including actors from the miniseries, attended his 90th birthday party, the Skagit Valley Herald reported.

“To us he wasn’t really a war hero, he was just a hero, period,” Tracy Compton told the Herald.

Lynn Compton also is remembered for his legal career in California. He headed the team that prosecuted Sirhan B. Sirhan for the slaying of Robert F. Kennedy and was appointed to the 2nd District Court of Appeal in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan. He retired from the bench in 1990.

He was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart during World War II. But it wasn’t until later in life that he became famous for his military service as a first lieutenant in Easy Company after the unit parachuted into France on D-Day in 1944. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 best seller about the unit was made into the 2001 TV series.

“His career as a prosecutor and a judge overrode his military career until ‘Band of Brothers’ came out, and then it just went crazy,” daughter Syndee Compton said.

A passage in the book recalled the D-Day invasion of France: “Compton had been an All-American catcher on the UCLA baseball team. The distance to the fleeing enemy was about the same as from home plate to second base. Compton threw his grenade on a straight line — no arch — and it hit a German in the head as it exploded.”

Compton was embarrassed by the attention at his birthday party at Skagit Regional Airport that was attended by children of other Band of Brothers veterans.

“All I can say is it’s flattering — and kind of embarrassing,” Compton told the Herald. “We didn’t expect anything more than those other guys (in the war). We’re celebrating longevity more than anything.”

The guests included “Band of Brothers” actors Michael Cudlitz, James Madio, Richard Speight Jr. and Neal McDonough, who portrayed Compton in the miniseries.

McDonough recalled meeting with Compton the day before he flew to London to begin filming “Band of Brothers,” and later peppering him with questions about his time during the war.

“When you play a historical figure, you have to do it right and tell the truth,” McDonough told the Times, recalling that Compton told him he was just doing his job.

“He’d say that’s what soldiers do,” said McDonough, who kept in touch with Compton and nicknamed his 6-year-old son Morgan “Little Buck” in his honor.

Tracy Compton said her father thought McDonough did a wonderful job portraying him and that “he laughed and said Neal was better-looking than he ever was.”

Compton was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 1921. He majored in physical education and minored in education at UCLA, where he lettered in football and baseball. He started at guard in the 1943 Rose Bowl game against Georgia and was selected all-conference catcher while captain of the baseball team in 1942.

He also participated in the ROTC program and entered active service in February 1943 at age 21.

After the war, he became a Los Angeles police officer and worked his way through Loyola Law School. He was a detective in the Central Burglary Division before joining the district attorney’s office in 1951. He was assistant district attorney when District Attorney Evelle J. Younger chose him as his chief deputy in 1966.

Compton’s memoir “Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers,” written with Marcus Brotherton, was published in 2008.

His wife, Donna, died in 1994. Along with his two daughters, he is survived by four grandchildren.

It’s not exactly cod ‘n’ chips, is it?

The Second World War had been raging for more than two years, with rationing in force and mounting fears of a U-boat blockade.

Faced with the prospect of food supplies being cut off, a pair of eminent scientists came up with a solution: Let them eat plankton.

They planned to harvest tons of the microscopic creatures from Scottish lochs.

Secret wartime letters just uncovered reveal that Professor Alister Hardy, a marine biologist at Hull University, told colleagues that plankton – the term for a range of drifting organisms found in fresh and sea water – were high in protein and could be ‘tasty’.

He convinced Sir John Graham Kerr, an MP and regius professor of biology at Glasgow University, and they calculated that ten nets could catch enough plankton in 12 hours to feed 357 people.

In 1941 Sir John wrote to Richard Elmhirst, director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, who appears to have been sceptical: ‘It is simply silly to brush the matter aside as of no importance, when one remembers the sea off our coasts is often soup-like in its richness with nutritive material.

‘No doubt you have tested for yourself the tastiness of some types of plankton.’

Scientists reckoned that nets anchored in Loch Fyne would cost £90,000 and would catch over 26 tons of plankton each day.

Hardy proposed: ‘The plankton would be emptied into containers and conveyed to the nearest pier where it would stand ready to be conveyed by lorry or motor boat to the drying plant.

‘Simple drying plants would be set up at convenient points along the coast and the resulting dry plankton dispatched in sacks to a headquarters factory for testing, sorting, mixing and final preparation into meal…’

‘The anchoring and inspection of nets would be done by motor boats which could also be continually cruising the area investigating the richest regions of plankton.’

Trials went ahead in 1941, 1942 and 1943 but it was found that the season was too short for the scheme to work.

By 1942, the first stockpiles had been harvested, but the plankton proved trickier to catch than the scientists expected, and the project was quietly abandoned.

The letters were found by Geoffrey Moore, emeritus professor in marine biology at the University of London, in the Association’s archive.

He said: ‘I know of only one  person who has tried plankton and he found it rather fishy and gritty.’

‘He wasn’t terribly impressed, but I suppose it would depend on how hungry you were.’

Richard Kirby of the University of Plymouth, the author of a book about plankton called Ocean Drifters – A Secret World Beneath the Waves, said the idea of eating plankton is not so bizarre.

He added: ‘The Germans had similar plans during the war, and there are still people trying to do this today.’

Prof Moore, who is also president of the Society for History of Natural History, said he was not surprised at what he found.

He said: ‘Marine biologists come up with a lot of strange ideas.’

But this scheme was not that odd – there are fisheries for various plankton in Japan and Scandinavia.

‘I’ve been interested for many years in the history of marine biology and for the last ten years have been delving into all sorts of historic marine biology archives.

‘When I found these letters, I thought I would write them up as an academic paper.

‘Sir Alister Hardy thought it was a way he could contribute to the war effort, because he wasn’t in the forces himself.

‘There was plenty of plankton around, but there was the question of how easy it would be to catch. You would need a very large net with a very small mesh.’

‘There would be the problem of the pressure of the water trying to push through a net, which would become clogged up with debris – not to mention basking sharks.’

‘I only know of one person who has tried plankton and he found it rather fishy and gritty. Unlike a prawn, which you can peel, the exoskeleton was still intact.’

‘He wasn’t terribly impressed, but I suppose it would depend on how hungry you were.’

‘And I expect it was intended that the plankton would have been added to other foods rather than eaten on its own.’

Until his death in 1985, Jean-Marie Loret believed that he was the only son of Adolf Hitler. There is now renewed attention to evidence from France and Germany that apparently lends some credence to his claim.

Loret collected information from two studies; one conducted by the University of Heidelberg in 1981 and another conducted by a handwriting analyst that showed Loret’s blood type and handwriting, respectively, were similar to the Nazi Germany dictator who died childless in 1945 at age 56.

The evidence is inconclusive but Loret’s story itself was riveting enough to warrant some investigation. The French newspaper Le Pointe published an account last week of Loret’s story, as he told Parisian lawyer Francois Gibault in 1979.

Le Pointe retells Gibault’s reaction to Loret’s claim:

“Master, I am the son of Hitler! Tell me what I should do,” Gibault told Le Pointe.

According to Le Pointe, the “Paris lawyer, does not believe his ears. The man before him is rather large, speaks perfect French without an accent, and is not a crackpot. His inspiring story is no less true.”

Loret claimed that his mother, Lobojoie Charlotte, met Hitler in 1914, when he was a corporal in the German army and she was 16. She described Hitler as “attentive and friendly.” She and Hitler would take walks in the countryside, although conversation often was complicated by their language barrier. Yet, despite their differences, after an inebriated night in June 1917, little Jean-Marie was born in March 1918, according to Loret.

Neither Loret nor the rest of his mother’s family knew of the circumstances of his birth until the early 1950s when she confessed to her son that Hitler was his father. She had given her only son up for adoption in 1930 but stayed in touch with him, according to Loret.

After this realization, according to LePointe, Loret began his journey to find out if the story was true, researching with a near-manic determination. He enlisted geneticists, handwriting experts and historians. He wrote a book, “Your Father’s Name Was Hitler,” that details that journey. It will now be republished to include the new studies that Loret believed confirmed his claim.

The attached video reports on the declassified story of the hunt for Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the holocaust.