Crash B26 on 11.April 1945 near Cologne

[RSwank]

Jacques James Saunder was born in Berlin on 8 June 1920. His family was Polish. His name then was Jacob Szuchman. He came to the US in 1938. He joined the army on August 7, 1941. He became a US citizen on 2 Nov 1942. It was at that time he changed his name to Saunder. After the war ended he served for a few years with the Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin. He is buried in Arlington:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/...acques-saunder

[manniw]

Hello, Rswank,
can you please still tell me the source from which you got the information about Jacques Saunder!?
Do you have his Army Serial Number ?
I found something else on Jacques Saunder at ancestry:

His original name was SHULMAN or SHUCHMAN, both names are listed there.
I didn't find any entry about his parents in the old Berlin address books, not even in the Jewish address book of 1931. And his birth certificate is unfortunately not accessible due to privacy issues.

Hello Horst Weber,

you have the page SAL BD ( AFHRA Microfilm A5686 page # 760 ) described by you or you can tell me the exact link to it. This document would be very interesting for me.

Greeting from Cologne
Manni



Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[RSwank]

Manni, Saunder's naturalization application was found on ancestry.com searching for Jacob Szuchman, born 1920. The papers were filed in Tennessee 2 Nov 1942. He gives his enlisted serial number as 32164207. He was then in the Army Signal Corps. He lists his name as Jacob Szuchman and is also changing it to Jacques James Saunder. He emigrated to the US on 4 November 1938, arriving on the ship Nieuw Amsterdam, sailing from Antwerp.

https://www.ancestry.com/interactive...258.1525548626

Information on him being in Berlin post war is from some OSS/CIA files. (OSS officers were not impressed with his work in Berlin, and managed to have him removed.) References to Jacques Saunder start on the bottom pdf page 53 and following.

https://ia800303.us.archive.org/10/i...es/Berlin1.pdf

(For those with an interest, there are 6 Berlin files (Berlin1.pdf to Berlin6.pdf) that can be viewed/downloaded, although the 5th file is called BERLIN5.PDF.)

UPDATE: Saunder's officer serial number: O-1997942 found on a roster list here: http://www.usairborne.be/Roster/ROSTER-505PIR.pdf

[Horst Weber]

Originally Posted by manniw

Hello, Rswank,
can you please still tell me the source from which you got the information about Jacques Saunder!?
Do you have his Army Serial Number ?
I found something else on Jacques Saunder at ancestry:

His original name was SHULMAN or SHUCHMAN, both names are listed there.
I didn't find any entry about his parents in the old Berlin address books, not even in the Jewish address book of 1931. And his birth certificate is unfortunately not accessible due to privacy issues.

Hello Horst Weber,

you have the page SAL BD ( AFHRA Microfilm A5686 page # 760 ) described by you or you can tell me the exact link to it. This document would be very interesting for me.

Greeting from Cologne
Manni


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Manni !

This was from an AFHRA microfilm, I ordered about 24 years ago from AFHRA at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Since I don't have a microfilm reader/printer, it's difficult to send prints of the desired pages. In this particular case, the pages are bad legible.

Here, I can't give you an (online) link, since I don't know anything about the progress in digitalisation of files and microfilms from AFHRA and their presence online.

Maybe the forum friends can help with general information in that matter !

Best wishes !

Horst Weber

[RSwank]

Manni,

I think the file Horst is referring to is this one:

http://airforcehistoryindex.org/data/000/216/785.xml

The IRISREF is A5686

There may well be a single CD with all these files, which includes the above file. They all have the same IRISREF and reel number.

http://airforcehistoryindex.org/search.php?q=A5686

[manniw]

Hello, everyone,

thank you for the information, I will get these documents from AFHRA.

I wish you all a happy new year, I will be online again on 2 January
Greeting
Manni

[Leendert]

Manni,

Had to bring back life in an old computer, but could print out the relevant page of the April 1945 loss list Horst and Rolland are referring to.
As Horst wrote, the quality is not super.

If interested, just PM me your home address and you'll find it in your letterbox soon.

Grüss,

Leendert

[RSwank]

An online 1943 Digital Map of the Cologne area (which is square wF of the Nord de Guerre Zone) can be found here:
https://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/i...acrepo%3A27070

When your cursor is on the map you can use the cursor to drag the map around or zoom in or out with the mouse wheel. 4 small circles appear in the upper left corner of the map when viewed in the viewing window. These circles can be sometimes hard to see. Clicking the 4th circle moves the map to full screen, for a much better view. You can also use the mouse to drag and to zoom the map in this full screen view. Use ESC to close the full screen view and return to the window view.

The value in this map lies in the fact that it has the grid lines marked in purple. The various locations given in the G-2 reports can be located directly on the map rather than using the http://www.echodelta.net/mbs/eng-welcome.php
site and the location translator. However, it is also useful to get an idea of the accuracy of the co-ordinate translator. At the bottom of the translation screen it says:
“Note : the imprecision of the determination is evaluated between 5 and 30 arc-seconds (this corresponds to an imprecision varying from 150 to 1000 meters on the field).”

To check on how accurate the translator is for locations on this map, let us compare the “location” of wF480480 as given by the map above with the location given as by the echodelta co-ordinate translator.
First, looking at the map, find the intersection of the horizontal and vertical “48” gridlines.
It appears to me that that location is about at 50.827353N, 6.999083E, (see red balloon) as given on this Google Maps.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/50...353!4d6.999083
(I think I can identify on the 1943 map Kirchstrasse and below it Uferstrasse both in red which helps find the location.)

So wF480480 is at:
50.827353N, 6.999083E

Now use the echodelta translator for wF480480 on the Nord de Guerre Zone. It converts to the location:
50.82909N, 6.99874E
https://www.google.com/maps/place/50...2909!4d6.99874

The difference in the two “locations” for wF480480 is about 200 meters.

[Nick Beale]

Thanks for the cautionary note about the co-ordinates translator. Add to that the lack of GPS in 1945. Airmen and troops reading maps weren’t always able to fix their positions with the kind of accuracy we take for granted now. That means that map references given in reports aren’t perfectly reliable either.

[manniw]

Hello, Roland,
first of all, a happy and healthy new year....

But now my head is smoking, I haven't gone that deep into it yet.........
This digital map of Cologne is of course great. So far I only had this American map of 1940 in printed form, which makes it very tedious to find the individual places.


One problem is, of course, that a lot has been built here since the 50's, especially on the outskirts of LÜLSDORF. If you open the Google-maps of Lülsdorf, there was all field to the left of Bachstr, there was no house except the Schneppenhof at the bottom left of the Rhine bank.


I had assumed the crash site (according to eyewitnesses) to be where BARRYNEALS is today, about in the field above. In the square field over there was a 8,8 cm FLAK with big ramparts and barracks...I have aerial photos from 1944 where you can see all this quite well......
Today I will work through the whole thing in peace and quiet and hopefully understand it :-))

But I have another question: The attack on 11.04.45 on ASCHERSLEBEN took place on a previously determined approach and return flight route......I have already looked through some things, but found nothing in this regard. Do you perhaps have a source on this.
Thanks again and have a nice day
Manni

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)