Venezuela’s El Nacional is celebrating its 76 birthday with not only no paper in which to print but his website is down, I suspect under attack. Still they managing to tweet and that included a photo of their first issue:

Monty and Patton were doing their racing up Sicily. 10,000 Germans were taken prisoners. Possible sabotage of a Pan-American Clipper that crashed in Brazil and top right “Curacao Attacked By The Nazis. One ship sunk, 23 dead including a Venezuelan”

It is a little known fact, even among people in countries of the Caribbean basin that there was a decent amount of German warfare in that area.   Venezuela was producing oil for the war effort and there were refineries in Curacao and Aruba that refined the oil into much needed POL (Petroleum, Oil, & Lubricants) supplies. As in any war, interdiction of basic war needs was a priority, but the Nazis were at the end of a long ass line of supply and although important work, they could not keep it up enough to make a difference.

If you go to Aruba and take a tour in a glass-bottomed boat, you will probably be taken by the remains of the oiler Pedernales sunk the 16 February 1942 by the German sub U-156. I am sure scuba divers will happen to know about more WWII wreck in area, but I happened to see this one on a vacation with the missus many years ago.

This is why I enjoy going through old newspaper. You get to see  a bit of history as it was made and more likely stuff that never made it to the history books. By now we have historians (possibly very political in their observations) who are basing their work on other historians who checked their stuff from another batch of historians.  Few people want to go to the original sources or check original records anymore.

That’s all. Just a little prance through history almost forgotten.