Rat Patrol Radio

I don’t know why this struck me, but it did. If we have any RPR listeners out there in the Murfreesboro area, I bet we can find this grand old gentleman’s cane!

While loading groceries near Thanksgiving, World War II veteran Jacob R. McClenny accidentally left his walking cane in shopping cart.

The 89-year-old retired Lt. Col. McClenny returned to the Walmart on Old Fort Parkway to search for the cane but couldn’t locate it, said grandson Bill Dunn, a sergeant with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office. McClenny is offering a reward for its return.

McClenny’s daughter, Joyce Anderson, said her father purchased the cane in 1976 in Germany.

“The approximately 1-inch medallions (on the cane) represent the places he has been,” Anderson said. “This cane is very special to him and I really would like to see him get it back.”

Dunn described the cane as being a light-colored natural wood.

“It’s very distinctive,” Dunn said.

McClenny flew B-17s in World War II that contributed to his hearing loss.

“His equilibrium is off now,” Dunn said. “He’s pretty unstable. He needs the cane to support him. He uses it from the time he gets up to the time he goes to bed.”

People who have knowledge about the cane may call Anderson at 896-2828.

“We hope whoever found it will call and return it,” Dunn said.

McClenny purchased a cheaper cane so he could get around.

“It meant a whole lot to him,” Dunn said of the sentimental value. “He’s just heart-broken about losing it.”

Mufreesboro Post photo of Lt Col McClennt

Here’s a neat mini WWII history of the Jeep.  I never knew that the Germans on the Eastern Front scrambled to get captured Jeeps from the Russians, since the Kubelwagons couldn’t handle the mud!

(Awesome photos of a restored Jeep, too. I love the old “meatball” emblem.)

In a story broken by Interfax, Gen. Vasily Khristoforov, the head archivist of the Federal Security Service (the successor of the KGB,) has revealed that the bodies of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and those of the Goebbels family were burned, ground to dust, and thrown in an East German river in 1970 on orders of KGB chief and later Soviet Premier Andropov.

According to recently declassified Soviet documents, the Soviet Army discovered the bodies of Hitler and Braun in a shell crater outside the Reichstag Bunker, where the Germans had burned them.  After forensic examination, the bodies were secretly buried in a forest near Rathenau, Germany in June 1945.  The next year, the remains were exhumed and buried in a secret location on a Soviet Army base in Magdeburg, East Germany.

As long as the remains were on property of the Soviet Army, their existence could be hidden. But when the decision was made in 1970 to turn the Army base over to the East German government, Soviet leadership feared the possibility of the remains being discovered and becoming a shrine to Hitler. Therefore, the bodies of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family were exhumed by a special KGB contingent, burned in a large bonfire, ground to dust and dumped in the Biederitz River.

Gen. Khristoforov told Interfax that the only physical remains of the Nazi Fuhrer are a piece of jawbone and a skull fragment that are in FSB archives.  He dismissed the claims of two US scientists questioning the authenticity of the remains, noting that they did not receive any DNA samples from the remains, and in any event “even if you take the fragments kept in our custody, it is unclear what these data can be compared with.”

CNN report on this story, with photos.