An arms cache, including a German MG-34 machine gun discovered in a Los Angeles safe house belonging to “
La Hermandad”(The Brotherhood) in June of 2007. Founded in the early 1970s due to increasing tensions between the Mexican-American and Caucasian populations of Union State controlled Texas and New Mexico, “
La Hermandad” was, at least officially, a self defense militia for Mexican Americans who felt oppressed under St. Louis‘ often autocratic rule. However, the group was rapidly subverted by the syndicalist government of Mexico, which established safe havens and training camps for the group in Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila provinces as well as providing intelligence support and arms deliveries. A recently declassified Union State Directorate of Military Intelligence(DMI) report published in 1979 stated that the group was “just as heavily armed as some regular army units and certainly better equipped than many of the police forces of Texas and New Mexico”. Clashes between special police units such as the Texas Rangers and the “sicarios” of
La Hermandad would continue on a fairly regular basis throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, at which point much of the group was either destroyed or forced to flee back over the Rio Grande following Operation
Nightshade, a joint operation between the AUS military and local police forces. Reorganizing in the safety of the Chihuahuan desert,
La Hermandad began preparations for a renewed northern campaign; however, they had lost a large amount of their weaponry, requiring increased support from the Mexican government. During the mid 1980s
La Hermandad began to establish itself in the Pacific States of America as well, clashing with Pacifican border troops in Arizona and making contacts with Mexican-Americans living in Southern California....particularly criminal elements such as the Salazar Cartel. Probably the most notable incident of this “Second Phase“ was the assassination of Pacifican journalist Henry Anderson in Las Vegas in March of 1987.
Anderson was a reporter known for his opposition to the syndicalist government of Mexico, reporting favorably on anti syndicalist exile groups in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the PSA. His reports on refugees fleeing across the Sonoran desert to the PSA had embarrassed the Mex Ian government, which viewed him as an “enemy of the people”. Anderson had received death threats before but dismissed them as being empty bluster......as it turned out, they were anything but.
On March 18, 1987 Anderson was eating in a local cafe when a truck pulled up outside and four heavily armed men stormed into the restaurant, guns blazing. Anderson and seven other customers and staff members were killed in the initial barrage of gunfire; eleven other people were wounded, three of them critically. A massive manhunt would eventually run the members of the hit team to ground in Southern California two days later; of the five members of the team behind the assassination, three, Carlos Fernandez, Diego Lopez and Pablo Rivera, were killed outright in the shootout(which also claimed the life of a Pacifican California State Police officer, Officer Joseph Fitzpatrick); one, Ignacio Sanchez, was badly wounded and captured, and later sentenced to a forty five year prison term; and the last man, known only as ”Jorge”, escaped, and was never captured. The identity of “Jorge” is a matter of much debate even to this day, with many believing he was a Mexican Special Forces commando or intelligence operative. The assassination of Anderson by members of
La Hermandad led the Pacifican government to begin a crackdown on the organization.
In the late 1990s, the recession of the Mexican economy meant that they were unable to supply the group with as much support, causing the organization to shift to smuggling illicit materials such as drugs into the AUS and PSA in order to fund continued operations. The profitability of such smuggling operations meant that
La Hermandad would remain a threat to American stability even after the country ’s reunification. The group continues to operate in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California and Nevada even to this day.
The famous “Seidel photo“, perhaps the most convincing evidence that the immense Megalodon shark still lives. In July of 1942, Imperial German Navy U-Boats
U-111 and
U-179 had been operating in the South China Sea for several weeks, attacking Japanese merchant ships and troop transports as part of the(rather ironically named) Operation
Hai(Shark). Having seen a great deal of success both submarines were running low on fuel and torpedoes, and therefore radioed Saigon to request resupply. The supply submarine
U-4070 had been dispatched to meet the two other U-Boats at a certain location relatively close to the island of Hainan, and the morning of July 20th saw the two U-Boats surfaced in order to get some fresh air. Captain Johan Seidel of
U-179 had just been settling in at his command post when the sounds of alarmed shouting coming from the lookouts he had posted on the deck of the U-Boat began to ring up. Hurrying up the ladder to the deck of the submarine, Seidel had to shoulder his way through a crowd of his bewildered sailors gawking at....something passing nearby. He was soon realized what they were staring at.....and was horrified. According Seidel and his crew, a gargantuan shark was circling the two U-Boats in a wide loop seemingly trying to figure out what they were. Noticing a similar crowd having gathered on the deck of
U-111, Seidel ordered his men to signal Captain Ernst Böhm, the commander of his fellow U-Boat, to try and figure out what to do about this bizarre situation. His fellow captain, quite frankly, was equally baffled.
Realizing that no one would believe them if they didn’t take a picture of the nearby creature, Seidel ordered one of his crewmen to snap a picture with the ship’s camera. The photo, with
U-111 in the foreground for scale, shows an immense shark— more than sixty feet long at the best estimates of Captain Seidel—- passing by in the near distance, its distinctive dorsal fin and tail fin extending several feet in the air. The shark apparently circled the motionless U-Boats several more times before disappearing beneath the waves, leaving a rather shaken group of sailors uneasily eyeing the ocean around them. The photo was successfully developed when
U-179 returned to Saigon from its patrol, but Seidel gave it to his superiors and it languished in a classified folder filled with files about “mysterious phenomena“ encountered by German soldiers during the Second Weltkrieg(everything ranging from a mysterious woman in white who had seemingly stalked a German officer in Belarus for several weeks before his frozen corpse was discovered as his unit retreated through a marsh......in the middle of summer, to rumors of fanged monsters lurking in tunnels beneath the cities of the Rhineland, to a report from German colonial troops in New Guinea who claimed to have encountered what they described as “glowing dragons”) for years until it was discovered in the mid 1970s by a lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy going through old files destined to be declassified, and then sold to a Saigon newspaper.
The photo caused a furor in the international media.
U-111 had been sunk a year later with all hands by a Japanese destroyer off the coast of Luzon, but
U-179 had survived the war, and several crewmen had come forwards to confirm that the photo was authentic and they had really seen this massive shark. To this day, the Seidel photo is seen as one of the best examples of evidence for the continued existence of the Megalodon shark, and in the existence of cryptids as a whole.
A pair of Panzer Mark VB “Jagdpanther”(Hunting Panther) tank destroyers roll through a French village, September 1944. The Jagdpanther was based on the Panzer Mark V “Kriegsengel “ main battle tank and was designed to combat the heaviest tanks of the French Communard and Union of Britain’s armored forces. Mounted on the Kriegsengel’s chassis, the Jagdpanther was equipped with a high velocity 88mm gun(the same gun used by the Panzer Mark VI “Tiger” heavy tank), two machine guns, and possessed a crew of five. The vehicle‘s low profile made it relatively easily concealable, and it’s heavily sloped frontal armor made it nearly invulnerable from the front(although the side armor was much weaker). Another weakness of the model was that it was hard for it to turn and maneuver swiftly, which was why standard German doctrine for the Jagdpanther was to have it engage a foe from long range, ensuring that it’s strong frontal armor was always presented to the foe.
The Jagdpanther had a reputation for reliability; despite being unable to turn or maneuver quickly, while moving in a straight line the vehicle could reach a reasonable speed. The tank destroyer would soon form one of the bulwarks of the German armored forces, serving in combat roles from August 1944 until the end of the war, and then for another decade post war.