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World War II History for August 3

03 Aug

Audio Clip: 1945-07-29 Truman Speaks Of Japanese Rejection Of US Ultimatum. This was to be the herald of the upcoming atomic attacks on the Japanese homeland and Japan’s last opportunity for surrender.

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World War II History for August 3

1940 - Italy began its occupation of British Somaliland in East Africa.

Italy begins its offensive against the British colony of Somaliland, in East Africa, territory contiguous with Italian Somaliland.

Italy had occupied parts of East Africa since 1936 and by 1940, when it officially entered the war, had troops far outnumbering British forces in the region. Despite their numerical superiority, the Italians had been slow to make offensive moves for fear that the British blockade in North Africa would make it impossible to get much-needed supplies, such as fuel and weapons, to sustain long engagements. But if Italy was to make greater territorial gains, it had to act, while British numbers were still relatively small.

After several forays a few miles into Sudan and Kenya, the Italians were ready for a bigger push: British Somaliland. The rationale was that it was actually a defensive move. Afraid that the British could enter Italian-occupied Ethiopia through French Somaliland, the Duke of Aosta (who was also Viceroy of Ethiopia and supreme Italian military commander of the region) ordered an invasion of British Somaliland. The British defenders at the garrison put up a fierce struggle; although they had to eventually withdraw, they inflicted 2,000 casualties on the Italian forces, while suffering only 250 of their own.

Italy would not enter the Somaliland capital, Berbera, until August 19, while Britain built up its African forces in Kenya. The war for East Africa was not over.

1941 - Catholic Bishop Clemems von Galen delivered a sermon in Münster Cathedral in which he attacked the Nazi euthanasia program calling it “plain murder.”

1943 - Gen. George S. Patton verbally abused and slapped a private. Later, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered him to apologize for the incident.

[1] “Italians move on British Somaliland,” History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=6539 (accessed Aug 3, 2009).

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Posted in African Theater, Country - Japan, Europe Theater, Media, North America, Podcast, Today

D-Day Audio History – Eisenhower

05 Jun

D-Day Audio History

65 years ago today …

1944-06-05 Eisenhowers Pre D-Day Announcement to Troops (1:42s)

Eisenhower Makes Pre-D-Day Announcement to Troops - 1944-06-05 [1:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

General Eisenhower and Field Marshall Montgomery

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Posted in Europe Theater, Media, Podcast, Today

World War II History for February 11

11 Feb

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World War II History for February 11

11 Feb 1940 - The Red Army launches assault on Karelian front.

Intense fighting developed on the Karelian front as the Red Army launched what was to become the decisive assault on the Mannerheim line. About 140,000 Russians attached on a 12-mile front, a massive concentration of seven men each yard.[2]

[More] Soviet Karelia: Stalin’s Northern Colony, 1920-1939 (BASEES/Curzon Series on Russian & East European Studies)

11 Feb 1941 - Five merchant ships in a British convoy off the Azores were sunk by Luftwaffe bombers.[3]

11 Feb 1942 - The “Channel Dash”

On this day, the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escape from the French port of Brest and make a mad dash up the English Channel to safety in German waters.

The Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been anchored at Brest since March 1941. The Prinz Eugen had been tied to the French port since the Bismarck sortie in May 1941, when it and the battleship Bismarck made their own mad dash through the Atlantic and the Denmark Strait to elude Royal Navy gunfire. All three were subject to periodic bombing raids–and damage–by the British, as the Brits attempted to ensure that the German warships never left the French coast. But despite the careful watch of British subs and aircraft, German Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax launched Operation Cerberus to lead the ships out of the French port.

The Germans, who had controlled and occupied France since June 1940, drew British fire deliberately, and the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Prinz Eugen used the resulting skirmish as a defensive smoke screen. Six German destroyers and 21 torpedo boats accompanied the ships for protection as they moved north late on the night of February 11.

Prinz Eugen – German Heavy Cruiser

In the morning, German planes provided air cover as well; ace pilot Adolf Galland led 250 other fighters in an unusually well coordinated joint effort of the German navy and Luftwaffe. The British Royal Air Force also coordinated its attack with the Royal Navy Swordfish squadron, but a late start–the RAF did not realize until the afternoon of February 12 that the German squadron had pushed out to sea–and bad weather hindered their effort. All three German warships made it to a German port on February 13, although the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been damaged by British mines along the way.

The British lost 40 aircraft and six Navy Swordfish in the confrontation, while the Germans lost a torpedo boat and 17 aircraft. The “Channel Dash,” as it came to be called, was extremely embarrassing to the British, as it happened right under their noses. They would get revenge of a sort, though: British warships sunk the Scharnhorst in December 1944 as the German ship attempted to attack a Russian convoy. The Gneisenau was destroyed in a bombing raid while still in port undergoing repairs, and the Prinz Eugen survived the war, but was taken over by the U.S. Navy at war’s end.[1]

11 Feb 1943 - General Dwight David Eisenhower was selected to command the allied armies in Europe.

11 Feb 1945 - During World War II, the Yalta Agreement was signed by U.S. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Yalta Conference

Yalta - Color

[1]“The “Channel Dash”,” The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=6709 (accessed Feb 11, 2009).

[2-3] Goralski, Robert. World War II Almanac 1931-1945: A Political and Military Record. New York, NY: Perigee Books, 1981.

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Posted in Atlantic Theater, Europe Theater, Ground, Media, Sea, Today

World War II History for October 4

04 Oct

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World War II History for October 4

1940 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in the Alps at Brenner Pass. Hitler was seeking help from Italy to fight the British.

1943 - Heinrich Himmler encourages his SS group leaders

On this day in 1943, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, addresses the squad leaders of his Nazi secret police, attempting to fill them with pride for the work they’ve accomplished-the murder of more than 1 million Jews in German-occupied Russia during a one-and-a-half-year period. “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand,” claimed Himmler. “To have stuck it out and at the same time…to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written.”

It was Himmler who oversaw the establishment of the Auschwitz concentration camp cluster, as well as the Warsaw ghetto massacre. The organizing of some prisoners for slave labor and the inflicting of gruesome medical experimentation on others can also be attributed to him. Consequently, it is little wonder that he could so blithely say, “Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”

1944 - Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributed to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that revealed the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat (“shell shock”).

“[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients…sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to ‘them shells’ and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact.”

On the basis of this evaluation, as well as firsthand experience, American commanders judged that the average soldier could last about 200 days in combat before suffering serious psychiatric damage. British commanders used a rotation method, pulling soldiers out of combat every 12 days for a four-day rest period. This enabled British soldiers to put in 400 days of combat before being deleteriously affected. The Surgeon General’s report went on to lament the fact that a “wound or injury is regarded, not as a misfortune, but a blessing.” The war was clearly taking a toll on more than just men’s bodies.

1940, 1943, 1944, Shell Shock, Eisenhower, Himmler, SS, Hitler, Mussolini, Alps

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Posted in Europe Theater, Ground, Today

World War II History for September 22

22 Sep

Today in WW II History

World War II History for September 22

1941 - A Ukrainian militia squad does the Nazis’ dirty work, murdering 28,000 Soviet Jews near the town of Vinnitsa.

1943 - British submarine troops sabotage the Tirpitz, Nazi Germany’s preeminent battleship, as it sits in port at Norway’s Altenfjord.

Recognizing that a two-front war is straining the Reich’s resources, Joseph Goebbels suggests that Adolf Hitler agree to a separate peace with the Soviet Union, but Hitler declines.

1944 - Patton’s Third Army is halted as supply lines are stretched to the breaking point.

1945 - General George S. Patton told reporters that he did not see the need for “this denazification thing.” He compared the controversy over Nazism to a “Democrat and Republican election fight.”

Once again, “Old Blood and Guts” had put his foot in his mouth.

Descended from a long line of military men, Patton graduated from the West Point Military Academy in 1909 and served in the Tank Corps during World War I. As a result of this experience, Patton became a dedicated proponent of tank warfare. During World War II, as commander of the U.S. 7th Army, he captured Palermo, Sicily, in 1943 by just such means. Patton’s audacity made itself evident in 1944, when, as commander of the 3rd Army, he overran much of northern France in an unorthodox–and ruthless–strategy.

Along the way, Patton’s mouth proved as dangerous to his career as the Germans. When he berated and slapped a hospitalized soldier diagnosed with shell shock, but whom Patton accused of “malingering,” the press turned on him, and pressure was applied to cut him down to size. He might have found himself enjoying early retirement had not Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall intervened on his behalf. After several months of inactivity, he was put back to work.

And work he did–at the Battle of the Bulge, during which Patton once again succeeded in employing a complex and quick-witted strategy, turning the German thrust in Bastogne into an Allied counterthrust, driving the Germans east across the Rhine. In March 1945, Patton’s army swept through southern Germany into Czechoslovakia–which he was stopped by the Allies from capturing, out of respect for the Soviets’ postwar political plans for Eastern Europe.

Patton had many gifts, but diplomacy was not one of them. After the war, while stationed in Germany, he criticized the process of denazification, or the removal of former Nazi party members from positions of political, administrative, and governmental power, probably out of naivete more than anything else. Nevertheless, his impolitic press statements questioning the policy resulted in Eisenhower’s removing him as U.S. commander in Bavaria. He was transferred to the 15th Army Group, but in December 1945 he suffered a broken neck in a car accident and died less than two weeks later at the age of 60.

Tirpitz, Patton, General, Third Army, Politics, Norway, Ukraine, Eisenhower, 1941, 1943, 1944, 1945