Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

March 20, 1945
British troops liberate Mandalay, Burma

On this day, the 14th Army, under British Gen. William J. Slim, captures the Burmese city of Mandalay from the Japanese, bringing the Allies one step closer to liberating all of Burma.
Mandalay, a city on the Irrawaddy River in central Burma (now Myanmar), was the center of the communications in Burma, as well as of rail, road, and river travel. The British conquered Mandalay, the second-largest city in Burma, in 1885. Burma as a whole was detached from India by the British in the Government of India Act of 1935 and made a Crown Colony with its own constitution and parliament. Burmese nationalists plotted with the Japanese in the late 1930s to wrest Burma from the British Empire and bring the nation within the Japanese Empire. Attempts by the nationalists to undermine the building of the Burmese Road (which would create an overland link between the West and China) and incite riots failed, and Burma remained a British colony.
On December 8, 1941, the Japanese took matters into their own hands and invaded Burma. Troops landed at Victoria Point, at the southern tip of the peninsula. Moving north, the Japanese troops, composed mostly of disgruntled Burmese nationals who fashioned themselves an army of liberation, determined to expel the Brits from their homeland, advanced on Rangoon, Lashio (the Burmese end of the Burma Road into China), and Mandalay, which fell on May 2, 1942. With the Japanese holding central Burma, China was cut off from the West-and Western supplies.
In early 1944, British Gen. William J. Slim, commander of the 14th Army, led an offensive against the Japanese that broke a siege at Imphal. By mid-December, buoyed by his success, Slim launched an offensive against Meiktila, east of the Irrawaddy River and a key communication post between Rangoon and Mangalay. A strategy of misdirection was employed, with one corps headed toward Mandalay even as Slim's immediate objective was Meiktila. With the Japanese preoccupied with the first corps, a second corps took Meiktila on March 3, 1945, and Mandalay fell on the 20th. The 14th Army now controlled a significant swath of central Burma. Rangoon, the capital, would fall in May, returning Burma to British hands.

[Peter Clare]

HMS LAPWING (March 20, 1945)

British sloop of 1,250 tons torpedoed and sunk in the Kola Inlet in Northern Russia while on escort duty with outward bound convoy JW-65. It was her ninth voyage to Russia. The Lapwing was hit amidships by a torpedo from the U-968 and sank shortly afterwards. After giving support to the Normandy landings the Lapwing joined the 7th Escort Group based on the Clyde in Scotland. Sources differ as to which U-boat torpedoed the Lapwing, it was either the U-968 or the U-716. She sank with the loss of 158 of her complement of 219. There were 61 survivors rescued from the freezing seas by HMS Savage.

[Peter Clare]

BERLIN

On March 20, 1943, Colonel Rudolf von Gertsdorff, General Kluge's chief of intelligence, tried to kill Hitler in the Zeughaus. The concealed bomb was to be detonated by acid while he stood close to Hitler in the exhibit hall. Unfortunately Hitler left the building before the acid could act and Gertsdorff immediately entered the men's room and flushed the fuse down the toilet.

[Peter Clare]

March 21, 1943
Another plot to kill Hitler foiled

On this day, the second military conspiracy plan to assassinate Hitler in a week fails to come off.
Back in the summer of 1941, Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow, a member of Gen. Fedor von Bock's Army Group Center, was the leader of one of many conspiracies against Adolf Hitler. Along with his staff officer, Lt. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and two other conspirators, both of old German families who also believed Hitler was leading Germany to humiliation, Tresckow had planned to arrest the Fuhrer when he visited the Army Group's headquarters at Borisov, in the Soviet Union. But their naivete in such matters became evident when Hitler showed up-surrounded by SS bodyguards and driven in one of a fleet of cars. They never got near him.
Tresckow would try again on March 13, 1943, in a plot called Operation Flash. This time, Tresckow, Schlabrendorff, et al., were stationed in Smolensk, still in the USSR. Hitler was planning to fly back to Rastenburg, Germany, from Vinnitsa, in the USSR. A stopover was planned at Smolensk, during which the Fuhrer was to be handed a parcel bomb by an unwitting officer thinking it was a gift of liquor for two senior officers at Rastenburg. All went according to plan and Hitler's plane took off--the bomb was set to go off somewhere over Minsk. At that point, co-conspirators in Berlin were ready to take control of the central government at the mention of the code word "Flash." Unfortunately, the bomb never went off at all-the detonator was defective.
A week later on March 21, on Heroes' Memorial Day, (a holiday honoring German World War I dead), Tresckow selected Col. Freiherr von Gersdorff to act as a suicide bomber at the Zeughaus Museum in Berlin, where Hitler was to attend the annual memorial dedication. With a bomb planted in each of his two coat pockets, Gersdorff was to sidle up to Hitler as he reviewed the memorials and ignite the bombs, taking the dictator out-along with himself and everyone in the immediate vicinity. Schlabrendorff supplied Gersdorff with bombs-each with a 10-minute fuse.
Once at the exhibition hall, Gersdorff was informed that the Fuhrer was to inspect the exhibits for only eight minutes-not enough time for the fuses to melt down.

[Bodston]

Saturday 22 March 1941

Eight US Armored Divisions
Washington; The American United Press News Agency reported:
The US Credit Commission has published a report which General Marshall read at a secret session on March 5. The report explains that at the end of February the USA recieved rurther precise data about the panzer divisions that Germany deployed last year in its armored drive to the English Channel. The US Army is going to form eight armored divisions of this kind. At the moment it has only two.

[Peter Clare]

March 22, 1942
Cripps and Gandhi meet

On this day, Sir Stanford Cripps, British statesman, arrives in India for talks with Mohandas Gandhi on Indian independence, in what will become known as the Cripps Mission.
Cripps was a gifted student with a background in such diverse disciplines as chemistry and law. Always of weak health, he was deemed unfit for military service during World War I; instead, he worked in a government factory. After the war, Cripps was made a King's Counsel (1927). Shortly thereafter, he was knighted, and in 1931 was elected to Parliament as a Labour Party member for Bristol East. Cripps' politics were left of even the Labour Party, and when he advocated a united front with the Communists in 1938 against a growing European fascism, he was expelled from the party.
Once World War II erupted, Cripps was made ambassador to the Soviet Union. In 1942, he joined the War Cabinet and ventured to India to begin discussing two pressing issues: Japan's threat to India, and India's independence from Britain. The first meetings of the Cripps Mission took place on March 22, 1942. The first item on the agenda was India's defense against a growing Japanese empire. Cripps wanted to rally the Indian National Congress behind the cause. The leader of the Congress was Mohandas K. Gandhi.
Nicknamed Mahatma, the "Great-Souled," Gandhi was at the center of India's quest for independence from British colonial rule. His use of nonviolent protest both in South Africa, where he practiced law, and in India made him a model and icon for later social-protest movements. Gandhi deemed the negotiations made with the British government through the Cripps Mission unsatisfactory. It did not guarantee Indian independence--never mind the immediate autonomy that the Congress demanded--and threatened to "divide and keep conquered" by playing Hindu Indians against Muslim Indians. Consequently, though Gandhi hated fascism, he could not promise unqualified Indian support of the British during the war.
The Cripps Mission failed; Cripps returned to Britain and was eventually transferred to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Gandhi was arrested as a "threat" to Indian security. He was interned for two years before health issues forced his release.

[Peter Clare]

March 23, 1944
Germans slaughter Italian civilians

On this day, German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit.
Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German troops had occupied wider swaths of the peninsula to prevent the Allies from using Italy as a base of operations against German strongholds elsewhere, such as the Balkans. An Allied occupation of Italy would also put into their hands Italian airbases, further threatening German air power.
Italian partisans (antifascist guerrilla fighters) aided the Allied battle against the Germans. The Italian Resistance had been fighting underground against the fascist government of Mussolini long before its surrender, and now it fought against German fascism. The main weapon of a guerrilla, defined roughly as a member of a small-scale "irregular" fighting force that relies on limited and quick engagements of a conventional fighting force, is sabotage. Aside from killing enemy soldiers, the destruction of communication lines, transportation centers, and supply lines are essential guerrilla tactics.
On March 23, 1944, Italian partisans operating in Rome threw a bomb at an SS unit, killing 33 soldiers. The very next day, the Germans rounded up 335 Italian civilians and took them to the Adeatine caves. They were all shot dead as revenge for the SS soldiers. Of the civilian victims, 253 were Catholic, 70 were Jewish and the remaining 12 were unidentified.
Despite such setbacks, the partisans proved extremely effective in aiding the Allies; by the summer of 1944, resistance fighters had immobilized eight of the 26 German divisions in northern Italy. By war's end, Italian guerrillas controlled Venice, Milan, and Genoa, but at considerable cost. All told, the Resistance lost some 50,000 fighters-but won its republic.

[Peter Clare]

VIA RASELLA (Rome, March 23, 1944)

The 11th Company of the German 3rd Battalion of the SS Polizei Regiment 'Bozen', consisting of 156 men, were on their regular daily march through the streets of Rome to the Macao Barracks, when they became the target of the Italian underground movement. On March 23 (the 25th anniversary of the day Mussolini formed his Fascist Party) the police company were climbing the narrow Via Rasella when a bomb, placed in a road sweepers cart, exploded. Twenty six SS policemen were killed instantly and sixty others wounded, two more died later. Some civilians were also killed. The German Commandant of Rome, General Kurt Malzer, drunk and shrieking for revenge, ordered the arrest of all who lived on the street. Some 200 civilians were rounded up and turned over temporarily to the Italian authorities.
Hitler, on hearing of the bombing, immediately ordered that 30 Italians were to be shot for every policeman killed. This number was later reduced to 10. Within twenty four hours, 335 people were loaded onto lorries and driven to a network of caves on the Via Ardeatina discovered by the Germans earlier and where the disbanded Italian army had hidden barrels of petrol and some vehicles. At 3.30pm the executions started, each victim ordered to kneel and was then shot in the back of the head. By 8pm it was all over. In 1947, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, who was in charge of the executions, was arrested and faced court in Rome. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1972, Kappler was allowed to marry his German nurse, Anneliese Wenger and in 1976, with her help, he escaped from the prison hospital. Seven months later, at her home in Soltau in northern Germany, Herbert Kappler died of cancer of the stomach. SS General Malzer was sentenced to life, later reduced to 21 years, but died in prison on March 24, 1952. The instigator of this attack on the 11th Company was Marxist medical student Rosario Bentivegna, helped by partisan member Carla Capponi whom he later married. Dr. Bentivegna was later decorated with the Golden Medal of the Italian Resistance and his wife Carla became a member of the Italian Parliament.

Today, the Ardeatina Caves is a Memorial. Nearby is the Mausoleum containing the stone sarcophagi of the 335 victims.

[Peter Clare]

March 24, 1944
Wingate dies in Burma

On this day, Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate, leader of the 77th Indian Brigade, also called the Chindits, dies in a transport plane crash. He was 41 years old.
Wingate, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, was a famous eccentric who both quoted the Bible and advocated irregular warfare tactics. His career as a guerrilla fighter began as he organized Jewish underground patrols to beat back Arab raids in British-controlled Palestine in the 1930s. In 1941, Wingate led a mixed Ethiopian and Sudanese force in retaking Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, from the Italians, who had invaded in 1935.
Upon the beginning of Japan's China-Burma campaign, Wingate was sent to India to employ his experience as a guerrilla fighter and organize what became known as the Chindits--a brigade of specially trained Gurkha (Nepalese), Burmese, and British troops. The Chindits were composed of two units of Long Range Penetration Groups, each made up of men-and mules. Wingate and his brigade entered Japanese-controlled Burma from the west, crossed the Chindwin River, and proceeded with sabotage activity: sneakily penetrating Japanese-held territory, attacking supply lines, and cutting communications. Once in the field, the Chindits were cut off from other units and could be supplied only by airdrops.
One of the most effective Chindit attacks was against the Mandalay-Myitkina railway, when they blew up three bridges while also beating back Japanese troops determined to stop the demolitions. The Chindits continued to wreak havoc--at one point killing 100 Japanese soldiers while suffering only one loss themselves--until a lack of supplies and troublesome terrain forced them back to India.
On the night of March 24, Wingate boarded a transport plane at the Broadway Base in Burma, destined for India. The pilot had complained earlier about the performance of one of the plane's twin engines, but after Wingate talked with the aircrew, a decision was made to take off. The plane never made it to India. The crash was so violent that virtually none of Wingate's remains were found.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill eulogized Wingate before the House of Commons that August: "There was a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny. He has gone, but his spirit lives on in the long range penetration groups, and has underlain all these intricate and daring air operations and military operations based on air transport and on air supply."

[Peter Clare]

24 March 1942

Air Attacks on Murmansk.

From the war diaries of Luftflotte 5.

In the forenoon, an attack was made by twelve Ju.87s on ships and harbour installations in Murmansk. Hits were observed on quay installations and on a large merchant ship at the quayside. Fighter defences consisted of 7-10 Hurricanes. In the afternoon, a dive-bombing attack was carried out against Murmansk harbour; three direct hits were observed on quay installations, and two direct hits fell on store houses. One Ju.87 was shot down by enemy fighters.
During the bomber operations against Murmansk in the morning, there was a fighter-battle 2000 metres above the town. In the course of this, our fighters shot down one Hurricane.