Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

April 26, 1894
Rudolf Hess is born

Rudolf Hess, Nazi party secretary and deputy to Adolf Hitler who caused an international sensation when he parachuted into Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a truce between Britain and Germany, is born on this day in Alexandria, Egypt.
Hess joined the Nazi Party as early as 1920 and became a friend and confidant to Hitler, editing much of Mein Kampf as it was dictated to him in Landsberg Prison, where both landed after the famous, and failed, November 1923 Munich beer hall putsch. On May 10, 1941, the day Hitler planned to invade Russia, Hess parachuted into Scotland, hoping to negotiate peace with Britain, in the person of the Duke of Hamilton, whom Hess claimed to have met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Such a peace would have prevented Germany from fighting on two fronts and greatly increased Hess's own prestige within the Nazi regime, many of whose members saw Hess as little more than a yes-man and sycophant (his nickname was "the Brown Mouse").
Hess did, in fact, find peace--in the Tower of London, where the British imprisoned him, the last man ever to be held there under lock and key. After the war, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau prison by the Nuremberg tribunal. He died, in prison, in 1987.

[Peter Clare]

YOSHIDA MARU (April 26-May 6, 1944)

A Japanese convoy (Operation Take-Ichi) transporting around 20,000 troops, en route from Shanghai to reinforce the Japanese garrison of Halmahera on the Vogelkop Peninsula, was attacked by the American submarine USS Jack. The Yoshida Maru was sunk off Minila Bay. Later on the 6th. May, the American submarine USS Gurnard spotted the convoy and attacked. Her torpedoes sank the transports Tenshizan Maru (6,886 tons), Taijima Maru (6,995 tons) and the Aden Maru (5,824 tons). Nearly half of the troops that embarked at Shanghai were lost.

[Peter Clare]

April 27, 1941
German forces enter Athens

On this day in 1941, the German army enters the Greek capital, signaling the end of Greek resistance. All mainland Greece and all the Greek Aegean islands except Crete are under German occupation by May 11. In fending off the Axis invaders, the Greeks suffer the loss of 15,700 men. Greece will not be liberated until 1944, by British troops from the Mediterranean theater.

[Peter Clare]

SLAMAT (April 27, 1941)

The 11,636 ton Dutch passenger liner was taken over for service as a troop transport and while engaged in the evacuation of British and New Zealand troops from Crete, she was attacked for the second time by German aircraft of Luftwaffe JG-77 and sank with the loss of 193 men. Of the troops on board, around 700 were rescued by the destroyers HMS Diamond and HMS Wryneck, both of which were later bombed and sunk, drowning most of the survivors of the Slamat. There was one officer, 41 seamen and 8 soldiers saved from this triple disaster, leaving a death toll of 843 men.
For more, see http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~popta/slamat/index.htm.

The Dutch passenger liner Slamat

[Peter Clare]

HMS WRYNECK and HMS DIAMOND (April 27, 1941)

British destroyers (900 tons) attacked by German Stuka aircraft and sunk off Nauplia, Greece. She was helping in the evacuation of troops from Greece, and in the process had picked up, with the help of another destroyer HMS Diamond, around 700 troops and crew from the 11,600 ton Dutch liner Slamat, now converted as a troopship and under British control, which had been attacked and damaged earlier.
HMS Wryneck and HMS Diamond were both sunk in the attack with the loss of nearly both their crews and all the survivors of the Slamat. The Wryneck lost seven officers and 98 ratings, the Diamond lost seven officers and 141 ratings. Of approximately 950 troops and crews of both ships only one officer, fourteen naval ratings and eight soldiers were rescued.

[Peter Clare]

April 28, 1945
Mussolini is executed

On this day in 1945, "Il Duce," Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.

The 61-year-old deposed former dictator of Italy was established by his German allies as the figurehead of a puppet government in northern Italy during the German occupation toward the close of the war. As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, defeat of the Axis powers all but certain, Mussolini considered his options. Not wanting to fall into the hands of either the British or the Americans, and knowing that the communist partisans, who had been fighting the remnants of roving Italian fascist soldiers and thugs in the north, would try him as a war criminal, he settled on escape to a neutral country.

He and his mistress made it to the Swiss border, only to discover that the guards had crossed over to the partisan side. Knowing they would not let him pass, he disguised himself in a Luftwaffe coat and helmet, hoping to slip into Austria with some German soldiers. His subterfuge proved incompetent, and he and Petacci were discovered by partisans and shot, their bodies then transported by truck to Milan, where they were hung upside down and displayed publicly for revilement by the masses.

[PeterG]

Originally Posted by Peter Clare

April 28, 1945
[Mussolini]and his mistress made it to the Swiss border, only to discover that the guards had crossed over to the partisan side. Knowing they would not let him pass, he disguised himself in a Luftwaffe coat and helmet, hoping to slip into Austria with some German soldiers. His subterfuge proved incompetent, and he and Petacci were discovered by partisans and shot, their bodies then transported by truck to Milan, where they were hung upside down and displayed publicly for revilement by the masses.

Peter

It was Rachele, Mussolini's wife, who tried to get into Switzerland, not Mussolini. It was Guido Buffarini-Guidi, the Fascist Minister of the Interior in the Salò Republic, who had pleaded with Mussolini to go to Switzerland but Mussolini rejected the proposal outright dismissing it as 'hardly serious'. The best account in English is here. Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce - Google Ricerca Libri Chapter 21 of the Last Days of Mussolini by Ray Mosley.

Incidentally, there is absolutely no way that Fascist Republican Border Guards could go over to the Partisans in April 1945. It was far too late. I was there when this happened, scores of Fascists were summarily shot or hanged publicly. This was the end of a bitter and bloody civil war and tempers were running extremely high.

Peter

[Peter Clare]

April 29, 1945
Adolf and Eva marry

Eva Braun met Hitler while employed as an assistant to Hitler's official photographer. Of a middle-class Catholic background, Braun spent her time with Hitler out of public view, entertaining herself by skiing and swimming. She had no discernible influence on Hitler's political career but provided a certain domesticity to the life of the dictator. Loyal to the end, she refused to leave the Berlin bunker buried beneath the chancellery as the Russians closed in. The couple was married only hours before they both committed suicide.
Also on this day in 1945, the Americans liberate the concentration camp at Dachau. Five hundred German garrison troops guarding the camp are killed within an hour, some by inmates, but most by the American liberators, who are horrified by what they bear witness to, including huge piles of emaciated dead bodies found in railway cars and near the crematorium.
There were 33,000 survivors of the camp, 2,539 of them Jewish. Dachau, about 12 miles north of Munich, was the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime, only five weeks after Hitler came to power. At least 160,000 prisoners passed through the main camp and another 90,000 through its 150 branches scattered throughout southern Germany and Austria. Medical experiments, ranging from studying the effects of freezing on warm-blooded creatures to treating intentionally inflicted malaria, were carried out on prisoners. At least 32,000 prisoners died of malnutrition and mistreatment at the camp itself; innumerable more were transported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. A memorial was established at the campsite on September 11, 1956

[Peter Clare]

April 30, 1945
Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his underground bunker

Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, burrowed away in a refurbished air-raid shelter, consumes a cyanide capsule, then shoots himself with a pistol, on this day in 1945, as his "1,000-year" Reich collapses above him.
Hitler had repaired to his bunker on January 16, after deciding to remain in Berlin for the last great siege of the war. Fifty-five feet under the chancellery (Hitler's headquarters as chancellor), the shelter contained 18 small rooms and was fully self-sufficient, with its own water and electrical supply. He left only rarely (once to decorate a squadron of Hitler Youth) and spent most of his time micromanaging what was left of German defenses and entertaining such guests as Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. At his side were Eva Braun, whom he married only two days before their double suicide, and his dog, an Alsatian named Blondi.

Warned by officers that the Russians were only a day or so from overtaking the chancellery and urged to escape to Berchtesgarden, a small town in the Bavarian Alps where Hitler owned a home, the dictator instead chose suicide. It is believed that both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules (which had been tested for their efficacy on his "beloved" dog and her pups). For good measure, he shot himself with his service pistol.

The bodies of Hitler and Eva were cremated in the chancellery garden by the bunker survivors (as per Der Fuhrer's orders) and reportedly later recovered in part by Russian troops. A German court finally officially declared Hitler dead, but not until 1956.

[Peter Clare]

SS NERISSA (April 30, 1941)

Canadian 5,583 ton passenger vessel built in Scotland in 1926 for the Warren Line. Engaged on the New York-Bermuda run before the war, she was pressed into service as a troop carrier and was sunk during her 40th wartime crossing of the Atlantic by the U-552 (Erich Topp) while en route from Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England. Carrying 175 passengers, mostly Canadian Army personnel and a class of newly graduated RAF pilots, the Nerissa, under the command of Captain Gilbert Watson, sank in less than four minutes with the loss of 124 passengers and 83 crewmembers including Captain Watson who stood on the bow of his ship as it went down and yelling to his men in the water 'Good luck boys'. The 84 Survivors were picked up by the destroyer HMS Veteran and eventually landed at Londonderry in Northern Ireland 200 miles away. (Erich Topp, who sank the American destroyer Reuben James on October 31, 1941, survived the war and died in Germany on December 26, 2005, at age 91)

The Canadian passenger ship SS Nerissa