Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

May 29, 1942
Jews in Paris are forced to sew a yellow star on their coats

On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler orders all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.
Joseph Goebbels had made the persecution, and ultimately the extermination, of Jews a personal priority from the earliest days of the war, often recording in his diary such statements as: "They are no longer people but beasts," and "[T]he Jews ... are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews."
But Goebbels was not the first to suggest this particular form of isolation. "The yellow star may make some Catholics shudder," wrote a French newspaper at the time. "It renews the most strictly Catholic tradition." Intermittently, throughout the history of the papal states, that territory in central Italy controlled by the pope, Jews were often confined to ghettoes and forced to wear either yellow hats or yellow stars.

[Peter Clare]

May 30, 1942
British bombard Cologne in Operation Millennium

On this day in 1942, a thousand-plane raid on the German city of Cologne is launched by Great Britain. Almost 1,500 tons of bombs rain down in 90 minutes, delivering a devastating blow to the Germans' medieval city as well as its morale.
Air Marshal A.T. (later Sir Arthur) Harris, commander in chief of the Bomber Command, planned Operation Millennium. It was his goal to prevent significant losses of Royal Air Force bombers by concentrating air attacks in massive bomber raids, overwhelming the enemy by numbers and delivering decisive, crippling blows. Harris would need to beef up the relatively small number of 416 "first line" aircraft needed, though; to those he had to add second-line and training squadron bombers, thus creating an aircraft force of 1,046.
On the night of May 30, Cologne was besieged: 600 acres of the city sustained heavy damage, 45,000 Germans were left homeless and 469 were killed. The chemical and machine tool industries, the main targets of the raid, were rendered useless. The cost to the British: 40 bombers, or less than 4 percent of the total that participated.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who approved the raid, telegraphed President Franklin Roosevelt the next day: "I hope you were pleased with our mass air attack ... there is plenty more to come."

[Peter Clare]

30-31 May 1942 -


The first 1,000-bomber raid. 1,047 aircraft were des patched to Cologne, of which 868 attacked the main target dropping 1,455 tons of explosives, two-thirds of which were incendiaries. The city suffered severe damage and 469 people were killed. About 250 factories and 18,400 houses were destroyed or damaged. Half of the city's power supply was out of action, and some 12,000 fires started, many of which burned for days. Forty one aircraft were lost, and Fg Off T Manser was posthumously awarded the VC for remaining at the controls of his No. 50 Sqn Manchester to allow his crew to bale out.

[Peter Clare]

May 31, 1941
Germans conquer Crete

On this day in 1941, the last of the Allies evacuate after 11 days of battling a successful German parachute invasion of the island of Crete. Crete is now Axis-occupied territory.
On the morning of May 20, some 3,000 members of Germany's Division landed on Crete, which was patrolled and protected by more than 28,000 Allied troops and an almost equal number of Greek soldiers. The German invasion, although anticipated, was not taken seriously; the real fear was of an attack from the sea. Those initial 3,000 parachutists were reinforced-to the tune of an additional 19,000 men, arriving by parachute drop, glider, and troop carrier.
The Allies remained optimistic; many of the German soldiers who dropped from the sky died or were injured on impact. The rest were undersupplied and inexperienced. But by the May 26, British General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the defense of Crete, already reported that their position was hopeless. Evacuation of Allied troops began on the 28th. By the night of the 31st, the last of the Allies that would make it out had left the seaport of Sphakia; 5,000 men would be left behind in the hands of the Germans. The total loss of Allied land soldiers in the Cretan engagements was 1,742; a further 2,265 sailors were lost at sea. Three cruisers and six destroyers had been sunk. The Germans suffered a loss of about 4,000 men.
Strangely, Hitler, despite the victory, considered his "losses" too great to pursue further gains in the Mediterranean and finally drive Great Britain out of the area

[Peter Clare]

June 1, 1942
News of death camp killings becomes public for first time

On this day in 1942, a Warsaw underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade, makes public the news of the gassing of tens of thousands of Jews at Chelmno, a death camp in Poland-almost seven months after extermination of prisoners began.
A year earlier, the means of effecting what would become the "Final Solution," the mass extermination of European Jewry, was devised: 700 Jews were murdered by channeling gas fumes back into a van used to transport them to the village of Chelmno, in Poland. This "gas van" would become the death chamber for a total of 360,000 Jews from more than 200 communities in Poland. The advantage of this form of extermination was that it was silent and invisible.
One month before the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, during which Nazi officials decided to address formally the "Jewish question," the gas vans in Chelmno were used to kill up to 1,000 Jews a day. The vans provided the "Final Solution" for Adolf Eichmann and other Wannsee attendees. The mass gassings were the most orderly and systematic means of eliminating European Jewry. Eventually, more such vans were employed in other parts of Poland. There was no thought of selecting out the "fit" from the "unfit" for slave labor, as in Auschwitz. There was only one goal: utter extermination.
On June 1, 1942, the story of a young Jew, Emanuel Ringelblum, (who escaped from the Chelmno death camp after being forced to bury bodies as they were thrown out of the gas vans), was published in the underground Polish Socialist newspaper Liberty Brigade. The West now knew the "bloodcurdling news ... about the slaughter of Jews," and it had a name-Chelmno.

[Peter Clare]

HMS SKIPJACK (June 1, 1940)

Royal Navy minesweeper (Lt. Cdr. F. Proudfoot) assisting in the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, was subjected to intensive bombing by a force of German bombers off La Panna. On board the Skipjack were between 250 and 300 soldiers just rescued from the beach, (the exact number is not known). The ship received a direct hit which sank her immediately. Most of the unfortunate troops and crew were drowned.

[Peter Clare]

1 Jun 1941 - No. 120 Sqn, RAF Coastal Command, forms at
Nutts Corner, Northern Ireland, with American-built Liberator long-range maritime patrol aircraft. Also, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Tedder is appointed AOC-in-C of RAF Middle East Command.

[Peter Clare]

1-2 Jun 1942 - The second 1,000-bomber raid; 956 aircraft attack Essen. The success of the first raid on Cologne is not repeated as many crews mistakenly bomb other cities.

[Peter Clare]

June 2, 1944
United States begins "shuttle bombing" in Operation Frantic

On this day in 1944, American bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force launch Operation Frantic, a series of bombing raids over Central Europe, alighting from airbases in southern Italy, but landing at airbases in Poltava, in the Soviet Union, in what is called "shuttle bombing."
The Fifteenth U.S. Air Force was created solely to cripple Germany's war economy. Operating out of Italy, and commanded by General Carl Spaatz, a World War I fighter pilot, the Fifteenth was recruited by a desperate Joseph Stalin to help the Red Army in its campaign in Romania. In exchange for the Fifteenth's assistance, Stalin allowed the American bombers to land at airbases within the Soviet Union as they carried out Operation Frantic, a plan to devastate German industrial regions in occupied Silesia, Hungary, and Romania. Given that such bombing patterns would have made return flights to Foggia and other parts of southern Italy, the Fifteenth's launching points, impossible because of refueling problems, the "shuttle" to Poltava was the solution that made Frantic a reality.
Before it was shortened to Frantic, the operation was dubbed Operation Frantic Joe-a commentary on Joe Stalin's original urgent appeal for help. It was changed to avoid offending the Soviet premier.
Also on this day in 1944, the date for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, was fixed for June 5. Originally June 4, it was acknowledged by Allied strategists that bad weather would make keeping to any one day problematic. German General Karl von Rundstedt, intercepting an Allied radio signal relating the June 4 date, was convinced that four consecutive days of good weather was necessary for the successful prosecution of the invasion. There was no such pattern of good weather in sight. The general became convinced that D-Day would not come off within the first week of June at all.

[Peter Clare]

June 3, 1940
Germans bomb Paris

On this day in 1940, the German air force bombs Paris, killing 254 people, most of them civilians.
Determined to wreck France's economy and military, reduce its population, and in short, cripple its morale as well as its ability to rally support for other occupied nations, the Germans bombed the French capital without regard to the fact that most of the victims were civilians, including schoolchildren. The bombing succeeded in provoking just the right amount of terror; France's minister of the interior could only keep government officials from fleeing Paris by threatening them with severe penalties.
Despite the fact that the British Expeditionary Force was on the verge of completing its evacuation at Dunkirk, and that France was on the verge of collapse to the German invaders, the British War Cabinet was informed that Norway's king, Haakon, had expressed complete confidence that the Allies would win in the end. The king, having made his prediction, then fled Norway for England, his own country now under German occupation.