Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

1941 : Lend-Lease introduced into Congress


On this day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program is brought before the U.S. Congress for consideration.
Roosevelt devised the Lend-Lease program as a means of aiding Great Britain in its war effort against the Germans. The program gave the chief executive the power to "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of" any military resources he deemed in the ultimate interest of the defense of the United States. The idea was that if Britain were better able to defend itself, the security of the U.S. would be enhanced. The program also served to bolster British morale, as they would no longer feel alone in their struggle against Hitler.
Congress authorized the program on March 11. By November, after much heated debate, Congress extended the terms of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, even though Stalin's USSR had already been the recipient of American military weapons and had been promised $1 billion in financial aid.
By the end of the war, more than $50 billion in funds, weapons, aircraft, and ships were distributed to 44 countries through the program. After the war, the Lend-Lease program morphed into the Marshall Plan, which allocated funds for the revitalization of "friendly" democratic nations.

[Peter Clare]

USS ARGONAUT(January 10, 1943)
The Argonaut was the largest submarine ever built in the US. (until the advent of nuclear submarines) At 3,128 tons she was designed primarily as a minelayer but later, in 1942, was converted to a troop carrying submarine and based at Brisbane, Australia. In January, 1943, while on patrol in the dangerous waters between New Britain and Bougainville, just south of St. George's Channel, her captain, Lt. Cmdr. John Pierce, spotted a Japanese convoy of five freighters with their three destroyer escorts. When in position for an attack the Argonaut fired one torpedo at one of the freighters and was immediately counterattacked by the destroyers. Badly damaged by depth charges, the destroyers circled the Argonaut pumping shell after shell into her hull until she sank below the waves taking 105 officers and men with her to the sea bed. There were no survivors.

[Peter Clare]

1942 : Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff established


On this day, the United States and Great Britain agree to have the British Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. Joint Chiefs work together, either through meetings or representatives, to advise the leaders of both nations on military policy during the war.
During the Arcadia Conference, which began on December 22, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., to discuss a unified Anglo-American war strategy and a future peace. Toward this end, the Combined Chiefs of Staff was created. The British Chiefs of Staff, composed of the three service heads (army, navy, air force), and their U.S. counterparts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were made into one office, with the Combined Staff Planners and the Combined Secretariat offering administrative support.

[Peter Clare]

1951 : The "Witch of Buchenwald" is sentenced to prison


On this day, Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment in a court in West Germany. Ilse Koch was nicknamed the "Witch of Buchenwald" for her extraordinary sadism.
Born in Dresden, Germany, Ilse, a librarian, married SS. Col. Karl Koch in 1936. Colonel Koch, a man with his own reputation for sadism, was the commandant of the Sashsenhausen concentration camp, two miles north of Berlin. He was transferred after three years to Buchenwald concentration camp, 4.5 miles northwest of Weimar; the Buchenwald concentration camp held a total of 20,000 slave laborers during the war.
Ilse, a large woman with red hair, was given free reign in the camp, whipping prisoners with her riding crop as she rode by on her horse, forcing prisoners to have sex with her, and, most horrifying, collecting lampshades, book covers, and gloves made from the skin of tattooed camp prisoners. A German inmate gave the following testimony during the Nuremberg war trials: "All prisoners with tattooing on them were to report to the dispensary.... After the prisoners had been examined, the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department, where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further."
Karl Koch was arrested, ironically enough, by his SS superiors for "having gone too far." It seems he had a penchant for stealing even the belongings of wealthy, well-placed Germans. He was tried and hanged in 1944. Ilse Koch was tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, but the American military governor of the occupied zone subsequently reduced her sentence to four years. His reason, "lack of evidence," caused a Senate investigation back home. She was released but arrested again, tried by a West German court, and sentenced to life. She committed suicide in 1967 by hanging herself with a bedsheet.

[jacobtowne]

1942. First "Blackout Caddy" is built.

The first "blackout" Cadillacs were completed. Due to restrictions on materials necessary to the war effort, these cars had painted trim rather than chrome. They also lacked spare tires and other luxuries.

JT

[Peter Clare]

1945 : Hitler descends into his bunker


On this day, Adolf Hitler takes to his underground bunker, where he remains for 105 days until he commits suicide.
Hitler retired to his bunker 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 Nazi colleagues like Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Constantly at his side during this time were his companion, Eva Braun, and his Alsatian, Blondi.
On April 29, Hitler married Eva in their bunker hideaway. Eva Braun met Hitler while working as an assistant to Hitler's official photographer. 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 bunker even as the Russians closed in.
Only hours after they were united in marriage, both Hitler and Eva committed suicide. Warned by officers that the Russians were only about a day 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 to take his life. 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 pistol.

[Peter Clare]

1944 : Allies make their move on Cassino, Italy


On this day, Operation Panther, the Allied invasion of Cassino, in central Italy, is launched.
The Italian Campaign had been underway for more than six months. Beginning with the invasion of Sicily, the Allies had been fighting their way up the Italian peninsula against German resistance--the Italians had already surrendered and signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943. The ancient town of Cassino, near the Rapido River, was a strategic point in the German Gustav Line, a defensive front across central Italy and based at the Rapido, Garigliano, and Sangro rivers. Taking Cassino would mean a breach in the German line and their inevitable retreat farther north.
Although the campaign to take Cassino commenced in January, the town was not safely in Allied hands until May. The campaign caused considerable destruction, including the bombing of the ancient Benedictine abbey Monte Cassino, which took the lives of a bishop and several monks.

[Peter Clare]

HMS MATABELE (January 17, 1942)
On duty in the Barents Sea, escorting convoy PQ-8 to Murmansk in northern Russia, the destroyer was hit by two torpedoes from the German submarineU-454 Both her magazines blew up sinking the ship within two minutes. Survivors swimming in the water were then killed when her depth charges detonated or froze to death in the icy waters. There were only two survivors from her crew of 200. The U-454 (Kptlt. Burckhard Hackländer) was later bombed and sunk in the Bay of Biscay. Thirty two of her crew were lost, 14 survived.

[Peter Clare]

1943 : Germans resume deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka


On this day, the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the concentration camp at Treblinka is resumed-but not without much bloodshed and resistance along the way.
On July 18, 1942, Heinrich Himmler promoted Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hess to SS major. He also ordered that the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish quarter constructed by the Nazis upon the occupation of Poland and enclosed first by barbed wire and then by brick walls, be depopulated-a "total cleansing," as he described it. The inhabitants were to be transported to what became a second extermination camp constructed at the railway village of Treblinka, 62 miles northeast of Warsaw.
Within the first seven weeks of Himmler's order, more than 250,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by rail and gassed to death, marking the largest single act of destruction of any population group, Jewish or non-Jewish, civilian or military, in the war. Upon arrival at "T. II," as this second camp at Treblinka was called, prisoners were separated by sex, stripped, and marched into what were described as "bathhouses," but were in fact gas chambers. T. II's first commandant was Dr. Irmfried Eberl, age 32, the man who had headed up the euthanasia program of 1940 and had much experience with the gassing of victims, especially children. He was assisted in his duties by several hundred Ukrainian and about 1,500 Jewish prisoners, who removed gold teeth from victims before hauling the bodies to mass graves.
In January 1943, after a four-month hiatus, the deportations started up again. A German SS unit entered the ghetto and began rounding up its denizens-but they did not go without a fight. Six hundred Jews were killed in the streets as they struggled with the Germans. Rebels with smuggled firearms opened fire on the SS troops. The Germans returned fire-machine-gun fire against the Jews' pistol shots. Nine Jewish rebels fell-as did several Germans. The fighting continued for days, with the Jews refusing to surrender and even taking arms from their Germans persecutors in surprise attacks.
Amazingly, the Germans withdrew from the ghetto in the face of the unexpected resistance. They likely did not realize how few armed resisters there were, but the fact that resistance was given at all intimidated them. But there was no happy ending. Before this new incursion into the ghetto was over, 6,000 more Jews were transported to their likely deaths at Treblinka.

[Ron Goldstein]

Dear Peter C

Forgive me for going a little "off thread" but I felt I had to make comment about Cassino.

I was recently round at a friends house, where I was paying my weekly visit to help him brush up his computer skills.

He had a particular problem on his computer that needed a solution from the company that had sold him the system and I found myself chatting on the phone with a computer expert.

We went into a mode that allowed the expert to operate his computer by remote control and he was interested to see that the screen saver showed him visiting a cemetery.

I pointed out that the photo displayed was my friend Lew re-visiting the CWGC Cemetery at Cassino and mentioned that he and I had both served in the same unit.

The conversation then went something like this:

Expert: Where did you say that was?
Ron: Cassino
Expert: Where's that?
Ron: May I ask how old you are?
Expert: Thirty-nine
Ron: Are you seriously telling me that you've never heard of Cassino?
Expert: No, where is it
Ron: Italy.... and tell me, did you not have any relatives who served in WW2?
Expert: Yes, one in the Navy and one in the RAF, but they have both since passed away.

I finally got the expert to promise me that he would look up "Cassino" on GOOGLE after he had put the computer problem to rights and Lew and I simply stared at each other.

Please tell me that other people of a similar age group have heard of Cassino, or am I asking too much ?

Ron