Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

1943 : The Battle of the Bismarck Sea


On this day, U.S. and Australian land-based planes begin an offensive against a convoy of Japanese ships in the Bismarck Sea, in the western Pacific.
On March 1, U.S. reconnaissance planes spotted 16 Japanese ships en route to Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea. The Japanese were attempting to keep from losing the island and their garrisons there by sending 7,000 reinforcements and aircraft fuel and supplies. But a U.S. bombing campaign, beginning March 2 and lasting until the March 4, consisting of 137 American bombers supported by U.S. and Australian fighters, destroyed eight Japanese troop transports and four Japanese destroyers. More than 3,000 Japanese troops and sailors drowned as a consequence, and the supplies sunk with their ships. Of 150 Japanese fighter planes that attempted to engage the American bombers, 102 were shot down. It was an utter disaster for the Japanese--the U.S. 5th Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force dropped a total of 213 tons of bombs on the Japanese convoy.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose March 4, the official end of the battle, to congratulate President Franklin D. Roosevelt, since that day was also the 10th anniversary of the president's first inauguration. "Accept my warmest congratulations on your brilliant victory in the Pacific, which fitly salutes the end of your first 10 years."

[Peter Clare]

I.J.N. ASASHIO (March 2/7, 1943)
The Japanese destroyer Asahio was one of eight on escort duty guarding a convoy of eight crowded transports carrying 5,954 soldiers of the Japanese 20th and 51st Infantry Divisions of the Japanese Imperial Army, plus 400 naval marines, from Rabaul to Lae, New Guinea, a distance of 260 miles. The convoy was spotted and attacked in relays by a force of 268 American and Australian fighters and bombers of all types from airfields around Milne Bay in Papua. The convoy was spotted while crossing the Huon Gulf and heading towards Lae, about eighty miles away. The attack turned out to be pure slaughter in one of the biggest air attacks of the Pacific war. All the troop transports, including the 5,000 ton Kyokusei Maru, and the 3,800 ton Shinai Maru, and four destroyers were sunk in this concentrated and persistent attack. Some of the transports were scuttled, the troops making their way to shore in lifeboats and rafts. On the way, most were destroyed by bombing and strafing by Allied fighters, many of the troops being taken by sharks as they struggled in the water like drowning rats.
The slaughter continued for days until nothing more lived on the waters of Huon Gulf. (A legitimate act of war to prevent those enemy troops from reaching land and being rearmed to fight another day). The destroyer Arashio 1,500 tons (sister ship of the Asashio) was sunk, as were two others, the Tokitsukaza, 2,000 tons, and the Shirayuki, 1,700 tons. It was believed that 2,890 Japanese troops and ships crews perished. Around 850 were rushed to Lae at the start of the attack, the destroyers then returning to the battle zone to rescue more survivors. Some 3,145 men were picked up from the water by the Japanese destroyers and a couple of Japanese submarines and taken to Rabaul. Ninety two men managed to reach the shore of New Guinea and a small number made it safely to nearby islands. Only three allied fighters and two bombers were shot down, the Japanese lost 63 aircraft.

[Peter Clare]

1945 : Finland declares war on Germany


On this day, Finland, under increasing pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, finally declares war on its former partner, Germany.
After the German invasion of Poland, the USSR, wanting to protect Leningrad more than ever from encroachment by the West--even its dubious Nonaggression Pact partner Germany--began demanding control of various disputed areas from Finland, including part of the Karelian Isthmus (the land bridge that gave access to Leningrad). Finland resisted the Soviet pressure. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin responded by enacting the "small print" of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact the USSR had signed with Germany back in August, which gave the USSR free reign in its "sphere of influence." The Soviets invaded Finland on November 30, 1939. (Stalin claimed that Finnish troops opened fire on Soviet troops.)
The Finns stunned everyone by beating back the initial Soviet offensive. Although their resistance consisted of only small numbers of trained soldiers (on skis and bicycles!) the refusal to submit made headlines around the world. President Roosevelt quickly extended $10 million in credit to Finland, while also noting that the Finns were the only people to pay back their World War I war debt to the United States in full. But by the time the Soviets had a chance to regroup and send in massive reinforcements, the Finnish resistance was spent. In March 1940, negotiations with the Soviets began, and Finland signed the Treaty of Moscow, which handed over control of the Karelian Isthmus.
As tension increased between Germany and the USSR, Finland saw in Hitler a possible ally in gaining back its lost territory. German troops were allowed on Finnish soil as the Germans prepared for their invasion of the Soviet Union-a war that the Finns joined. Although Finnish troops captured large areas of East Karelia back from the Soviet Union, they were reluctant to trespass the old borders of 1939 and help Germany in the siege of Leningrad.
But repeated German setbacks resulted in putting the Soviet Union on the offensive again. Shortly after the Red Army broke through to the Karelian Isthmus in June 1944, the Finnish president, Risto Ryti, resigned. (Around this same time, the United States broke off relations with Finland after repeated demands that Ryti renounce his alliance with Germany were rebuffed.) Ryti's successor, Gustaf Mannerheim, immediately sued for an armistice with the Soviet Union. This was signed on September 19, 1944; Finland agreed to the terms of the 1940 Treaty of Moscow and to throw all German troops off Finnish soil. The final act of capitulation came on March 3, 1945, with a formal declaration of war against the already dying Germany.

[Peter Clare]

1941 : Britain launches Operation Claymore


The British navy raids a German position off the coast of Norway and inside the Arctic Circle-the Lofoten Islands. The raid, code name Operation Claymore, proved highly destructive of its target--an armed German trawler--but ultimately a failure in achieving its objective, the capture of an Enigma decoding machine.
The Brits severely damaged the trawler, called the Krebs, and killed 14 German sailors, took another 25 prisoner, and destroyed the Germans' local stockpile of oil. While the attack boosted British public morale temporarily, the Enigma machine still eluded the British military. The commander of the Krebs, Lieutenant Hans Kupfinger, threw it overboard before he was killed in the raid, but the Brits were able to recover documents that gave clues to the Enigma's workings. British intelligence was able to piece together enough of the German coding system to track German naval activity for about five weeks.


CMBINEDOPS Lofoten

[Peter Clare]

HMAS YARRA (March 4, 1942)
Australian Navy destroyer which, in January, took part in the rescue of 1,804 persons from the blazing liner Empress of Asia. On March 4, while escorting a small convoy on its way to Darwin, Australia, she was attacked by three Japanese cruisers, the Atago, Maya and Takao. Their gunfire was directed by a float plane that was circling overhead. In spite of being outgunned the Yarra headed straight for the enemy ships, her guns blazing. Badly damaged, the destroyer began to sink. Eighteen men managed to get into rafts but only 13 were alive when rescued four days later.
The gallant ship took 138 crewmen to the bottom.

[Peter Clare]

1945 : Dutch Resistance ambushes SS officer--unwittingly


Members of the Dutch Resistance who were attempting to hijack a truck in Apeldoorn, Holland, ambush Lt. Gen. Hanns Rauter, an SS officer. During the following week, the German SS executed 263 Dutch in retaliation.
The Dutch Resistance was one of the fiercest of all the underground movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. "The Dutch never accepted the German contention that...the war was over," wrote the Dutch foreign minister in a postwar account of life under Nazi occupation. "[T]heir acts of resistance and sabotage grew more audacious as time passed."
Those acts of resistance and sabotage included harboring Allied soldiers and pilots who either parachuted or crash-landed within Dutch territory, harboring Dutch Jews, and killing German troops. The Resistance was composed of representatives from all segments of Dutch society, ranging from the most conservative to communists.
Rauter was head of the SS in Holland and answered directly to Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander. In 1941, during a strike that broke out in Amsterdam among Dutch workers to protest the round-up of almost 400 Dutch Jews, Hauter ordered the SS and German troops to open fire on the strikers, killing 11. The Jews, whom the strikers were trying to protect, were deported to Buchenwald. All were dead by the fall.
Rauter was riding in an SS truck, filled with food destined for the Luftwaffe (the German air force) based near Apeldoorn on March 6, 1945, when some young members of the Dutch Resistance ambushed the truck. The closing days of the war had left much of occupied Holland close to famine conditions, and the guerrillas were determined to co-opt the food. They did not know Rauter was in the truck when it was attacked; Rauter was shot during the heist attempt but lived. In retaliation, the SS proceeded to round up and execute 263 Dutchmen, some of whom were Resistance fighters who were already being held in prison.
Rauter was tried for war crimes by the Dutch court Den Haag. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He appealed the sentence at Nuremberg in 1949, but the sentence was upheld and he was executed that year.

[Peter Clare]

SS HARRY LUCKENBACK (March 7, 1943)
American freighter torpedoed by the U-91 (Walkerling) while part of Convoy HX-229 sailing from New York to the United Kingdom. On board were 54 crewmembers and 26 Naval Armed Guard. Three lifeboats were seen to get away from the sinking vessel but were never seen or heard from again.

[Peter Clare]

1941 : British forces arrive in Greece


On this day, a British expeditionary force from North Africa lands in Greece.
In October 1940, Mussolini's army, already occupying Albania, invaded Greece in what proved to be a disastrous military campaign for the Duce's forces. Mussolini surprised everyone with this move against Greece, but he was not to be upstaged by recent Nazi conquests. According to Hitler, who was stunned by a move that he knew would be a strategic blunder, Mussolini should have concentrated on North Africa by continuing the advance into Egypt. The Italians paid for Mussolini's hubris, as the Greeks succeeded in pushing the Italian invaders back into Albania after just one week, and the Axis power spent the next three months fighting for its life in a series of defensive battles.
Mussolini's precipitate maneuver frustrated Hitler because it opened an opportunity for the British to enter Greece and establish an airbase in Athens, putting the Brits within striking distance of valuable oil reserves in Romania, which Hitler relied upon for his war machine. It also meant that Hitler would have to divert forces from North Africa, a high strategic priority, to bail Mussolini out of Greece-and postpone Hitler's planned invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Brits indeed saw an opening in Greece, and on March 7, 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill diverted troops from Egypt and sent 58,000 British and Aussie troops to occupy the Olympus-Vermion line. But the Brits would be blown out of the Pelopponesus Peninsula when Hitler's forces invaded on the ground and from the air in April. Thousands of British and Australian forces were captured there and on Crete, where German paratroopers landed in May.

[Peter Clare]

1942 : Dutch surrender on Java


On this day, Dutch forces surrender to the Japanese after two months of fighting.
Java is an island of modern-day Indonesia, and it lies southeast of Malaysia and Sumatra, south of Borneo, and west of Bali. The Dutch had been in Java since 1596, establishing the Dutch East India Company, a trading company with headquarters at Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), which the Dutch commandeered in 1619. The Dutch East India Company began to assert greater and greater control over the Muslim kingdoms of the East Indies, transforming them into vassal states, with peasants growing rice, sugar, pepper, and coffee for the Dutch government. The company was dissolved in 1799 because of debts and corruption, and the Dutch government took control of the East Indies directly.
The British supplanted the Dutch in Java for a brief period (1811-1816), but the Dutch returned to power, slowly granting native Javanese more local control, even giving them a majority on the People's Council. But on January 11, 1942, the Japanese declared war on the Royal Dutch government with its invasion of Borneo and the Island of Celebes, a date that also marked the beginning of the end of the Dutch presence in the East Indies. Sumatra was the next site of Japanese occupation, with paratroopers and troops landing from transports on February 14-16. Seven thousand British and Australian troops reinforced the Dutch fighters on Java, but the Allies pulled out of the fight in late February at the approach of two more large Japanese invasion forces that arrived on March 1.
The Dutch finally ended all resistance to the superior Japanese forces on March 8, surrendering on Java. Java's independence of colonial control became a final fact of history in 1950, when it became part of the newly independent Republic of Indonesia.

[Peter Clare]

1945 : Firebombing of Tokyo


On this day, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history.
Early on March 9, Air Force crews met on the Mariana Islands of Tinian and Saipan for a military briefing. They were planning a low-level bombing attack on Tokyo that would begin that evening, but with a twist: Their planes would be stripped of all guns except for the tail turret. The decrease in weight would increase the speed of each Superfortress bomber-and would also increase its bomb load capacity by 65 percent, making each plane able to carry more than seven tons. Speed would be crucial, and the crews were warned that if they were shot down, all haste was to be made for the water, which would increase their chances of being picked up by American rescue crews. Should they land within Japanese territory, they could only expect the very worst treatment by civilians, as the mission that night was going to entail the deaths of tens of thousands of those very same civilians. "You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen," said U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay.
The cluster bombing of the downtown Tokyo suburb of Shitamachi had been approved only a few hours earlier. Shitamachi was composed of roughly 750,000 people living in cramped quarters in wooden-frame buildings. Setting ablaze this "paper city" was a kind of experiment in the effects of firebombing; it would also destroy the light industries, called "shadow factories," that produced prefabricated war materials destined for Japanese aircraft factories.
The denizens of Shitamachi never had a chance of defending themselves. Their fire brigades were hopelessly undermanned, poorly trained, and poorly equipped. At 5:34 p.m., Superfortress B-29 bombers took off from Saipan and Tinian, reaching their target at 12:15 a.m. on March 10. Three hundred and thirty-four bombers, flying at a mere 500 feet, dropped their loads, creating a giant bonfire fanned by 30-knot winds that helped raze Shitamachi and spread the flames throughout Tokyo. Masses of panicked and terrified Japanese civilians scrambled to escape the inferno, most unsuccessfully. The human carnage was so great that the blood-red mists and stench of burning flesh that wafted up sickened the bomber pilots, forcing them to grab oxygen masks to keep from vomiting.
The raid lasted slightly longer than three hours. "In the black Sumida River, countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all black as charcoal. It was unreal," recorded one doctor at the scene. Only 243 American airmen were lost-considered acceptable losses.