Remembering History by day WW2

[Peter Clare]

1941 : Operation Typhoon is launched


On this day in 1941, the Germans begin their surge to Moscow, led by the 1st Army Group and Gen. Fedor von Bock. Russian peasants in the path of Hitler's army employ a "scorched-earth" policy.
Hitler's forces had invaded the Soviet Union in June, and early on it had become one relentless push inside Russian territory. The first setback came in August, when the Red Army's tanks drove the Germans back from the Yelnya salient. Hitler confided to General Bock at the time: "Had I known they had as many tanks as that, I'd have thought twice before invading." But there was no turning back for Hitler--he believed he was destined to succeed where others had failed, and capture Moscow.
Although some German generals had warned Hitler against launching Operation Typhoon as the harsh Russian winter was just beginning, remembering the fate that befell Napoleon--who got bogged down in horrendous conditions, losing serious numbers of men and horses--Bock urged him on. This encouragement, coupled with the fact that the Germany army had taken the city of Kiev in late September, caused Hitler to declare, "The enemy is broken and will never be in a position to rise again." So for 10 days, starting October 2, the 1st Army Group drove east, drawing closer to the Soviet capital each day. But the Russians also remembered Napoleon and began destroying everything as they fled their villages, fields, and farms. Harvested crops were burned, livestock were driven away, and buildings were blown up, leaving nothing of value behind to support exhausted troops. Hitler's army inherited nothing but ruins.

[Peter Clare]

1942 : Germany conducts first successful V-2 rocket test


On this day in 1942, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's brainchild, the V-2 missile, is fired successfully from Peenemunde, as island off Germany's Baltic coast. It traveled 118 miles. It proved extraordinarily deadly in the war and was the precursor to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) of the postwar era.
German scientists, led by von Braun, had been working on the development of these long-range missiles since the 1930s. Three trial launches had already failed; the fourth in the series, known as A-4, finally saw the V-2, a 12-ton rocket capable of carrying a one-ton warhead, successfully launched.
The V-2 was unique in several ways. First, it was virtually impossible to intercept. Upon launching, the missile rises six miles vertically; it then proceeds on an arced course, cutting off its own fuel according to the range desired. The missile then tips over and falls on its target-at a speed of almost 4,000 mph. It hits with such force that the missile burrows itself into the ground several feet before exploding. It had the potential of flying a distance of 200 miles, and the launch pads were portable, making them impossible to detect before firing.
The first launches as part of an offensive did not occur until September 6, 1944 when two missiles were fired at Paris. On September 8, two more were fired at England, which would be followed by more than 1,100 more during the next six months. More than 2,700 Brits died because of the rocket attacks.
After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union captured samples of the rockets for reproduction--they also captured the scientists responsible for their creation.

[Peter Clare]

1943 : Heinrich Himmler encourages his SS group leaders


On this day in 1943, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, addresses the squad leaders of his Nazi secret police, attempting to fill them with pride for the work they've accomplished-the murder of more than 1 million Jews in German-occupied Russia during a one-and-a-half-year period. "Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand," claimed Himmler. "To have stuck it out and at the same time...to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written."
It was Himmler who oversaw the establishment of the Auschwitz concentration camp cluster, as well as the Warsaw ghetto massacre. The organizing of some prisoners for slave labor and the inflicting of gruesome medical experimentation on others can also be attributed to him. Consequently, it is little wonder that he could so blithely say, "Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany."

[Peter Clare]

1944 : Ike warns of the risk of "shell shock"


On this day in 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. "[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients...sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to 'them shells' and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact."
On the basis of this evaluation, as well as firsthand experience, American commanders judged that the average soldier could last about 200 days in combat before suffering serious psychiatric damage. British commanders used a rotation method, pulling soldiers out of combat every 12 days for a four-day rest period. This enabled British soldiers to put in 400 days of combat before being deleteriously affected. The Surgeon General's report went on to lament the fact that a "wound or injury is regarded, not as a misfortune, but a blessing." The war was clearly taking a toll on more than just men's bodies

[Peter Clare]

1942 : "Stalingrad must not be taken by the enemy."


On this day in 1942, Joseph Stalin, premier and dictator of the Soviet Union, fires off a telegram to the German and Soviet front at Stalingrad, exhorting his forces to victory. "That part of Stalingrad which has been captured must be liberated."
Stalingrad was a key to capturing the Soviet Union, in many ways as important as capturing Moscow itself. It stood between the old Russia and the new, a center of both rail and river communications, industry and old-world Russian trade. To preserve Stalingrad's integrity was to preserve Russian civilization past and present. As the Germans reached the Volga, thrust and counterthrust brought the battle to a standstill. Everyone from Russian factory workers to reinforcements of more than 160,000 Soviet soldiers poured into Stalingrad to beat back the German invader. Despite dwindling supplies, such as tanks and troop reserves, Hitler would not relent, convincing himself that the Russians could not hold out for long.
But Stalin appealed not only to Russian patriotism but also to Allied armaments. Requests to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for aid had not gone unheeded, as five British merchant ships arrived in northern Russia, loaded with supplies

[Peter Clare]

1945 : Pierre Laval attempts suicide


On this day in 1945, former French premier and Vichy collaborator Pierre Laval tries to kill himself on the day he is to be executed for treason. He fails.
Laval served as premier of France twice, the second time from June 1935 to January 1936, but fell from power primarily because of his appeasement of Italy after the invasion and occupation of Ethiopio by Mussolini and his fascist regime in 1935. Upon the German invasion of France in 1940, Laval, ever the opportunist, saw a chance to re-establish himself in office by supporting a puppet government headed by Henri Philippe Petain, who, when he acceded to the position of premier in June 1940, rewarded Laval by making him deputy head of state and foreign minister.
Laval was always more slavish in his devotion to his German masters than was Petain; for example, Laval began secret negotiations for a formal collaboration with Germany, convinced that the future lay in the hands of the Axis power. Petain finally fired him in December 1940. But the Germans questioned Petain's double loyalty and pressured him to reinstate Laval. Petain fell further from German favor, and when Hitler's forces occupied France in 1942, Laval, wanting to reassure Germany of his loyalty, began sending French workers to Germany and stripping French Jews of their rights. He also helped the Nazis capture and deport non-French Jews. He openly announced that he wished for a German victory. "An American victory would mean victory for the Jews and the communists."
As the end for Hitler grew near, Laval fled first to Germany, then to Spain, then to Austria, where he was arrested and sent back to France and was tried, along with Petain, on the charge of treason. Laval defended his actions, believing he had done nothing wrong. He was sentenced to be shot by firing squad on October 6, 1945, but swallowed cyanide before they could come for him. A physician saved his life--just in time for Laval to be executed a little less than two weeks later.

[Peter Clare]

1940 : German troops enter Romania


On this day in 1940, Hitler occupies Romania as part of his strategy of creating an unbroken Eastern front to menace the Soviet Union.
As early as 1937, Romania had come under the control of a fascist government that bore great resemblance to that of Germany's, including similar anti-Jewish laws. Romania's king, Carol II, dissolved the government a year later because of a failing economy and installed Romania's Orthodox Patriarch as prime minister. But the Patriarch's death and a peasant uprising provoked renewed agitation by the fascist Iron Guard paramilitary organization, which sought to impose order. In June 1940, the Soviet Union co-opted two Romanian provinces, and the king searched for an ally to help protect it and appease the far right within its own borders. So on July 5, 1940, Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany-only to be invaded by its "ally" as part of Hitler's strategy to create one huge eastern front against the Soviet Union.
King Carol abdicated on September 6, 1940, leaving the country in the control of fascist Prime Minister Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard. While Romania would recapture the territory lost to the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded Russia, it would also have to endure the Germans' raping its resources as part of the Nazi war effort. Nevertheless, with German troops now occupying his nation, Antonescu would go on to sign the Tripartite (Axis) Pact in November, tying Romania to the military machinations of not only Germany, but Italy and Japan as well.

[Peter Clare]

1941 : Germans overrun Mariupol, in southern Russia


On this day in 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union begins a new stage, with Hitler's forces capturing Mariupol. The Axis power reached the Sea of Azov.
Despite the fact that Germany and Russia had signed a "pact" in 1939, each guaranteeing the other a specific region of influence without interference from the other, suspicion remained high. Despite warnings from his advisers that Germany could not fight the war on two fronts (as Germany's experience in World War I proved), Hitler became convinced that England was holding out against repeated German air assaults, refusing to surrender, because it had struck a secret deal with Russia. Fearing he would be "strangled" from the East and the West, he created, in December 1940, "Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa"--the plan to invade and occupy the very nation he had actually asked to join the Axis only a month before. On June 22, 1941, after having postponed the invasion of Russia when Italy's attack on Greece forced Hitler to bail out his struggling ally in order to keep the Allies from gaining a foothold in the Balkans, three German army groups struck Russia hard by surprise. The Russian army was larger than German intelligence had anticipated, but they were demobilized. Stalin had shrugged off warnings from his own advisers, even Winston Churchill himself, that a German attack was imminent. By the end of the first day of the invasion, the German air force had destroyed more than 1,000 Soviet aircraft. And despite the toughness of the Russian troops, and the number of tanks and other armaments at their disposal, the Red Army was disorganized, enabling the Germans to penetrate up to 300 miles into Russian territory within the next few days.
Hitler's battle for Stalingrad and Moscow still lay ahead, but the capture of Mariupol, at the sea's edge, signaled the beginning of the end of Russia-as least as far as Hitler's propaganda machine was concerned. "Soviet Russia has been vanquished!" Otto Dietrich, Hitler's press chief, announced to foreign journalists the very next day.

[Peter Clare]

1944 : Churchill and Stalin confer


On this day in 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin begin a nine-day conference in Moscow, during which the war with Germany and the future of Europe are discussed.
Germany's defeat now seemed inevitable, and Stalin was prepared to commit the USSR to intervening in the war against Japan once Germany had formally surrendered. This optimistic outlook enabled a significant portion of the talks to center on the relative spheres of influence of the two superpowers in a postwar European environment. Churchill ceded the disposition of Romania, which Stalin's troops were liberating from German control even as the conference commenced, to the Soviet Union. But the British prime minister was keen on keeping the Red Army away from Greece. "Britain must be the leading Mediterranean power." They made a deal: Romania for Greece.
Churchill was more accommodating elsewhere, willing to divvy up the spoils of war. Yugoslavia could be cut down the middle, east for Russia, west for the West. Churchill also laid out a plan by which the German populations of East Prussia and Silesia would be moved into the interior of Germany, with East Prussia split between the USSR and Poland, and Silesia handed over to Poland as compensation for territories Stalin already occupied and intended to keep.
But Churchill was insistent on one issue that would be harder to negotiate in 50-50 terms-freedom. Churchill wanted every nation to be free to select the government most amenable to its people, especially smaller, more vulnerable nations. "Let them work out their own fortunes during the years that lie ahead." Churchill was frank about the West's fear of expansionist communism. But none of what was discussed was carved in stone or even put on paper--a fact that would be all too obvious as the Cold War commenced.

[Ron Goldstein]

On today, 9th October 1944;
Regimental Diary 49th Light Anti Aircraft Rgt. RA;

On the 9th F Tp 280 Bty were deployed at Firenzuola, 25 miles NNE of Florence, with 38 Bde. 90 Bty at Figline was to move to Scarperia on the 11th with instructions to construct an airfield with 281 Fd Park Coy RE. F Tp 280 Bty was still at Firenzuola and E Tp at Castel del Rio

Personal Diary:
Monday 9th. October 1944
Building road in morning, all my clothes still soaking from two days ago. Rain almost all the time. "In " at the casa after drawing NAAFI rations.