At 11:00 the Red Army started shelling Berlin.
It was Hitler's 56th birthday. He left his bunker to to decorate a group of Hitler Youth combatants. He refused an effort to evacuate to Obersalzberg. Goering and Himmler left the bunker for good.
SS officer Herbert Lange, age 35, commandant of Chełmno extermination camp was killed in action in the city.
The 7th Army captured Nuremberg. Karl Holz, age 49, German Nazi Gauleiter was found dead in a barricaded police bunker. Willy Liebel, age 47, lord mayor of Nuremberg was also found there, a suicide.
U.S.aircraft dropped Italian paratroopers over northern Italy in Operation Herring.
While the Italian Army is often dissed in World War Two, it's airborne troops were good.
Mussolini gave his final interview noting that the end had been reached for him.
Members of the Australian First Tactical Air Force based on the island of Morotai in the Dutch East Indies tendered their resignations to protest their belief that they were being assigned to missions of no military importance. A later investigation confirmed their views.
The war had never been as widely supported in Australia as it was in the US, something the Australians shared with Canadians. And they had a real point here I've often wondered about. Islands in the South Pacific and targets in the Indian Ocean that had been significant early on really were not by this time, even though fighting continued on them. The wisdom of continuing the ongoing operations actively can be questioned.
The US 3rd Amphibious Corps completed the capture of the Motobu Peninsula and the whole of the main northern part of Okinawa.
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