The battlecruiser Kongō and destroyer Urwakaze were sunk in the South China Sea by the USS Sealion.
Albanian partisans occupied Tirana and Durazzo.
Last edition:
The German backed fascist coup in Hungary, designed to keep the country in the war, completed with the leader of the banned fascist Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, becoming prime minister of a "Government of National Unity" w hich was controlled by the Germans. Horthy was taken prisoner.
Horthy, who appears here a lot, died in Portugal in 1957 at age 88. Szálasi was executed in 1946 at age 49.
Who the crap could think that the fascist were going to win in late 1944?
The Soviets launched the Gumbinnen Operation with the goal of penetrating the borders of East Prussia.
Albanian partisans liberated Vlorë.
The U.S. launched an offensive towards Bologna.
The 10th Indian Division crossed the Savio River.
A U.S. bombing raid on Salzburg destroyed the dome of the cathedral and most of the Mozart family home.
The first large scale daylight bombing raid on Berlin occured. The raid, remembered as Black Monday, involved 814 bombers and 944 fighters from bases in southern England. 69 bombers were lost.
P-51 pilot Donald Blakeslee would fly the first such aircraft over the city. An early American fighter pilot, he first joined the RCAF in 1941, he served in the USAF until 1965 and passed away in 2008 at age 80.
For those watching Masters of the Air, it is depicted in Episode 7.
The Red Army took Volochysk.
Finland rejected a Soviet peace proposal that included interning German troops that were inside of Finland and restoring the 1940 borders. The proposal was very similar to what the Finns would accept the following September and represented, effectively, a defeat, which is likely why it was not accepted, in part, at this time, although it was also surprisingly generous on Moscow's part.
The U-744 was sunk in the Atlantic, and the U-973 was sunk in the Arctic.
Albanian partisan Ramize Gjebrea age 20, was executed by a partisan firing squad for "immoral behavior", that being having intercourse with a male partisan. She was engaged to another person. The charge was denied by both parties, but she was convicted and, on this day, shot.
Himmler delivered the first of his Posen speeches to SS officers and German administrators, in which he stated, in part:
I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter. Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do our duty as we were ordered, and to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot them, and we never spoke about it and we never will speak about it. It was a matter of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, that we never talked about it amongst ourselves, that we never discussed it. Each of us shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it again if it were an order, and if it were necessary. I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: "The Jewish people are going to be exterminated," that's what every Party member says, "sure, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination - it'll be done." And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a firstrate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this - and except for cases of human weakness - to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history, for we know how difficult it would be for us if today - under bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war - if we were still to have the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators, and inciters. If the Jews were still lodged in the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the stage of 1916-17.
The wealth they possessed we took from them. I gave a strict order, which has been carried out by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl, that this wealth will of course be turned over to the Reich in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single Mark of this money is a dead man. A number of SS men - they are not very - many committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a bacillus, to be infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character....
He also stated:
What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me, Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture.
He went on to refer to these people as animals, noting how the Germans were, he claimed, the only people in the world to have a decent attitude towards animals.
These were words from a German leader, it might be noted, celebrating German murder.
The Germans took the Greek island of Kos, following which they killed 100 Italian officers, following orders from Hitler regarding Italian officers who had followed their government into action against the Germans.
Corsica was liberated from the Axis.
The Australians prevailed in the Battle of Dampu.
Albanian resistance fighters prevailed in the Battle of Drashovica.
An RAF raid on Frankfurt hit a children's hospital's air raid shelder, resulting in 529 civilian deaths, of which 90 were children.
The U-279, U-389, U-422 and U-460 were all destroyed by aircraft in the Atlantic.
The U.S. Navy attacked German shipping at Bodø, Norway with aircraft from the USS Ranger in Operation Leader. Five German ships were sunk, four damaged and two aircraft lost for a loss of four Navy aircraft.
The operation in far northern Norway was the U.S. Navy's only carrier assault on German targets during World War Two, outside of operations against submarines and in the Mediterranean.
Bing Crosby recorded I'll Be Home for Christmas.
The Germans, in one of the most successful withdrawals of the Second World War, carried on with day two of its evacuation of Axis forces from Sicily.
Franklin Roosevelt broadcast a message to the Filipino people, promising to establish full sovereignty for the nation upon liberation from the Japanese. The scheduled date for that was already July 4, 1946. As it was, liberation of the island would not come until July 1945 and the scheduled date was kept.
The Polish Home Army executed Operation Góral and recovered a massive amount of cash being taken out of the country by the Germans. On the same day, the Albanian resistance ambushed a German convoy successfully in the Kurtës Ambush
The German Sicherheitsdienst, the SD reported on the attitude of young Germans. Among other things, it reported:
Most boys and girls have not the slightest interest in becoming a member of the NSDAP. All attempts by the relevant authorities to get them involved have been in vain. For the boys it's the Wehrmacht which is now the thing not the Party.
And:
The reserve shown towards the Party is also encouraged by the unresolved Party-Church question. Since a large section of youth, and above all their parents, are still loyal to the Church, remarks aimed at the "sacred beliefs which they have held hitherto" by Party comrades, cadres and HJ leaders have a negative impact. This is particularly the case at the present time because, as a result of the current war situation, young people too notice that the Church pays great attention, for example, to caring for the relatives of those who have been killed, and that the priests give clear answers on questions concerning life and the present time. In addition, rumors about alleged positive remarks about the churches by leading personalities, soldiers who have been decorated etc. have a big impact.
The SD and related organizations carried on a lot of secret polling of this type during the war.
Things were happening in the North Pacific.
