Saturday, July 21, 1945. Warnings to Japan.

American radio broadcasts called on Japan to surrender or face destruction.

In an unauthorized statement to the press, a Washington D. C. posted Navy captain stated the same, adding that the US was "running out of patience".

The Battle of Balikpapan ended in an Australian victory.

Last edition:

Friday, July 20, 1945. Mistakes were made.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Art, Belgium, Japan, Okinawa, Philippines, Posters, Potsdam Conference, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, World War Two

Monday, July 9, 1945. Dutch land at Balikpapan.

Dutch troops landed north of Balikpapan, completing the encirclement of the bay.

Chinese troops captured the Tanchuk airbase.

The Brazilian cruiser Bahia accidentally sank itself by hitting itself during antiaircraft firing exercises.  294 men were killed.

Charles de Gaulle proposed a national referendum to decide the system of government in France.

A crowd of 30,000 gathered in Perth for the funeral procession of John Curtin to Karrakatta Cemetery.

A total solar eclipse was visible across parts of the northern hemisphere, including parts of North America.

Life magazine featured a model in a bikini, something that various magazines had been doing a lot of in 1945.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 8, 1945. The Camp Salina Massacre.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1970, 1970s, Army, Australian Army, boats and ships, Borneo, Crime, Dutch Navy, Prisoners of War, South China Sea, U.S. Navy, Utah

Thursday, July 5, 1945. Elections in the UK.

The United Kingdom held a general election.

The Polish Provisional Government of National Unity was recognized by Britain and the United States..

Australian Prime Minister John Curtin died and Frank Forde took his place.

Gen. Spaatz was announced as the air commander for Operation Downfall.

"Patrols of 29 Bn., 18th Brigade move cautiously into the village area of Penadjam, Balikpapen, Borneo, under sniper fire. 5 July, 1945. Photographer: Lt. Novak. Photo Source: U.S. National Archives. Digitized by Signal Corps Archive.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 4, 1945. MacArthur declares things wrapped up while additional mopping up occurs in the Philippines.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Adolf Hitler, British Army, Canadian Army, Douglas MacArthur, Germany (Berlin), Harry S. Truman, Independence Day, Philippines, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, World War Two

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Maria Michi in Rome, Open City.  She also played the role of the welcoming Italian turned prostitute in Paisan.  Both films were directed by Roberto Rossellini and filmed immediately after World War Two.  Why am I featuring her? See below.

Tokyo's population was down to 200,000 people due to evacuations from the bombed city.

Australian troops took Balikpapan's oil facilities.

American operations conclude on the Ryukyus.

The submarine USS Barb fired rockets on Kaihyo Island near Sakhalin,the first instance of a submarine firing such weapons.

Mountbatten is ordered to launch Operation Zipper, the liberation of Malaya, in August.

The 1945 Sheikh Bashir Rebellion broke out in Burao and Erigavo in British Somaliland against the British.

"The American Farmer" was the cover story in Newsweek.

Louis Till, father of Emmett Till who is remembered for being lynched at age 14 in 1955, was executed by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy for two counts of rape and murder.  

The elder Till had married the younger Till's mother when they were 18, over the objections of her parents. The marriage was not a happy one and she divorced him after he physically attacked her.  A conviction from that resulted in his joining the U.S. Army in order to avoid a prison sentence.

While Tills' conviction and execution are debated, the circumstances of the crime, which involved a home invasion and rape, are vile, and it seems that the trial was well conducted.

What's this have to do with the younger Till's lynching?  Absolutely nothing.  The junior Till never knew his father as the relationship had disintegrated when he was a mere infant.

There may be something, however, to take away about the horrors of the postwar world.  Armies are made up of all kinds of people, particularly conscripted armies.  Putting somebody in uniform so they wouldn't go to jail was fairly common.  There was a guy in boot camp with me who was there for that very reason, and I know a very successful person who essentially had the same thing occur to him.

And wars are a huge violation of the moral order.  Invading armies have always been associated with crime, with rape being a particularly common one.  Occupying armies, and even garrison armies, have a fair amount of moral depredation they bring on as well.

This certainly doesn't apply to everyone in uniform in these conditions, and not even the majority of those in uniform, in most modern armies, but it's frankly the case that World War Two created a vast amount of prostitution in Europe, some of it of a massively desperate type as portrayed in Rossellini's Paisan, and discussed in Atkinson's The Day of Battle.  Italy was quite frankly particularly hard hit as its infrastructure was far less developed than that of France or Germany, and it's population lived much more primitively and much closer to the poverty line.  Indeed, the vast bulk of the Italian population even before the war lived in what Americans of the same period would have regarded as poverty.

In these conditions, Italian women became targets.  Many prostituted themselves.  Some entered what might be regarded as a species of concubinage.  A biography of Bill Mauldin notes, for example, that for a period of time both Mauldin and another Stars and Stripes reporter kept girls in their mid teens, something that would have been regarded as a crime in the U.S. given the girls' very young age.  Paisan, as noted, depicts a middle class Italian girl descending into poverty, and then trying to grasp a straw out of it that nearly appears.  The classic The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit depicts a middle class American businessman who was an officer during the war engaging in a secret affair that produces a child while a soldier in Italy.

Concubinage is one thing.  Rape quite another, but murder is beyond the pale even for most whose morals decay in wartime.  But not for everyone.  And of course, we haven't touched on the Red Army, for whom wholescale rape, and then murder, of the women of the countries they overran was routine.  The percentage of Soviet soldiers that went home as rapist likely isn't known, but it was appreciable, and appreciated apparently by Soviet women, which lead to that generations domestic lives being notoriously turbulent.

War changes everything, and most of what it changes, isn't for the better.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, Automobiles, Battle of Balikpapan, Borneo, Dutch Army, Germany, Growing up in the 1970s, Music, New Wave Music, Personalities, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, Rock Music, World War Two

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

Today in World War II History—July 1, 1940 & 1945: 85 Years Ago—July 1, 1940: Germans occupy Jersey and Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. 80 Years Ago—July 1, 1945: Australians land at Balikpapan, Borneo.

US occupation forces arrive in Berlin.

Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (former commander of the Tuskegee Airmen) assumes command of Godman Field, KY, the first Black officer to command a major US air base.

US resumes production of cars, with the first rolling off the assembly line on August 30.

From Sarah Sundin's blog. 

The Australian and Dutch (mostly Australian) landing at Balikpapan was a major one, which had been preceded by an Allied naval bombardment that lasted for days.

US landing craft landing Australian infantry, July 1, 1945.

The Inner German Border was established and the British withdrew from Magdeburg which was part of the Soviet zone.

German Gen. Willibald Borowietz, 51, committed suicide at the Camp Clinton, Mississippi POW camp.  He had been a POW since 1943, having surrendered with the Afrika Korps.  His wife, Eva Ledien, was of Jewish decent and had killed herself in 1938 so that their children could be Aryanized. Her sister, Käthe (Ledien) Bosse, was killed in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.

Debbie Harry (Angela Trimble), lead singer of Blondie, was born in Miami, Florida.  She was given up for adoption by her parents and adopted by parents of the lsat name of Harry, who renamed her.  Her birth mother, whom she later located, was a pianist, but who chose not to reunite with her.

When I was in high school I was a big fan of Blondie.  I have all of their lps.

Harry started off as a folk singer.  She became a New Wave trend setter with Blondie at age 33, late for a pop musician.  

Last edition:

Saturday, June 30, 1945. Mopping up.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Armor, Army, China, Chinese Army, French Foreign Legion, French Indochina, Harry S. Truman, Imperial Japanese Army, Okinawa, Philippines, United States Marine Corps, World War Two