Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Monday, June 18, 1945. The death of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Thursday, June 14, 1945. Slogging.
The Chinese Army captured Ishan.
Action continued on Okinawa, but the battle was finally winding down.
Likewise, action continued in the Philippines, and Bouganville.
The British arrested Joachim von Ribbentrop in Hamburg.
The Northern Ireland general election returned a Ulster Unionist Party majority.
A victory parade was held in Rangoon.
Gen. Eisenhower was awarded the French Order of Liberation by Gen. de Gaulle.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff issue a directive to General MacArthur, General Arnold and Admiral Nimitz to prepare plans for the immediate occupation of the Japanese islands in the event of a sudden capitulation.
Today In Wyoming's History: June 14--Flag Day: 1945 Shoshone and Washakie National Forests consolidated. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
Last edition:
Wednesday, June 13, 1945. Taking the Oruku Peninsula.
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Thursday, June 7, 1945. Returning monarchs.
Today in World War II History—June 7, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—June 7, 1945: King Haakon VII of Norway and his family return to Oslo on their fifth anniversary of leaving Norway. US Marines cut off Oroku Peninsula on Okinawa. King George VI & Queen Elizabeth visit Guernsey and Jersey in recently liberated Channel Islands. In Honolulu, Hawaii, the USO opens the Rainbow Club, for all races, with staff of all races.
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
The Battle of West Hunan concluded in a Chinese victory.
The 1st Corps took Bambang on Luzon.
Joseph Stalin instructed the Soviet delegation at San Francisco to drop its request for a Big Five veto over discussion of international disputes in the United Nations.
Winston Churchill refused a demand from the House of Commons to reveal all that was discussed at the Yalta Conference.
Last edition:
Wednesday, June 6, 1945. Hitler's body.
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Sunday, May 27, 1945. Reversals of fortune in China.
The 6th Army captured Santa Fe and attacked around Wawa Dam on Luzon.
Chinese troops completed the occupation of Nanning, the capital of Kwangsi Province, cutting off the main Japanese supply route from French Indochina, Thailand, Malaya and Burma.
The Chinese 6th Army was air transported from Burma to China, the first time an entire army was moved by air.
Heavy fighting occurred on Okinawa. Off of Okinawa the USS Drexler was sunk by Japanese aircraft.
Rudolf Querner, age 51, German SS officer and police leader committed suicide as the odd process of Germany somewhat denazifying itself continued to occur in this fashion.
Last edition:
Saturday, May 26, 1945. The Homecoming.
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Friday, May 18, 1945. Paying the consequences.
The U.S. Army took Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced the deportation of Fritz Julius Kuhn of the German American Bund to Germany. His citizenship had been revoked in 1943. His family had already been repatriated, during the war, to Germany.
The entire series of events would crush him. He sought to return to t he US without success. He was arrested and tired by the post war German government. He died in 1951 a broken figure.
The Chinese Army reoccupies Foochow.
Karl Karl Dönitz issues a statement expressing horror at the Holocaust and distancing the German military from it.
Yeah. . . whatever.
William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second KKK, died at age 65.
Irish Prime Minister Eamon De Velera, announces a $12 million food and clothing aid program for Europe.
Last edition:
Thursday, May 17, 1945. The emerging post war world.
Monday, March 31, 2025
Saturday, March 31, 1945. Liberated.
The Red Army prevailed in the Upper Silesian Offensive.
The U.S. Navy sank the I-8 off of Okinawa.
The British and Nationalist Chinese armies took Kyaukme.
The French 1st Army crossed t he Rhine near Speyer.
Last edition:
Friday, March 30, 1945. Mère Marie Élisabeth de l'Eucharistie gassed at Ravensbruck. Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose killed in action.
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Thursday, May 25, 1944. Japanese victory at Henan, Operation Rösselsprung in Yugoslavia, Breakthrough at Anzio.
The Japanese won the Battle of Central Henan in China. During the battle, Chinese peasants in the Henan area acted as sort of a third independent agrarian forces, attacking the Nationalist Chinese Army and the Japanese. Actions against the Nationalist army were in spired by the 1938 Yello River Flood of the late 1930s and the famine of 1942.
The Germans began a combine air and ground assault on the headquarters of the Yugoslav Partisans at Drvar. The offensive included German mountain troops, SS paratroopers (all regular German paratroopers were in the Luftwaffe) and Yugoslav collaborationist.
SS Paratroops grather for Operation Rösselsprung, the counter partisan offensive in Yugoslavia.
I hadn't been aware of the existence of a SS paratrooper battalion, but there was one, which showed the increasing importance of the SS in the German forces late in the war.
An operation like this, also, demonstrates the degree to which the Germans were losing control of Yugoslavia.
The Fifth Army broke through to the Anzio beachhead and captured Cisterna.
Last prior edition:
Wednesday, May 24, 1944. Hitler to Caesar.
Monday, March 4, 2024
Saturday, March 4, 1944. The resisting defeated.
The German military, evil cause notwithstanding, was proving itself to be as amazing in defeat as it had been in victory. Never as well-equipped or modern as its propaganda would have it, it was nonetheless a potent fighting force, both in defeat as well as victory. On this day, the Second Narva Offensive resulted in a German victory.
Outnumbered, the Germans took thousands of casualties, but not as many as the Red Army. Both armies had a disregard for life. The Germans were, frankly quite surprisingly, aided by the presence of able Estonian recruits who had only recently entered service.
The latter was a portent of what was to come. As 1944 marched on, the German frontiers contracted, and as they did, the bloodletting, in part due to increased German resistance, meant that 1945, not 1944, was to be the bloodiest year of the war.
The Red Army launched a new series of offensive actions in Ukraine. Stalwart German resistance notwithstanding, and the frankly primitive state of much of the Red Army, the tide had irrevocably turned.
From Sarah Sundin's blog:
Today in World War II History—March 4, 1944: 80 Years Ago—Mar. 4, 1944: Maj. Gen. Alexander Patch assumes command of US Seventh Army in Algiers, to prepare for landings in southern France.
Germany's battlefield performance on the Baltic coast and in Italy notwithstanding, the direction the war was headed in was obvious and the Allies were preparing not only for Operation Overlord, but Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France. Patch was placed in command of that operation.
Patch had already seen combat command in the war in the Pacific, and more specifically Guadalcanal, making him one of a handful of U.S. generals who served against the Germans and Japanese. His health in the Pacific had been very poor, and he suffered from pneumonia while serving there.
Patch was born into an Army family and had originally wanted to be a cavalryman, but foresaw its obsolesce so he instead chose the infantry when he graduated from West Point in 1913 He saw action in the Punitive Expedition and in World War One. He never recovered from his respiratory ailments and died on November 21, 1945, just after the end of the war. He was 55.
Other things were also occurring in Algiers.
French industrialist, and fascist, Piere Firmin Pucheu went on trial in Algiers in spite of conditions that probably should have led to his safe presence in Algeria, Vichy role notwithstanding. He had been the Vichy minister of the interior. He was the first person tried under the French Committee of National Liberation's September 1943 edict charging all Vichy ministers with treason, something that was frankly political and extralegal. He would be found guilty and executed on March 20, 1944, going to his death after shaking hands with his own firing squad and giving the order to fire himself.
Pucheau is an uncomfortable example as to how some examples of Allied justice were not just. Pucheau was largely not admirable. He was a fascist, and he had a hatred of Jews. His execution, however, can be viewed for his being on the losing side of the war.
The 8th Air Force targeted Berlin, but only 29 bombers made it through due to weather.
Fighting was going on at Los Negros, where Troy McGill performed an act of heroism that would result in his receiving a posthumous Medal of Honor.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy at Los Negros Island, Admiralty Group, on 4 March 1944. In the early morning hours Sgt. McGill, with a squad of eight men, occupied a revetment which bore the brunt of a furious attack by approximately 200 drink-crazed enemy troops. Although covered by crossfire from machine guns on the right and left flank he could receive no support from the remainder of our troops stationed at his rear. All members of the squad were killed or wounded except Sgt. McGill and another man, whom he ordered to return to the next revetment. Courageously resolved to hold his position at all costs, he fired his weapon until it ceased to function. Then, with the enemy only five yards away, he charged from his foxhole in the face of certain death and clubbed the enemy with his rifle in hand-to-hand combat until he was killed. At dawn 105 enemy dead were found around his position. Sgt. McGill's intrepid stand was an inspiration to his comrades and a decisive factor in the defeat of a fanatical enemy.
The U-472 was sunk in the Barents Sea. She never sank a single ship.
China and Afghanistan entered into a pointless treaty of friendship.
Mobster Louie Lepke, birth name Louis Buchalter and also known as Louis Lepke or Lepke Buchalter, was executed.
Louis Capone met the same fate on this day, for the same reason.
The Phillies attempted to introduce a blue jay logo.
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Thursday, March 2, 1944. And the Oscar goes to. . .
Men of the 5th Cavalry Rgt. were landed on Los Negros to back up the previous landings. Momote Airfield was taken.
Lend Lease aid to Turkey was cut off. That it was ever extended is interesting, in that Turkey had not joined the war and in fact was still being courted by both sides.
Friday, May 7, 2021
May 7, 1941 An Enigma Solved
On this day in 1941, as you can read in the item below, the British destroyer HMS Somali captured the German weather ship München off of Iceland.
Today in World War II History—May 7, 1941
With the ship the British also captured her July Enigma code book. In fact, she was targeted for that.
Benchley Park had figured out that the fatal flaw of Enigma was the universality of the code books and they guessed that weather ships would have them, even though they didn't transmit in code, and that they'd have the following month's in a safe. The plan was to fire over a weather ship and frighten the crew in the hopes they'd fail to dump the second book, which they in fact did.
Weather ships were a critical part of the German U-boat campaign but also a weakness in it. In the days before satellite weather forecasting, weather forecasting relied upon weather readings and observations. This meant that the Germans had no choice but to put weather ships in the North Atlantic and to also land men on Iceland and Greenland, and even Labrador. All of these efforts were vulnerable to Allied detection and they had to rely on the remoteness of their locations for protection.
On the same day, the Germans released the film Sieg Im Westen (Victory in the West). It proved to be premature.
Also on this day, the Royal Air Force took its first delivery of B-17s. The RAF would never use a large number of the American bomber, but they did employ some. They would not see combat until July, when they were used in a high altitude bombing raid which served to confirm in British minds that daylight bombing was too costly.
The Battle of South Shanxi began in China and would result in one of the worst defeats for the Nationalist Chinese in the Second World War. Critical to the result, Communist Chinese forces refused to come to the aid of encircled Nationalist Chinese forces due to embittered communist feelings over the New Fourth Army Incident of earlier that year.
That earlier incident had occurred in early 1941 and saw the Chinese communist sustain about 7,000 casualties at Nationalist Chinese hands. Accounts of the incident vary enormously and it is therefore almost impossible to figure out who broke the truce between the Nationalist and the Communist that was brokered in order to contest the Japanese, the bigger enemy. At any rate, the Nationalist sustained over 100,000 casualties in the South Shanxi battle, so the Communist more than evened the score.
Sunday, March 14, 2021
March 14, 1941. The Blitz over Scotland, Italian submarines in the North Atlantic, Japanese offensive in China.
British troops took meals and were photographed on this day in St. Andrew's House, which is now the seat of the Scottish Parliament.
Serving during what is now regarded as Britain's dark days of the war, these men would have nonetheless have had a hard time imagining a United Kingdom with more than one parliament and being in the current state of being at least somewhat disunited, let alone that kingdom not having an Empire.
Clydeside bombed again
In China, the Japanese would launch as assault at Shanggao which would result in a decisive Chinese victory.
The SS Western Chief, formerly a U.S. naval cargo vessel but now a civilian cargo ship, was sunk by an Italian submarine in the North Atlantic.
We tend to not even think of the Italians having submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic, but in fact their submarine fleet was the largest in the world at the start of World War Two and their commitment to the Atlantic early in the war equaled that of the Germans.
The submarine in question was the Emo, a Marcello class submarine that was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1942.
The story of Italian submarines during the war is not only largely forgotten, but complicated as well. About half their fleet was destroyed in action as the war went on, and a surprising number of their boats were converted to transport craft to run to the Far East.
On the topic of submarines, German film maker Wolfgang Petersen, who filmed the submarine masterpiece Das Boot, was born on this day in 1941.
And speaking of the Japanese, President Roosevelt met with the Japanese Ambassador late in the day, on this day in 1941.