Friday, June 22, 1945. The Battle of Okinawa ends.

The Battle of Okinawa ended. It was the last major ground battle of World War Two.

Today in World War II History—June 22, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—June 22, 1945: Battle for Okinawa officially ends at a high cost—12,520 Americans and 110,000 Japanese were killed, plus 42,000 civilians.

June 22, 1945: The Battle of Okinawa

Operation Ten-Go, the last major Japanese naval operation, concluded.

Gen. MacArthur announced that Gen. Joseph Stilwell would replace Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. as commander of the U.S. Tenth Army.

Emperor Hirohito directed his government to find a way to peace talks.

Japanese generals Isamu Chō, 50, and Mitsuru Ushijima, 57,  committed suicide on Okinawa.

The Japanese withdrew from Liuchow.

Last edition:

Thursday, June 21, 1945. Fall of Hill 89.

Labels: 1940, 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, boats and ships, Borneo, Kamikaze, Luzon, Okinawa, Operation Iceberg, Operation Ten-Go, Polish Home Army, USSR, World War Two

Tuesday, June 19, 1945. Eisenhower's parade.

The U.S. Army took IIigan in the Philippines.

343 Japanese troops surrendered on Okinawa.

"Pfc. Alden A. Fisher, Morganton, Ga., fires a bazooka. Pfc. William Miller, Oceanside, Long Island, is the loader. They are firing at a Japanese cave on Okinawa. 19 June, 1945. 77th Infantry Division Photographer: LaGrange."

Troops of the British Commonwealth brought the war back to Thailand, invading it from Burma.

King Leopold III of Belgium refused to abdicate.

The United Nations, meeting in San Francisco, denied Francoist Spain admission to the body.

Gen. Eisenhower received a ticker tape parade in New York City which 4,000,000 people turned out to view.

French politician Marcel Déat, in hiding in Italy, was sentenced to death in absentia for collaborating with the enemy.  He would not be captured and died in Italy in 1955.

Last edition:

Monday, June 18, 1945. The death of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Army, boats and ships, British Army, China, Chinese National Army, Civil War, Collaborators, Japan, Mexican War, Okinawa, Personalities, Polish Home Army, USSR, World War Two

Monday, June 11, 1945. King gets another term. . . but it's a minority government.

A Canadian federal election was held in which the incumbent Liberal Party led by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was re-elected to its third consecutive mandate, but this time through a minority government.

It was likely a sign of things to come in the upcoming British election.

US forces captured the height east of Mount Yaeju on Okinawa but an accompanying Marine assault failed to capture Kunishi Ridge.

Japanese forces recaptured Ishan in Kwangsi Province.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided In re Summers, ruling 5-4 that the First and Fourteenth Amendment freedoms of a conscientious objector were not infringed when a state bar association declined to admit him to the practice of law, which seems obviously wrong.

The Soviets began the expulsion of Sudetenlanders from Czechoslovakia.

Last edition:

Sunday, June 10, 1945. Action in the Far East.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, Australian Navy, Battle of Davao, Battle of Labuan. World War Two, Battle of North Borneo, Battle of Porton Plantation, boats and ships, Chinese Army, Japan, Okinawa, U.S. Navy, Weapons

Friday, June 8, 1945. Battle of Porton Plantation

The Battle of Porton Plantation began on Bougainville Island between Australian, New Zealand and Japanese troops.

The Ashigara was torpedoed and sunk in the Bangka Strait by the British submarine Trenchant.

The US 145th Infantry Regiment took Solano and advanced as far as Bagabag, towards the Cagayan valley in the Philippines.

The French poet Robert Desnos died at Theresienstadt of typhoid.

German World War Two official in Czechoslovakia Karl Hanke, age 41, was killed by Czech partisans while trying to escape captivity.

Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew denied reports that Russia would be given Korea among other states in exchange for its entry into the Pacific war.

Last edition:

Thursday, June 7, 1945. Returning monarchs.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Chinese Army, Chinese National Army, Joseph Stalin, Luzon, Okinawa, The Battle of West Hunan (湘西會戰), United Nations, Weapons, Winston Churchill, World War Two, Yalta Conference

Friday, June 1, 1945. The Levant, the fate of the German Cossacks, and of Danish collaborators.

Twenty seven P-51 Mustangs out of 148 escordging B-29s were lost in a thunderstorm en route to Osaka.

Charles de Gaulle accused the British of meddling in French affairs in the Middle East. In response, the British accused the French of using Lend-Lease equipment to fight the Syrians and Lebanese in violation of the agreement with the United States, which the French were almost certainly doing.  The British meanwhile complete the occupation of Lebanon and Syria.

Cossack cemetery in Peggetz.  By He96848 - own work (transferred from de:Image:Kosakenfriedhof2.jpg), GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5447806

British troops reluctantly began the forcible repatriation of approximately 40,000 members of the Cossack Corps and their families.  Conflict broke out resulting in 700 Cossack deaths from gunshots, panic, and suicide.

The repatriated Cossacks would meet with death in their home countries.  The few who managed to avoid repatriation tended to immigrate to the United States, where they spent the rest of their lives in an understandably insular manner.

Cossacks had suffered as an ethnicity under Communism and largely joined the Germans, as many other Soviet citizens did, hoping to overthrow the Communist government while not really giving much thought to what the Germans stood for.  The Nazis proved to be oddly fascinated with them, so much so that they were given a false ethnic identity to make them more "Aryan".  

Sarah Sundin's blog also discusses their fate today, and that of Danish collaborators:

Today in World War II History—June 1, 1940 & 1945: Denmark decrees prison for war profiteers and for those who aided Germans or joined German military or police units, and the death penalty for those in Danish Nazi terror organizations.

Japanese troops began to grow upset with the war on Okinawa.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 31, 1945. Intervening in Syria.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, British Army, Charles de Gaulle, French Army, French League of Nation Mandates, It was because of World War Two, Levant, Okinawa, Philippines, Syria, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Thursday, May 24, 1945. Japanese paratroopers on Okinawa.

The 10th Army crossed the Asato and entered Naha on Okinawa.  The Japanese landed paratroopers on Yontan airfield and destroyed a large number of aircraft.

Australian troops surrounded Wewak on New Guinea.

Tokyo was heavily hit in a US incendiary rai

Field Marshall Robert Ritter von Greim, age 52, the last commander of the Luftwaffe committed suicide.  Von Greim had been a pilot in World War One and was a recipient of the Blue Max.

De Gaulle awarded Montgomery the Grande Croix of the Legion d'Honneur

Courtney Hodges was given a parade in Georgia.

Last edition:

Wednesday, May 23, 1945. The end of governments.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, German Flensburg Government, Heinrich Himmler, Japan, Nazi Germany, U.S. Navy, United Kingdom, United Nations, Winston Churchill

Sunday, May 20, 1945. Contracting in China.

Chocolate Drop Hill on Okinawa was taken by U.S. troops.  The final fighting was in interconnected tunnels.

The 1st Marine Division captured Wana Ridge on Okinawa.  Marines also conducted mopping up operations on Horseshoe and Half Moon using flamethrowers, resulting in a desperate Japanese counterattack that ends with 200 Japanese troops killed.

The US took Malaybalay on Mindanao.

The Japanese Army evacuated Hochih, China as the Imperial Japanese General Staff decided to deploy forces closer to the Japanese Home Islands.

The Japanese had secured enormous territorial gains in China with a just completed offensive, and yet there was a massive amount of China left, the same problem the Japanese had been faced with since 1932 when they first began to fight in the country.  In many ways, for the Japanese, World War Two was principally about China, and now it was faced with the reality that being tied down there was contributing enormously to its losing in the war.

The Soviets appointed Soviet authorities appointed Dr. Arthur Werner as the Oberbergermeister of the Berlin.  The appointment would be shortly confirmed by the Western Allies.

He was not a Communist and had not been a Nazi. An engineer, he had lost his teaching position in 1942.

Last edition:

Saturday, May 19, 1945. Landing in Syria and Lebanon.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, French Army, Indonesia, It was because of World War Two, Lebanon, Nazi Party, Okinawa, Pacific, Syria, World War Two

Wednesday, May 16, 1945. The Haguro sunk, U-boats surrender.

Okinawa.

The Royal Navy sank the Haguro ending the Battle of Malacca Strait.  Admiral Kaju Saguira, age 49, was one of the casualties.

Fourteen U-boats surrendered to convoys in the Arctic.

The British liberated Alderney.

Heavy fighting occurred on Okinawa with the Japanese succeeding in knocking out some U.S. tanks.

Physicist Leo Szilard wrote a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to convince him that  atomic bombs shouldn't be used against Japan.

Last edition:

Tuesday, May 15, 1945. Germans fully surrendered, Chinese Army in retreat.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Austria, Axis Powers, Battle of Poljana, Battle of the Malacca Strait, Burma, German Wehrmacht, Japan, Okinawa, Philippines, World War Two, Yugoslavia

Friday, May 11, 1945. The USS Bunker Hill.

The USS Bunker Hill was badly damaged by kamikaze attacks, something that had been an unrelenting feature of the Japanese defense of Okinawa as part of Operation Ten-Go.

The Battle of West Henan–North Hubei ended in tactical stalemate but a Japanese operational victory.

Soldiers of the US Army who had commenced combat with Operation Torch and who had gone on to serve in Europe were exempted from further combat deployment.  Fighting was still raging all over the Pacific, with troops meeting stiff resistance in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa as examples.

Soldiers at a familiarization course for newly arrived soldiers on Okinawa, May 11, 1945.

The Australians took Wewak, New Guinea.

The Red Army continued to encounter German units that had not yet surrendered.  In Yugoslavia German Group Ostmark refused to surrender and kept fighting Yugoslav forces.

German forces began to surrender in the Aegean.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 10, 1945. Guderian surrenders.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Channel Islands, Czechoslovakia, France, Luzon, Okinawa, Prague Czechoslovakia, Prisoners of War, Red Army, World War Two

Monday, April 9, 1945. The End of B-17 Production.

"Tankmen of the 781st Tank Battalion, supporting the 100th Infantry Division, relax while awaiting the construction of a new bridge across the Neckar River in Heilbronn, Germany. The former pontoon bridge put in by the engineers was knocked out by effective and accurate artillery fire. 9 April, 1945.  781st Tank Battalion, 100th Infantry Division."

Photographer: T/4 Irving Leibowitz, 163rd Signal Photo Co.

The Battle of Königsberg ended in a Red Army victory.

The Japanese invaded west Hunan.

The Battle of Bologna began in Italy.

The Australian Z Special Force began Operation Opossum with the goal of rescuing the Sultan of Ternate from Ternate Island in Indonesia.

The RAF sank the Admiral Scheer, the U-804, U-843 and the U-1065.

B-17 production stopped in Seattle.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age 39, German Lutheran pastor; Wilhelm Canaris, age 58, German admiral; Ludwig Gehre, age 49, German officer; Hans Oster, age 57, German major general; Karl Sack, age 48, German jurist; and Theodor Strünck, age 50, German lawyer, and  Johann Georg Elser, age 42, were executed by the German government.

Last edition:

Sunday, April 8, 1945. Cebu City.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Army, Battle for Cebu City, Croatia, Italy, Operation Amherst, Philippines, South African Army, Weapons, World War Two, Yugoslavia

Japanese Type 95 Ha-Go light tank. National Museum of Military Vehicles.

Last edition:

M38 A1s, National Museum of Military Vehicles.

Labels: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 4x4, Artillery, Automobiles, Korean War, Military, National Museum of Military Vehicles, Radio, Trucks, Wyoming (Dubois)

Monday, March 26, 1945. Last action at Iwo Jima.

The Battle of Iwo Jima officially ended in a U.S. victory following a final Japanese suicide attack.  Japanese commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi is believed to have died on or around this date, probably killed in action.  Some Japanese holdouts would fight on beyond this date.

The Battle for Cebu City began in the Philippines.

The USS Halligan was irreparably damaged by a mine off of Okinawa.

The U-399 was sunk off of Land's End by the HMS Duckworth.

Last edition:

Sunday, March 25, 1945. Crossing the Rhine.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Allied Powers, Army, Battle of Remagen, Bernard Law Montgomery, Bratislava–Brno Offensive, Germany, Operation Plunder, Red Army, the spoken word, The written word, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Wednesday, March 21, 1945. Ohka.

The first attempted use of the the Yokosuka MXYZ Ohka suicide jet failed when the flight of Betty bombers carrying them towards their target, the US fleet off of Okinawa, was intercepted and all the bombers shot down.

The Battle of West Henan–North Hubei (豫西鄂北會戰) between the Chinese National Revolutionary Army and Imperial Japanese Army began.

The RAF hit Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, which also resulted in 125 civilian deaths.

The Royal Air Force hit Venice harbor from the air.

Last edition:

Tuesday, March 20, 1945. Hitler's last appearance in public.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Arnsberg Forest Massacre, Australian Army, Blog Mirror, boats and ships, Commandos, German Army, Heroes, Hitler Youth, Kamikaze, Okinawa, Operation Platypus, War Crimes, World War Two