Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleets, Admiral Mineichi Koga (古賀 峯一) was killed when his plane, a Kawanishi H8K ("Emily") flying boat, crashed during a typhoon between Palau and Davao while he was overseeing the withdrawal of the Combined Fleet from its Palau headquarters. His second in command, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome (福留 繁) went down in a separate plain off of off Cebu and captured by Filipino guerrillas. As a result of that, Koga's battle plans associated with Palau and the defense of the Marianas, Operation Z, were captured by the Allies.
Koga's death was kept secret until May, due to difficulties agreeing to a successor.
Fukudome survived the war, although he was tried for war crimes and found negligent association with the killing of two American airmen in Singapore. He was generally cooperative with the Allies after the war. His prison sentence was brief, and he was an advisor to the Japanese government on the establishment of the Japanese Self Defense Force. He died in 1971 at the age of 80.Operation Desecrate One concluded.
The Red Army took Ochakov.
Generaloberst Georg Lindemann took command of German Army Group North, which had been commanded by Model.
Operation Ukrainian Committee was carried out by the Polish Home Army. It saw the elimination of the small collaborationist Ukrainian Central Committee, which was active in recruiting Ukrainians for the SS Galicia unit.
The Central Committee was headed by a Ukrainian military refugee who had lived in Poland since 1923. In a way, this shows the complicated nature of the war in the East, and of the post-war East, the "Bloodlands", in general. Poland had claimed large chunks of Ukraine after World War One, and while it didn't keep all that it claimed in Ukraine and Belarus, it kept a lot of it. Ukraine and Poland fought a war immediately after World War One over the issue. Ukraine and Poland's struggle against each other, however, would soon be consumed by their mutual struggle with the Soviet Union, which would result in Poland being absorbed into the Communist state, but Poland avoiding it. Poland then became a place of refuge for Ukrainians struggling against the USSR.
With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1940, Poland was put in a desperate situation and ceased to exist, according to their enemies. The Polish civilian death rate was the highest in Europe during the war, with regular Poles subject to German murders. Ukrainians had suffered massively from the USSR's genocidal policies aimed at it in the 1920s and 1930s, and accordingly many Ukrainians aw the Germans as liberators. The Germans saw no future for an independent Ukraine, but Ukrainian organizations sprang up under the belief that the Germans would grant them the same, with Ukrainian partisan movements also developing, some of which supported the USSR, and some of which opposed the USSR and the Germans, as well as the Poles on Ukrainian territory, the latter being a revival, more or less, of the Russo Ukrainian War in a weird way.
All of this continues to have overtones to the present day, with the Poles supporting democratic Ukraine in its war against Russia, but not really having forgotten the earlier Polish Ukrainian bloodletting. Russian claims that Ukrainians are Nazis, which they are not, recalls the earlier pro Nazi movements in wartime Ukraine, not all of which have really been disavowed by modern Ukrainians.
The Disney short Donald Duck and the Gorilla was released.
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