Saturday, March 11, 1944. Rittmeister Eberhard von Breitenbuch attempts to assassinate Hitler.

Rittmeister Eberhard von Breitenbuch, an aid to Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch, accompanied the latter who had been summoned to brief Adolf Hitler to a briefing.  Part of what would become the July 20 Plot, he carried a Browning pocket pistol with him in order to assassinate the German Führer, something he had worked out with senior plotter Henning von Tresckow as he was opposed to what others preferred, a suicide bomb.  He as allowed into the Berghof but wasn't allowed into the conference rooms by the SS, which had determined not to allow in aides.

Unlike many involved in the various German military efforts to assassinate Hitler, Von Breitenbuch was not a career officer.  A forester before the war, and again after, he was part of the cavalry branch, a typical branch for those involved in forestry.

A member of the Order of St. John, the Protestant branch of the Knights Hospitallers, he survived the war and died in 1980 at age 70. 

Polish mortar men, March 11, 1944.  Italy.

British forces took Buthidaung in Burma.  

Reconnaissance forces land on Manus Island and Butjo Luo in the Admiralty Islands and meet Japanese resistance.

The U-380 and U-410 were sunk in their pens at Toulon in an American air raid.  Former Italian submarine UIT-22, now in the service of the German's, was sunk off of the Cape of Good Hope by a Royal Air Force PBY.

A conscientious objector from Laramie was sent to a detention center.  Attribution:  Wyoming History Calendar.

People have a widespread idea that conscientious objectors simply didn't serve during World War Two.  In reality, their fate was much more difficult, quite frequently.  70,000 American men applied for conscientious objector status during World War Two, and about half of them received it, with most of them receiving some sort of alternative service.

Last Prior:

Friday, March 10, 1944. Soviets say no to Finns.

Tuesday, November 16, 1943. An attempt on Hitler's life.

Major Axel von dem Bussche, a confederate of Claus von Stauffenberg, planned to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a concealed landmine which he planned to detonate while embracing Hitler during a viewing of a new winter uniform the striking looking Major would be modeling. The viewing was canceled when an Allied air raid in Berlin destroyed the rail car in which the new uniforms were contained.

Von dem Bussche was of German noble lineage, as the name indicated, and had turned against the Nazis after accidentally witnessing a 1942 massacre of Jews in Ukraine.  He volunteered to attempt the assassination again in 1944 and was set to do so when he was badly wounded on the Russian Front and had to have a leg amputated.  His being in the hospital at the time of the July 20 plot saved him from being a suspect in it.

An East Westphalian by birth, much of his ancestral holdings were in East Germany after the war, which required him to pursue a civilian career, which he in turn did.  After 1990, however, he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking their return, which failed.  His eldest daughter, however, has since bought the larger portions back from the Federal Republic of Germany.  He died in 1993 at the age of 73.

The Battle of Leros ended with an Allied surrender.  The Germans, however, had taken tremendous casualties in the effort, and were on the verge of calling the offensive off when the surrender came.

The British village of Tyneham in Dorset was ordered evacuated by the British War Department, which needed the grounds for a training area.  It remains a British military facility today.

The U.S. Army Air Force struck heavy water facilities at Rjukan and a molybdenum refinery at Knaben, damagign the German nuclear weapons effort.

USS Corvina.

The submarine USS Corvina was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-176, becoming the only U.S. submarine to be sunk by another submarine.

The I-176.

The I-176 was in turn sunk in June 1944.

The U-280 was sunk by a British B-24.

Monday, July 13, 1942. Von Bock relieved.

Today in World War II History—July 13, 1942: Nazis massacre 5000 Jews in Rovno, Ukraine. Italian frogmen swim 5 km to Gibraltar and plant limpet mines, sinking three Allied ships.

And Feodor von Bock, as Sundin also reports on her blog, was relieved of command of Army Group B, although that became effective on July 15. 

Von Bock was not a Nazi, and indeed personally disliked the Nazis, but he was also passive in regard to their atrocities within his command.  That command included several officers who later were participants in the July 20 plot, which he was invited to participate in, but he declined to do so.

He was killed at the extreme end of the war when a vehicle he was in, along with his wife and stepdaughter, was strafed.

The German 21st Panzer division was repulsed by Australian and South African forces in an attack featuring heavy losses at Tel el Eisa and the El Alamein "box".

The USS Seadragon, still off of Cam Ranh Bay, sank the transport Shinyo Maru.

The RAF bombed Duisburg during thunderstorms, but missed the industrial areas.

 Additional labels for the post immediately above.

May 14, 1941. Descent

On this day in 1941, 3,700 foreign Jews were rounded up by the Germans in France to be sent to internment camps in France.

By this point in the war Germany was acting in a full scale genocidal way against the Poles.  It was, moreover, openly oppressing the Jews everywhere it occupied territory.  It had already engaged in, and failed in, a terror campaign against British cities.  It's descent into evil was very far gone already, and getting worse.

This should have been, and frankly likely was, obvious to the Germans themselves.

It was definitely obvious to others.

One of those people was Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss Catholic theology student, who was executed in Germany on this day in 1941 for attempting to assassinate Adolph Hitler in November, 1938.

Bavaud had been studying theology in France when he fell under the influence of an anti communist figure who claimed to be a Romanov who asserted that family would be restored to the Russian thrown following a communist downfall. While it's exceedingly complicated, the belief was that assassinating Hitler would somehow bring this about and, further, Bavaud rightly judged Hitler an enemy of faith in Germany.  He planned to shoot Hitler as the annual gathering of those who had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch but a combination of bad planning and events frustrated his plan and he was ultimately arrested.  He confessed to his intent as a captive.

Bavaud's unilateral attempt on Hitler's life was far fetched and lacked funding, a fact which in part ended up in his having to abandon the effort after a selection of failed planned rendezvous with Hitler failed.  Indeed, Bavaud's actions were so flighty that it isn't too much to ponder the degree to which he was an unstable thinker, and certainly believing that assassinating Hitler would do anything for the Romanovs as nonsense.  But that somewhat clouds the often forgotten fact that the July 20, 1944 plot was far from the only serious attempt on Hitler's life.  Indeed, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 was equally whacky and it succeeded.

Hitler was in fact the target of forty-three attempts on his life, the first coming in 1932 and the last one in July, 1944.  Some were one off attempts, like that of Bavaud's, but others were well thought out plots by organized men, including more than one by members of the German military.  Two known plots were carried out by unidentified individuals, one by poisoning in 1932 and a second by a man dressed in a SS uniform in 1937.  The simplest plot was by a German general who simply individually planned on shooting him when he came to inspect his troops, although he ended up retiring prior to the opportunity presenting itself.  And these are all plots that are known about.  It's almost certainly the case that there were individual plotters whose intents were never revealed.

The fact that so many plots were attempted and failed actually ended up contributing to Hitler's aura with the convinced.  He seemed protected in their minds.

On this day the British evacuated Greek gold reserves from Crete, well aware that the Germans would be hitting the island soon.

After spotting German aircraft at a Syrian airfield during an overflight, the British government issued authority to the RAF to strike airfields in Syria, a French League of Nations mandate, which was done all on this day.  This was a strike against the territory of a neutral nation, France, but it wasn't the first time the British had hit the French following their 1940 surrender to the Germans.  The fact that France as allowing German use of Syrian airfields was itself a violation of French neutrality in any event.