Showing posts with label The Great Tokyo Air Raid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Great Tokyo Air Raid. Show all posts

Monday, March 10, 2025

Saturday, March 10, 1945. The execution of Gen. Émile Lemonnier.

Gen. Émile Lemonnier of the French Army was executed by the Japanese for, as a captive, refusing to sign an instrument of surrender to the Japanese in Indochina.  He was 51 years of age.

The last few years of his life must have been one of unrelenting mental torment.

The cowardly weasel ordering his execution, Captain Kayakawa was himself executed after the war..

I know some will excuse the latter's actions based on culture, but he was a weasel.

It was day two of the firebombing of Tokyo.

It's extremely difficult not to be morally troubled by this action.  There are military justifications of it, but by and large, it was a monstrous attack upon a civilian population right down to the infant level.  It survives as a reminder that even in World War Two, in which the Allies held hte moral high ground, not all Allied actions were morally licit.

In our own day, in which we have a President who stands by as rockets rain down on a civilian population, and in which that same President sat a war out due to shin splints, it rains buckets of blood on our own  heads.

The Australians landed at Wide Bay, Papua New Guinea.

Smiling Albert Field Marshal Kesselring arrivee from Italy to take command of the German armies in the west.

The Germans withdrew from from the pocket west of the Rhine between Wesel and Xanten in the face of British and Canadian pressure.

The German offensive around Lake Balatron began to encounter heavy Rad Army resistance..

The U-275 struck a mine and was sunk off of East Sussex.  The U-681 was sunk off of the Isles of Scilly by a U.S Navy B-24.

FDR involved Spanish representatives with their hands out no American aid will be forthcoming so long as the Franco dictatorship continued.

Good for FDR.

Today, King Donny would probably be giving warm smooches to Francoist delegates.

Last edition:

Friday, March 9, 1945. Firebombing Japan (Operation Meetinghouse). Japanese end French rule in Indochina (Operation Bright Moon)

Sunday, March 9, 2025

Friday, March 9, 1945. Firebombing Japan (Operation Meetinghouse). Japanese end French rule in Indochina (Operation Bright Moon)

 


The US Army Air Force conducted a 48 hour fire bombing raid of Tokyo.  Sixteen square miles of the city's interior were destroyed and between 80,000 and 130,000 civilians killed.  One million were rendered homeless.

Similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe also took place.

The U.S. 1st Army took Bonn and Godesburgh

The Japanese launched Operation Bright Moon, 明号作戦, the attack on the French military and government in Indochina.  

The Japanese had tolerated ongoing French administration of Indochina up until this point, but by this point, the French government had gone from Vichy to Free French, and Japan was becoming concerned that the Allies would land with French consent in region.  The French were expecting the attack but were unablet o successfully repel it, with some French forces having to retreat to Nationalist China where they were not well received.

French Indochinese soldiers retreating to Nationalist China.  I have to sonder how man of these Vietnamese troops survived this trek, and of those who did, did they go on and fight in the French Indochinese War on the French side?

Troops of the Italian Social Republic committed the Salussola Massacre as the war in Italy increasingly devolved into a civil war which would carry on, in some ways, until the 1970s.

Benito Mussolini sent a priest to Switzerland to propose to a Vatican envoy that Italy and Germany join with the Allies to attack and defeat the Soviet Union.  The proposal met with the predictable response.

Congress passed the McCarran–Ferguson Act, exempting the insurance business from most federal regulation.

Last edition:

Thursday, March 8, 1945. Operation Sunrise