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WWII Timeline – 1947 and Beyond
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at 1947 and beyond in this post. This is the final post of my WWII Timeline series.
A Timeline of WWII, 1947 and Beyond
April 16, 1947
Former Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss was hanged at Auschwitz near Crematory I.
September 15, 1947
Twenty-one former SS-Einsatz leaders went on trial before the U.S. Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Fourteen were sentenced to death, with only the four group commanders actually being executed. The others’ death sentences were commuted.
May 1948
The Soviets blockaded Berlin.
Regarding the Malmedy Massacre trial, political complications arose after the Soviets blockaded Berlin. The strategic importance of post-war Germany in the emerging Cold War became apparent to the U.S. amid public outcry in Germany against war crime trials being conducted by the U.S. Army.
June 25, 1948
President Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act which allowed more than 200,000 European refugees to settle in the United States.
November 1948
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East sentenced Japanese War Minister Tojo Hideki to death for his war crimes.
1949
Regarding the Malmedy Massacre trial, in 1949, following a series of public charges and counter charges by trial participants and further investigations over whether justice had been served in the conduct of the trial, six of the remaining death sentences were commuted.
A U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee then began an investigation, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, concerning the U.S. Army’s overall handling of the case. The Senate investigation heightened the controversy surrounding the trial, due in part to the aggressive behavior of Sen. McCarthy.
April 4, 1949
The United States, Canada, and several Western European nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty which established NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
May 1949
Following the establishment of NATO, the Soviets lifted their blockade of western Berlin.
Early 1950’s
Regarding the Malmedy Massacre trial, by the early 1950s, following years of accusations, denials, investigations, controversy, and political turmoil, the final remaining death sentences were commuted and release of all of the convicted SS men began.
December 1, 1950
President Harry Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration under the Office of Emergency Management.
September 8, 1951
The declaration of war against Japan in 1941 was officially lifted when forty-nine nations signed the Japanese Peace Treaty in San Francisco. It reestablished Japanese sovereignty and peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers on behalf of the United Nations.
October 19, 1951
The declaration of war against Germany in 1941 was officially lifted when President Harry Truman signed an act formally ending World War II after having Congress abolish the state of war with Germany.
December 1956
The last prisoner from the Malmedy Massacre trial, Jochen Peiper, was released from Landsberg Prison. He eventually settled in eastern France.
May 11, 1960
Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina by the Israeli secret service.
April 11 – August 14, 1961
Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem and found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. A fellow Nazi reported Eichmann once said he would,
leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.
May 31, 1962
Adolf Eichmann was hanged at Ramleh.
July 14, 1976
In the last of the acts following the Malmedy Massacre trial, on Bastille Day in France, Jochen Peiper was killed when a fire of mysterious origin destroyed his home. Firefighters responding to the blaze found their water hoses had been cut.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Most recent post from the series:
This is the final post of my WWII Timeline series.
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – 1946
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at 1946 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, 1946
March 5, 1946
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his Sinews of Peace/Iron Curtain Speech at Missouri’s Westminster College. This speech may be regarded as the most important Churchill delivered as Leader of the Opposition (1945-1951). His passage on the iron curtain had incalculable impact upon public opinion in the United States and in Western Europe. Russian historians date the beginning of the Cold War from this speech. A link to the entire speech is in the Sources section below and includes Churchill’s full reference to the iron curtain starting with,
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent…
March 11, 1946
The British arrested former Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss, who was posing as a gardener or farm worker in Gottrupel, Germany.
March 20, 1946
The imprisonment of Japanese in American internment camps, which began on February 19, 1942, ended with the closing of the camps.
April 15, 1946
Rudolf Höss testified at the Nuremberg trials. Later he was tried in Warsaw, Poland and found guilty. While in prison, he wrote his memoirs about Auschwitz and claimed,
History will mark me as the greatest mass murderer of all time.
April 28, 1946
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East indicted Japanese War Minister Tojo Hideki as a war criminal and charged him with fifty-five counts.
May 16, 1946
The two month trial of the U.S. Military Tribunal for War Crimes for seventy-four former SS men, including Jochen (aka Joachim) Peiper and SS General Sepp Dietrich, concerning the Malmedy Massacre of December 17, 1944, began.
See more about the Malmedy Massacre of December 17, 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge in my Fall 1944 Timeline post and subsequent information regarding January 1945 in my Winter 1945 Timeline post.
The trial was held in a courthouse at Dachau. The defense team raised allegations of mistreatment including physical abuse by the U.S. Army and cited the use of mock trials in obtaining SS confessions as improper. The defense also complained that the court’s legal expert, a Jew, constantly ruled in favor of the prosecution.
The trial included testimony by a survivor of the massacre who was able to point out the SS man that actually fired the first shot.
July 11, 1946
In the Malmedy Massacre trial, the Judges returned a verdict after two and a half hours of deliberation. All of the SS were found guilty as charged. Forty-three, including Jochen Peiper, were sentenced to death, and twenty-two, including Sepp Dietrich, were sentenced to life imprisonment. The others received long prison terms in Landsberg Prison, the same prison where Hitler had served time following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
Controversy continued, however, as various U.S. Army Boards conducted critical reviews of the trial process and methods used during pretrial interrogations. As a result, most of the death sentences were commuted and over half of the life sentences were reduced.
October 16, 1946
Hermann Göring commited suicide two hours before the scheduled execution of the first group of major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Hans Frank and the others were hanged and the bodies taken to Dachau and burned in the final use of the crematories there. Their ashes were scattered into a river.
During his imprisonment, Hans Frank stated,
A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.
December 9, 1946
Twenty-three former SS doctors and scientists went on trial before the U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Sixteen were found guilty, and seven were hanged.
December 31, 1946
Harry Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2714 declaring an official end to World War II, officially declaring the cessation of all hostilities. Even though the actual combat of the war ended May 8, 1945 in Europe and September 2, 1945 in the Pacific, the state of war was not lifted off of Japan and Germany in order to give a reason for the necessity of occupation troops in those countries.
Once the War Crimes Trials ended, the hostilities were seen as over. The signing of Proclamation 2714 is the reason why the U.S. recognizes its World War II veterans as anyone who has served between the dates of December 7, 1941, and December 31, 1946.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Peace-Iron Curtain Speech
Höss Testimony at the Nuremberg Trials
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Fall 1945
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at October – December 1945 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Fall 1945
October 24, 1945
The United Nations was “born,” formally coming into existence on this day when its charter was ratified by its five permanent members: the United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union.
Otto Frank received word that his daughters Anne and Margot died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Hermine “Miep” Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid the Frank family and four other Dutch Jews from the Nazis, gave him the diary written by Anne that she found in the annex after the family was arrested.
November 13, 1945
Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle was elected head of the provisional French government.
November 20, 1945
The best-known of the Nuremberg trials, the Trial of Major War Criminals, was held from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The former leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich on trial in Nuremberg, Germany included,
- Hermann Göring
- Rudolf Hess
- Joachim von Ribbentrop
- Wilhelm Keitel
- Ernst Kaltenbrunner
- Alfred Rosenberg
- Hans Frank
- Wilhelm Frick
- Julius Streicher
- Walther Funk
- Hjalmar Schacht
- Karl Dönitz
- Erich Raeder
- Baldur von Schirach
- Fritz Sauckel
- Alfred Jodl
- Franz von Papen
- Arthur Seyss-Inquart
- Albert Speer
- Konstantin von Neurath
- Hans Fritzsche
The trial was conducted by a joint United States-British-French-Soviet military tribunal, with each nation supplying two judges.
The four counts in the indictment were:
- Count 1 – Conspiracy to commit crimes alleged in the next three counts
- Count 2 – Crimes Against Peace, including planning, preparing, starting, or waging aggressive war
- Count 3 – War Crimes, including violations of laws or customs of war
- Count 4 – Crimes Against Humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement, persecution on political or racial grounds, involuntary deportment, and inhumane acts against civilian populations
The History Place reports that,
The majority of the defendants claimed they were unknowing pawns of Adolf Hitler or were simply following orders. Evidence used against the defendants included Nazi propaganda films and extensive Nazi paperwork documenting mass murder and other crimes. Also shown were films taken by the Allies after the liberation of extermination camps.
For more detail about the trial, follow the link below in Sources.
December 9, 1945
General George S. Patton broke his neck in a car accident near Mannheim, Germany. The accident left him paralyzed from the neck down.
December 21, 1945
General Patton died in a hospital in Luxemburg from injuries he sustained in the December 9 car crash.
December 22, 1945
Britain and the U.S. formally recognized the new government of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia.
U.S. President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order known as the “Truman Directive,” which gave preference to displaced persons for immigrant visas under existing U.S. immigration quota restrictions. Overall immigration into the United States did not increase but more displaced persons were admitted than before. About 22,950 displaced persons, of whom two-thirds were Jewish, entered the United States between December 22, 1945 and 1947 under provisions of the Truman Directive.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
The History Place: Nuremberg War Crimes Trial
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Summer 1945
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at July – September 1945 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Summer 1945
July 1, 1945
American, British, and French troops moved into Berlin.
July 5, 1945
Liberation of the Philippines from Japanese rule was announced by General Douglas MacArthur.
July 10, 1945
One thousand bomber raids against Japan began.
July 13, 1945
Italy (formerly an Axis power) declared war on Japan.
July 14, 1945
The first U.S. Naval bombardment of the Japanese home islands began when US Navy warships attacked the Japanese cities of Kamaishi and Muroran.
July 16, 1945
The first atomic bomb was successfully tested in the U.S. when the first-ever nuclear bomb was detonated in New Mexico at the Alamogordo Test Range. The bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” created a crater nearly 1,000 feet wide. The test, code-named the “Trinity” nuclear test, began the Atomic Age.
July 17 – August 2, 1945
The Potsdam Conference, the last of the WWII meetings held by the “Big Three” heads of state (American President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his successor, Clement Attlee, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin) was held near Berlin. The conference established a Council of Foreign Ministers and a central Allied Control Council for administration of Germany. Talks primarily centered on the future of postwar Europe, but the “Big Three” also issued a declaration demanding “unconditional surrender” from Japan.
July 26, 1945
Clement Atlee of the Labour Party was elected British Prime Minister to succeed Conservative Winston Churchill.
The USS Indianapolis delivered components of the atomic bomb “Little Boy” at Tinian Island in the South Pacific.
July 28, 1945
A B-25 Mitchell bomber pilot became disoriented in heavy fog and crashed his aircraft into the Empire State Building in New York City. Although the accident did not compromise the building’s structural integrity, it caused fourteen deaths, three crewmen and eleven people in the building.
July 30, 1945
A Japanese submarine sank the Cruiser USS Indianapolis resulting in the loss of 881 crewmen. The ship sank before a radio message could be sent out leaving survivors adrift for two days. Only 316 onboard survived.
August 6, 1945
The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan from a B-29 flown by Col. Paul Tibbets, killing as many as 140,000 people.
August 8, 1945
The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria.
August 9, 1945
The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan from a B-29 flown by Maj. Charles Sweeney, killing as many as 80,000 people. Emperor Hirohito and Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki sought an immediate peace with the Allies.
August 14, 1945
Japan agreed to unconditional surrender. Some consider this date (August 15 in the UK because of time differences) as V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, but others consider September 2, when the surrender document was signed, to be V-J Day.
General Douglas MacArthur was appointed to head the occupation forces in Japan.
August 15, 1945
Some of the first child Holocaust survivors arrived in England from Europe.
August 16, 1945
General Jonathan M. Wainwright, a prisoner of war since May 6, 1942, was released from a POW camp in Manchuria.
Winston Churchill delivered an address in the British House of Commons stating,
…it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.
August 27, 1945
B-29’s dropped supplies to Allied POWs in China.
August 29, 1945
The Soviets shot down a B-29 dropping supplies to POWs in Korea,
U.S. Troops landed near Tokyo to begin the occupation of Japan.
August 30, 1945
The British reoccupied Hong Kong.
September 2, 1945
President Harry S. Truman declared V-J (Victory over Japan) Day as Japan formally surrendered and signed a surrender agreement during a ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, as one thousand aircraft carrier-based planes flew overhead, officially ending WWII.
September 3, 1945
General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Imperial Japanese Army, commander in the Philippines, surrendered to General Jonathan Wainwright at Baguio.
September 4, 1945
Japanese troops on Wake Island surrendered.
September 5, 1945
The British landed in Singapore.
September 8, 1945
General Douglas MacArthur entered Tokyo.
September 9, 1945
The Japanese in Korea surrendered.
September 13, 1945
The Japanese in Burma surrendered.
September 25, 1945
The Nazi party was declared illegal in Germany.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Fold3 Blog Post: The 75th Anniversary of the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Spring 1945
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at April – June 1945 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Spring 1945
Spring 1945
The Nazis continued marches of concentration camp and prisoner of war camp inmates. Some were marched westward away from advancing Soviet troops and some were marched eastward away from advancing American and British troops. At the same time, German civilians fleeing the advancing Russians often shared the road with the inmates marching.
April 1945
The Allies discovered stolen Nazi art and wealth hidden in German salt mines.
Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Tito’s Partisan units captured Zagreb and toppled the Ustasa regime. Top Ustasa leaders fled to Italy and Austria.
Early April 1945
The Soviets drove the Germans and their Hungarian collaborators out of Hungary.
April 1, 1945
American troops encircled German forces in the Ruhr.
In the Pacific Theater, the Battle of Okinawa began with the final amphibious landing of the war when the U.S. Tenth Army invaded Okinawa.
April 4, 1945
The Soviets forced the surrender of Slovakia with the capture of Bratislava.
The Ohrdruf camp, a subcamp of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, was liberated. It was the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops. It was later visited by General Dwight D. Eisenhower (on April 12).
April 6, 1945
Codename “Operation Grapeshot” began. It was the Spring 1945 Allied offensive in Italy, the final Allied attack during the Italian Campaign near the end of WWII. This attack into the Lombardy Plain in Northern Italy by the 15th Allied Army Group ended on May 2 with the formal surrender of German forces in Italy.
April 7, 1945
American fighter pilots based on Iwo Jima escorted Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers in their first P-51 Mustang fighter-escorted mission against Japan.
U.S. Aircraft Carrier-based fighters sank the Japanese super-battleship Yamato and several Japanese escort vessels which planned to attack U.S. Forces at Okinawa.
April 11, 1945
U.S. troops from the 6th Armored Division of the Third Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after the prisoners stormed the watchtowers and seized control of the camp.
U.S. forces liberated the Dora-Mittelbau camp.
April 12, 1945
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his Warm Springs, Georgia vacation home. Vice President Harry Truman, who had held the office for eighty-three days and had had little contact with Roosevelt, was summoned to the White House. Truman was unaware that Roosevelt had died. After being sworn in as President, one of Truman’s first acts was to meet with Roosevelt’s advisers to learn of matters of national security, including the existence of the atomic bomb.
Canadian forces liberated prisoners at the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands.
April 13, 1945
The Soviets captured Vienna, Austria.
April 15, 1945
British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus at this camp a month earlier.
April 16, 1945
The Soviets launched their final offensive and encircled Berlin.
April 18, 1945
German forces in the Ruhr surrendered.
Pulitizer prize winner Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper’s bullet while reporting on the Battle of Okinawa.
April 23, 1945
Soviets troops reached Berlin.
The 358th and 359th U.S. Infantry Regiments (90th US Infantry Division) liberated Flossenbürg.
April 28, 1945
The Allies took Venice.
Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, captured as they attempted to flee to Switzerland, were executed by Italian partisans.
April 29, 1945
The U.S. 7th Army liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp.
Adolf Hitler married longtime mistress, Eva Braun.
April 30, 1945
Holed up in a bunker under his headquarters in Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. He and Eva Braun poisoned themselves and their dogs with cyanide capsules and Hitler shot himself in the head with his service pistol.
May 1945
Allied troops conquered Okinawa, the last island stop before the Japanese islands.
May 1, 1945
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, and his wife Magda committed suicide after murdering their six children.
May 2, 1945
German troops in Italy surrendered.
The Theresienstadt Ghetto/Concentration Camp in the Czech Republic was taken over by the Red Cross.
The BBC History website reported about this date,
…After one of the most intense battles in human history, the guns at last stopped firing amongst the ruins of Berlin. According to Soviet veterans, the silence that followed the fighting was literally deafening. Less than four years after his attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler’s self-proclaimed thousand-year Reich had ceased to exist.
George Edwin Farrar, Lawrence Newbold, and other POW’s of Stalag Luft IV were liberated on the road near Gudow, Germany by the British Royal Dragoons.
May 5, 1945
The Mauthausen Concentration Camp was liberated. The camp was known for its “Todesstiege” (Stairs of Death) in the rock quarry at Mauthausen. The Nazis forced prisoners to repeatedly carry heavy granite blocks up 186 stairs until they died or were murdered if they failed.
May 7, 1945
Germany surrendered to the western Allies at General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Headquarters in Reims, France. German Chief-of-Staff, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender, to take effect the following day.
May 8, 1945
V-E (Victory in Europe) Day was declared as German troops continued to surrender to the Allies throughout Europe.
May 9, 1945
Germany surrendered to Russia at Soviet headquarters in Berlin. The Soviets had insisted that a second ceremonial signing take place in Soviet-occupied Berlin.
Hermann Göring was captured by members of the U.S. 7th Army.
May 14, 1945
The Austrian Republic was re-established.
May 20, 1945
The Japanese began withdrawal from China.
May 23, 1945
The German High Command and Provisional Government were imprisoned.
SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler committed suicide while in British custody.
May 25, 1945
The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved “Operation Olympic,” the invasion of Japan, scheduled for November 1, 1945.
June 5, 1945
The Allies divided up Germany into four Zones of Occupation and took over the government.
June 9, 1945
Japanese Premier Suzuki announced Japan would fight to the very end rather than unconditionally surrender.
June 18, 1945
Japanese resistance ended on Mindanao in the Philippines.
American President Harry Truman authorized “Operation Olympic.”
June 22, 1945
In the Battle of Okinawa, which had begun on April 1, Japanese resistance ended as the U.S. Tenth Army completed its capture of Okinawa.
June 26, 1945
The United Nations charter was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco, California, USA.
June 28, 1945
General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters announced the end of all Japanese resistance in the Philippines.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Spring 1945 Offensive in Italy
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Winter 1945
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at January – March 1945 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Winter 1945
1945
As Allied troops advanced, the Nazis conducted marches of concentration camp and prisoner of war camp inmates away from outlying areas. Some were marched westward away from advancing Soviet troops and some were marched eastward away from advancing American and British troops. Prisoners received little aid from people in towns they passed through, and in some cases were harassed and assaulted. At the same time, German civilians fleeing the advancing Russians often shared the road with the marching camp inmates.
January 1945
By January of 1945, the combined efforts of the Allied armies drove the Germans back to their original starting positions in the Battle of the Bulge. American troops reached the sight of the Malmedy Massacre of December 17, 1944 (see Fall 1944 post), now buried under two feet of winter snow.
The bodies of the eighty-one American POW’s lay frozen in the same spot they were murdered the previous month. They were located through the use of mine detectors and were numbered as each was uncovered. Forty-one of the POW’s had been shot in the head.
Columns of German POW’s were led by the site by their American captors during the U.S. medical team’s identification and recovery process, but no act of vengeance was perpetuated on the enemy soldiers.
January 1-17, 1945
German forces withdrew from the Ardennes.
January 3, 1945
In preparation for planned assaults against Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and mainland Japan, American General Douglas MacArthur was placed in command of all U.S. ground forces and American Admiral Chester Nimitz in command of all U.S. naval forces.
January 4, 1945
The British occupied Akyab in Burma.
January 6, 1945
The Russians liberated Budapest, Hungary, and in doing so, freed over 80,000 Jews.
January 9, 1945
The U.S. Sixth Army invaded Lingayen Gulf and landed on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
January 11, 1945
U.S. Aircraft Carrier-based planes carried out an air raid against Japanese bases in Indochina.
January 12, 1945
In the Vistula–Oder Offensive, the Soviet Red Army made a major advance into German-held territory in Poland.
January 14, 1945
Russian troops invaded eastern Germany.
January 16, 1945
The U.S. 1st and 3rd Armies reconnected after a month-long separation during the Battle of the Bulge.
January 17, 1945
As part of the Vistula–Oder Offensive, Soviet troops captured and liberated Warsaw, Poland.
Swedish Foreign Ministry diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who in 1944 had saved nearly 33,000 Jews, was detained by Soviet agents and was never heard from again. (See post for July 1944 in Summer 1944 timeline series).
January 18, 1945
The Nazis evacuated 66,000 prisoners from Auschwitz.
January 19, 1945
As part of the Vistula–Oder Offensive, Soviet troops captured and liberated Krakow, Poland.
January 20, 1945
Crematory II at Auschwitz-Birkenau was destroyed by the SS using explosives, along with Crematory III, just seven days before the death camp was liberated by the Soviets.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in for his fourth and final term in office.
January 26, 1945
Crematory V at Auschwitz-Birkenau was blown up by the SS as the Soviets were approaching.
January 27, 1945
Soviet troops liberated the remaining prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. By this time, an estimated 2,000,000 persons, including 1,500,000 Jews, had been murdered there.
January 28, 1945
The Allies finally eradicated the Ardennes salient (the Bulge).
The Burma road was reopened.
January 30, 1945
Adolf Hitler delivered his final radio address.
A Soviet submarine sank the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German armed military transport ship, in the Baltic Sea while evacuating German civilian refugees from East Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Estonia and military personnel from Gotenhafen as the Red Army advanced. An estimated seven thousand to more than nine thousand died.
February 1945
Peru, Lebanon, Turkey, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt joined the Allies and declared war on Nazi Germany and Japan.
Iran declared war against Japan.
February 3, 1945
The U.S. Sixth Army attacked the Japanese in Manila.
February 4, 1945
The U.S. First Army took the first of seven Ruhr Valley dams in Germany.
February 4 – 11, 1945
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin attended the conference at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula to discuss post-war spheres of influence.
February 6, 1945
The march of prisoners of war of Stalag Luft IV, of which my father George Edwin Farrar was one, began.
Tens of thousands of German civilians fled Breslau (now Wrocław), Poland before the westward advance of the Soviet Red Army.
February 12, 1945
All German women between the ages of 16 and 60 were called to service in the Volkssturm, the German people’s army.
February 13, 1945
The Soviets captured Budapest, Hungary after a two-month siege.
The 70th motorized infantry brigade of the Soviet Red Army liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
February 13 – 15, 1945
The German city of Dresden was destroyed by firestorm after Allied (British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces) aircraft conducted bombing raids. Between 20,000 and 45,000 civilians were killed.
February 16, 1945
U.S. troops recaptured Bataan, a province on the Philippine island of Luzon, in the Philippines.
February 19, 1945
U.S. Marines invaded Iwo Jima with an amphibious assault.
February 23, 1945
U.S. Marines raised the flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
March 1, 1945
A U.S. submarine sank a Japanese merchant ship loaded with supplies for Allied POWs. The act resulted in a court martial for the captain of the submarine since the ship had been granted safe passage by the U.S. Government.
March 2, 1945
U.S. airborne troops recaptured Corregidor, an island located at the entrance of Manila Bay in southwestern part of Luzon Island in the Philippines.
March 3, 1945
U.S. And Filipino troops took Manila.
March 6, 1945
The last German offensive of the war began in an effort to defend the oil fields in Hungary.
March 7, 1945
The Allies took Cologne.
U.S. troops of the US 9th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff Railroad Bridge at Remagen, between Koblenz and Bonn, Germany, and crossed the Rhine River .
March 9/10, 1945
U.S. B-29 aircraft firebombing raids on Tokyo destroyed sixteen square miles of the city and killed an estimated 100,000 people.
March 10, 1945
The U.S. Eighth Army invaded the Zamboanga Peninsula on Mindanao in the Philippines.
March 15, 1945
Anne Frank died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi Concentration Camp.
March 20, 1945
British troops liberated Mandalay, Burma.
March 26, 1945
The Battle for Iwo Jima ended with the Allied capture of the island from the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA).
March 27, 1945
The last German V-2 rocket struck Great Britain. The V-2 campaign killed nearly three thousand Britains.
B-29 aircraft laid mines in Japan’s Shimonoseki Strait to interrupt shipping.
March 30, 1945
Soviet troops captured Danzig, a port city on the Baltic Sea.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Fall 1944
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at October – December 1944 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Fall 1944
Late 1944
Oskar Schindler saved 1200 Jews by moving them from the Plaszow labor camp in the southern suburb of Kraków, Poland to his hometown of Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia.
October 2 – 5, 1944
The Polish Home Army surrendered to the Nazis ending the Warsaw Uprising.
October 7, 1944
After learning that they were going to be killed, the Sonderkommando (special work units who were made up of Nazi death camp prisoners, usually Jews, and were forced to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims) revolted at Auschwitz-Birkenau resulting in the complete destruction of Crematory IV.
October 10-29
Soviet troops captured Riga, the capital of Latvia on the Baltic Sea.
October 11, 1944
The U.S. began air raids against Okinawa.
October 14, 1944
German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel committed forced suicide by cyanide poisoning after being implicated in the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. His death was announced to be due to battle wounds suffered on July 17, 1944.
The Allies liberated Athens, Greece.
October 15, 1944
As the Hungarian government was pursuing negotiations for surrendering to the Soviets, the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement, with German support, carried out a coup d’état (a revolt performed through violence), allowing the Nazis to seize control of the Hungarian puppet government. The deportation of Jews, which had been temporarily halted due to international political pressure, resumed.
October 17, 1944
SS leader Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary.
October 18, 1944
Fourteen American B-29 Superfortress aircraft based on the Mariana Islands attacked the Japanese base at Truk.
October 20, 1944
The U.S. Sixth Army invaded Leyte in the Philippines.
Soviet forces captured Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, from the Germans.
October 21, 1944
The Germans surrendered at Aachen, Germany in the Battle of Aachen. It was the first German city to fall to the Allies.
October 23-26, 1944
The three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history, resulted in a decisive U.S. Naval victory over Japan.
George Edwin Farrar’s younger brother Robert (my Uncle Bob) Burnham Farrar served aboard the USS Intrepid, which was involved in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
October 25, 1944
In World War II, a Japanese aircraft loaded with explosives and making a deliberate suicidal crash on an enemy target was known as a Kamikaze (meaning “Divine Wind”) attack. Fleet Admiral William Halsey called it the “only weapon I feared in the war.” The first recorded Kamikaze attack occurred against U.S. warships during the three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf.
October 28, 1944
Two thousand Jews in the last transport from Theresienstadt (a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto in the town of Terezín, located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), arrived at Auschwitz.
October 29, 1944
A Japanese Kamikaze hit Bob Farrar’s ship, the USS Intrepid, on one of her port side gun positions. Damage to the ship was minimal, but ten men were killed and six were wounded.
October 30, 1944
The last transport of Jews from Theresienstadt arrived at Auschwitz and the gas chambers there were used for the last time.
November 8, 1944
The Nazis forced 25,000 Jews to walk over 100 miles in rain and snow from Budapest to the Austrian border. A second forced march of 50,000 persons followed, ending at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
For the first time since 1933, Adolf Hitler failed to appear in Munich on the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.
November 7, 1944
Franklin Roosevelt won his fourth consecutive term as U.S. President.
November 11, 1944
The U.S. navy bombed Iwo Jima.
November 18, 1944
The U.S. Third Army crossed the German frontier.
November 20, 1944
French troops drove through the ‘Beffort Gap’ in southwestern France to reach the Rhine.
November 23, 1944
American troops liberated the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, located in the Vosges Mountains close to the Alsatian village of Natzwiller in France.
November 24, 1944
The French captured Strasbourg, France.
Twenty-four B-29 Superfortresses bombed the Nakajima aircraft factory near Tokyo.
November 25, 1944
SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the crematories at Auschwitz. Crematory IV had already been destroyed by inmates during a revolt on October 7, 1944.
Shortly after noon, two Japanese Kamikazes crashed into Bob Farrar’s ship, the USS Intrepid, killing sixty-six men and causing a serious fire. Bob Farrar was injured in the attack, mainly due to smoke inhalation. The ship remained on station, however, and the fires were extinguished within two hours. She was detached for repairs the following day.
December 4, 1944
Athens, Greece was placed under martial law during a Civil War.
December 11, 1944
At Hartheim Castle, near Linz Austria, German authorities carried out the last gassing of inmates, and under SS guard, Mauthausen (Austria) concentration camp prisoners dismantled the killing facility. Hartheim was one of six gassing installations for adults, the majority of them mentally and physically disabled patients, established as part of the Nazi’s “euthanasia” program.
December 15, 1944
U.S. Troops invaded Mindoro in the Philippines.
In the summer of 1944, bandleader Glenn Miller (a member of the U.S. Army since late 1942 and later Army Air Forces) formed a fifty-piece USAAF (United States Army Air Forces) band and departed for England where he gave hundreds of performances to Allied troops over the next six months. On this date, he left England to entertain American troops in France in a UC-64 Norseman (a Canadian single-engine bush plane), traveling over the English Channel, but never arrived. The wreckage of his plane was never found and his official military status remains Missing in Action.
December 16, 1944
The Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg’s Ardennes Forest began as the Germans launched a final offensive in the west known as Operation Wacht am Rhein. The objectives were to re-conquer Belgium, split the allied forces along the German border, and capture the strategic port of Antwerp. Three German Armies conducted a surprise attack along a 70-miles front and quickly overtook the American line.
December 17, 1944
On the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, the Nazi Waffen-SS (the military branch of the Nazi Party’s SS organization) murdered eighty-one American POW’s in the Malmedy Massacre.
A regiment of the 1st SS Panzer Division of the Leibstandarte-SS, commanded by SS Lt. Col. Jochen Peiper, intercepted a truck convoy of the U.S. 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion’s Battery B southeast of Malmedy. Peiper’s troops, called the Blowtorch Battalion, had burned their way across Russia and had slaughtered civilians in two separate villages.
The Panzer tanks fired upon and destroyed the lead vehicles in the truck convoy. The convoy halted while the tank fire continued. The Americans were forced to abandon their vehicles and surrendered.
The captured American Battery B soldiers were herded into a nearby field where an SS tank commander ordered an SS private to shoot into the prisoners. The SS opened fire on the unarmed Americans with machine guns.
When the machine gunfire ceased, an English speaking SS man walked among the victims on the ground asking if anyone was injured or needed help. Those survivors who responded were killed by a pistol shot to the head. In what was the single worst atrocity against American troops during World War II in Europe, a total of eighty-one Americans were killed.
Three American survivors reported the massacre to a U.S. Army Colonel stationed at Malmedy. Because the news spread quickly that Germans were shooting POW’s, the American troops became determined to hold the lines against the German advance.
The same day, in the Pacific Theater of Operations, the U.S. Army Air Forces established the 509th Composite Group to operate the B-29 Superfortresses that would drop the atomic bombs.
December 20, 1944
Bob Farrar’s ship, the USS Intrepid, reached San Francisco for repairs.
December 21, 1944
The Germans besieged U.S. paratroopers in Bastogne, Belgium. Units of Germany’s 5th Panzer Army captured St. Vith, Belgium.
December 22, 1944
Surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge, American Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne Division received a surrender ultimatum from the Germans. His immortal reply: NUTS! [Use the link in Sources below to read the fascinating story.]
December 26, 1944
The 4th Armored Division, leading the attack by General George S. Patton’s Third Army, attacked the Germans at Bastogne and was the first unit to break through to relieve the besieged 101st Airborne Division of paratroopers. While American troops held the town, refugees were able to evacuate.
December 27, 1944
Soviet troops besieged Budapest.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
The Forced Suicide of Erwin Rommel
The Story of Anthony McAuliffe’s NUTS! Reply
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Summer 1944
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at July – September 1944 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Summer 1944
Summer 1944
The highest-ever daily number of those gassed and cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau was recorded at just over 9,000. This overwhelmed the capacity of the crematories and required six huge pits to burn the bodies.
July 1944
The Swedish Foreign Ministry sent diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest, Hungary with the support of the World Jewish Congress and American War Refugee Board to aid the 200,000 Jews left in the Hungarian capital. He saved nearly 33,000 Jews by securing their release from deportation trains, death march convoys, and labor service brigades, and by issuing diplomatic papers (protective documents) and establishing a network of thirty-one safe, or protected, houses in Budapest, called the International Ghetto. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg was detained by Soviet agents and was never heard from again.
July 3, 1944
The Battle of the Hedgerows began in Normandy, named so because the Allies were hindered by the agricultural hedges in Western France which intelligence had not properly evaluated. The US First Army VIII Corps advanced only seven miles in twelve days.
The Soviets captured Minsk.
July 4, 1944
Less than one month since D-Day on June 6, the Allies had landed 920,000 troops, and lost 62,000 men, the count including those killed, wounded, and missing.
July 8, 1944
The Japanese withdrew from Imphal, the capital city of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. They had invaded Imphal in a bid to capture British Colonies, but were defeated.
July 9, 1944
British and Canadian troops captured Caen, France.
Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest as first secretary to the Swedish legation in Hungary and with financing from the US War Refugee Board.
July 11, 1944
The Czech family camp at Auschwitz was liquidated.
July 17, 1944
German General Erwin Rommel was seriously injured in Normandy when a British Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter plane strafed his staff car, injuring the driver, which caused it to crash into trees. Rommel was thrown from the car, suffering cuts to his face from glass shards and three fractures to his skull. He was taken to a hospital with major head injuries and then to his home in Germany to convalesce.
July 18, 1944
British General Bernard Montgomery, the commander of all the Allied ground forces in Normandy, launched Operation Goodwood 40 miles east of Caen.
U.S. troops reached and captured St. Lô, France.
July 20, 1944
German Army officers who were part of the German resistance attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, but failed when a heavy conference table deflected the blast from a bomb placed under it. Hitler was only slightly wounded.
July 21, 1944
U.S. Marines invaded Guam in the Mariana Islands. In Operation Stevedore, Task Force 53, commanded by Rear Admiral Richard L. Connolly of the U.S. Navy, the Third Marine Division and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, along with the U.S. Army 77th Infantry Division, landed on Guam.
July 24, 1944
Soviet troops liberated the first concentration camp at Majdanek where over 360,000 had been murdered.
U.S. Marines invaded Tinian, an Island in the Northern Mariana Islands.
July 25, 1944
The U.S. Army began Operation Cobra in Normandy.
The II Canadian Corps began Operation Spring, an offensive south of Caen.
July 27, 1944
American troops completed the liberation of Guam.
July 28, 1944
Soviet troops took Brest-Litovsk, Belarus.
U.S. troops took Coutances, France.
August 1, 1944 – October 5, 1944
The non-communist underground Home Army in Poland, the dominant Polish resistance movement when Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, rose up against the Nazis in an attempt to liberate Warsaw before the arrival of Soviet troops. The Soviet advance stopped on the east bank of the Vistula River. On October 5, the remnants of the Polish Home Army fighting in Warsaw surrendered to the Nazis.
August 1, 1944
Patton’s U.S. Third Army was activated in Normandy, France.
U.S. troops reached Avranches, France.
August 2, 1944
The SS liquidated the Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
August 3, 1944
U.S. And Chinese troops took Myitkyina, the capital city of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), after a two month siege.
August 4, 1944
Anne Frank and her family were arrested by the Gestapo in Amsterdam, Holland. They were first sent to the Westerbork Transit Camp and then on to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot were later sent to Bergen-Belsen where Anne died of typhus on March 15, 1945.
August 6, 1944
Lodz, the last Jewish ghetto in Poland, was liquidated with 60,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz.
August 7, 1944
The Germans began a major counter-attack toward Avranches, France.
August 8, 1944
American troops completed the capture of the Mariana Islands.
The Canadians launched Operation Totalize south of Caen, France with 600 tanks and 720 guns.
August 15, 1944
In Operation Dragoon, Allied forces landed in southern France near Nice and advanced rapidly towards the Rhine River to the northeast.
August 19, 1944
The French Resistance caused an uprising in Paris against the Germans.
August 19/20, 1944
A Soviet offensive in the Balkans (an area comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia) began with an attack on Romania.
August 20 – 25, 1944
Allied troops reached Paris. On August 25, Free French forces, supported by Allied troops, entered the French capital. By September, the Allies reach the German border; by December, virtually all of France, most of Belgium, and part of the southern Netherlands were liberated.
August 20, 1944
The Falaise Pocket or Battle of the Falaise Pocket was the decisive engagement of the Battle of Normandy in WWII. The Western Allies encircled the German Army Group B, 7th Army, and Fifth Panzer Army, in the Falaise Pocket, a pocket formed around Falaise, Calvados, in the Normandy region of France.
August 23, 1944
The appearance of Soviet troops on the Prut River induced the Romanian opposition to overthrow the Antonescu regime. The new government concluded an armistice and immediately switched sides in the war. The Romanian turnaround compelled Bulgaria to surrender on September 8, and the Germans to evacuate Greece, Albania, and southern Yugoslavia in October.
August 25, 1944
Paris was liberated when Germany surrendered Paris to the Allied forces, ending four years of occupation.
August 29, 1944 – October 28, 1944
The underground Slovak resistance uprising began under the leadership of the Slovak National Council, consisting of both Communists and non-Communists, against the Germans and the indigenous fascist Slovak regime. In late October, the Germans captured the headquarters of the uprising at Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia and ended the organized resistance.
August 31, 1944
Soviet troops took Bucharest, the largest and capital city in Romania.
September 1944
As the British and American Air Forces destroyed most of the V-1 launch sites, by September of 1944, the Nazis introduced the V-2 rocket. The V-2 was much more sophisticated, a liquid-fueled rocket that traveled at supersonic speeds as high as 50 miles. It would plunge toward its target at a speed of nearly 4,000 miles per hour, smashing its 2,000 pound high explosive warhead into the ground without warning. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 rockets could not be intercepted. Over a thousand were fired at London.
September 1-4, 1944
The cities of Verdun, Dieppe, Artois, Rouen, and Abbeville in France, and Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium, were liberated by Allies.
September 3, 1944
The British Second Army liberated Brussels, Belgium.
Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt assumed command of the German armies in the West.
September 4, 1944
Finland and the Soviet Union agreed to a cease-fire.
September 13, 1944
U.S. troops reached the Siegfried Line in western Germany.
September 15, 1944
U.S. Troops invaded Morotai Island in Indonesia.
September 17 – 25, 1944
The Allied assault known as “Operation Market-Garden” was an attempt by combined Allied airborne and ground assault troops to capture bridges over Dutch waterways in order to open a rapid northern route for the Allied advance into Germany.
The First Allied Airborne Army dropped at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem to secure bridgeheads and the British Second Army pushed north into Holland from Belgium, to link up.
It was the largest Allied airborne operation of the war and the most costly. The third of the three airborne landings, at Arnhem, proved to be a complete failure as British troops landed too far from the Arnhem bridges and the Germans quickly recovered from the surprise of the aerial assault. Of 10,000 British troops at Arnhem, 1,400 were killed while over 6,000 were taken prisoner.
September 19, 1944
The Moscow Armistice ended the Continuation War when it was signed by Finland on one side and the Soviet Union and United Kingdom on the other side. Finland had participated in the Continuation War in an Axis partnership with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944.
September 25, 1944
The British evacuated the remaining paratroopers from Arnhem in the Netherlands, but only 2,163 men out of nearly 10,000 returned.
Adolf Hitler ordered the formation of the Volkssturm (the “people’s storm”), the German home guard or national militia. It was created not by the formal German Armed Forces, but rather by the Nazi Party on Hitler’s order. Members were conscripted from those between sixteen and sixty years of age who were not already serving in a military unit. It was not officially announced until October 16, 1944.
September 26, 1944
Soviet troops occupied Estonia.
September 28, 1944
Frogmen from the German Marine Einsatzkommando demolished the Nijmegen, Holland railway bridge, which had been a key objective for the Allies to hold in Operation Market Garden.
The two B-17’s of the John Oliver Buslee crew and the James Jospeh Brodie crew of the 384th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force collided after coming off the target at Magdeburg, Germany. Four of the eighteen airmen aboard the two ships survived: George Edwin Farrar (my father), Harry Allen Liniger, Wilfred Frank Miller, and George Marshall Hawkins, Jr.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Hedgerow Warfare During the Battle of Normandy
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Spring 1944
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at April – June 1944 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Spring 1944
April 5, 1944
Siegfried Lederer, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, escaped to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Terezin, Czechoslovakia where he warned the Elders of the Council about Auschwitz.
April 6, 1944
The Lyon (France) Gestapo, headed by Klaus Barbie, raided the Jewish children’s home at Izieu. The home was a refuge for children who had come to France to escape Nazi persecution. Fifty-one people were arrested during the raid and forty-four of them were children. They were all first sent to Drancy, and then were one of the last transports from France to Auschwitz. Only one survived.
April 7, 1944
Two days after Siegfried Lederer’s escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, two more Jewish inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped and made it safely to Czechoslovakia. Vrba submitted a report to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia which was forwarded to the Vatican, and received there in mid-June.
Paul Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda, took overall control of Berlin.
April 8, 1944
Soviet troops began an offensive to liberate Crimea.
April 14, 1944
A total of 5,200 Greek Jews were moved in the first transports of Jews from Athens, Greece to Auschwitz.
April 17, 1944
The Japanese began their last offensive in China, attacking U.S. air bases in eastern China.
April 22, 1944
In the Japanese theater, the Allies invaded Aitape and Hollandia in New Guinea.
April 28, 1944
German E-boats (the western Allies name for the fast German attack craft or fast boat, Schnellboot) attacked Allied forces training for D-Day at Slapton Sands, in Southwest England, killing more than 600 US Army and Navy personnel (1/3 the number killed on D-Day on Utah Beach).
May 1944
Nazi SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s agents secretly proposed to trade Jews for trucks, other commodities, or money to the western Allies.
May 8, 1944
Rudolf Höss of the Nazi SS returned to Auschwitz to oversee the extermination of Hungarian Jews on the order of Heinrich Himmler.
May 9, 1944
Soviet troops recaptured Sevastopol.
May 11, 1944
The Allies attacked the Gustav Line south of Rome.
May 12, 1944
The Germans surrendered to the Soviets in the Crimea.
May 15, 1944
The Germans withdrew to the Adolf Hitler Line in central Italy.
The Nazis began the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz. Eventually, 440,000 Hungarian Jews would be deported with two-thirds of those murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
May 16, 1944
Hungarian Jews arrived at Auschwitz. German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, arrived to personally oversee and hasten the extermination process. An estimated 100,000 Jews were gassed in the following eight days, by May 24. By the end of the month, May 31, the SS reported collecting 88 pounds of gold and white metal from the teeth of those gassed. By the end of June, half the Jews in Hungary (381,661 persons) had arrived at Auschwitz.
May 18, 1944
The Allies captured the town of Monte Cassino in the province of Frosinone, Italy after four months of battle and the cost of 20,000 lives.
May 19, 1944
Around fifty of the Stalag Luft III Allied POW underground tunnel escapees were executed. Almost all of those who escaped were recaptured, with about twenty returned to the camp to serve as a warning to other prisoners.
May 25, 1944
The Germans retreated from Anzio, on the coast of Italy, south of Rome.
May 26, 1944
Charles de Gaulle proclaimed his Free French movement to be the “Provisional Government of the French Republic.” The new government was recognized by Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, and Norway, but an infuriated Roosevelt and Churchill refused to recognize it and retaliated by excluding de Gaulle from the final planning for Operation Overlord (codename for the Battle of Normandy, which was launched on June 6, 1944 with the Normandy landings).
May 27, 1944
The Allies invaded Biak Island, New Guinea.
June 1944
The Nazis carefully prepared and “beautified” the Theresienstadt Ghetto (in Terezín located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) and its Jewish inmates for a Red Cross delegation visit which resulted in a favorable report.
June 4, 1944
Allied troops liberated Rome, the first Axis capital to be liberated.
June 5, 1944
The first B-29 Superfortress combat mission was flown as seventy-seven planes bombed the Japanese Makasan railway yards in Bangkok, Thailand.
June 6, 1944
D-Day (Operation Overlord), the long-awaited Allied (Allied Expeditionary Force of British, American, Canadian, Polish, and Free French troops) invasion of Normandy, on the northern coast of France, began before dawn with naval and aerial bombardments. The British 6th Airborne Division landed near Caen, and 12,000 U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Division troops were dropped on the Cotentin peninsula overnight June 5/6.
The first wave followed when five divisions (156,115 men) landed at the Normandy beaches code-named Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah.
Naval support for D-Day included 1,213 warships (including seven battleships and 23 cruisers), 1,600 auxiliary ships, and 4,126 landing craft. The British and American Air Forces flew 14,674 sorties that day.
Opposition included five German infantry divisions with about 50,000 men, 100 tanks, and assault guns in bunkers and on the beaches.
The Americans on Omaha Beach suffered especially heavy casualties, but the surprised Germans were overwhelmed and most of the allied objectives were reached and secured by nightfall. The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) and Navy Kriegsmarine provided very little opposition.
June 7, 1944
British troops liberated Bayeux, five miles inland from the Normandy coast. All beachheads were reported established.
June 9, 1944
The Soviet offensive against the Finnish front began.
June 10, 1944
The Nazis massacred the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, population 652, in France. A Nazi SS Division (Das Reich) surrounded the village and ordered everyone to gather in the town square. The Nazi commandant accused them of hiding explosives and announced a search and check of identity papers.
The men were locked in barns and the women and children were locked in the church. The men were executed with machine guns. The Nazis then set fire to the entire village, including the barns and church, to cover up the massacre, burning the few male survivors in the barn, and the women and children in the church, alive. A total of 642 townspeople – 245 women, 207 children, and 190 men – were slaughtered. A few men in the barn and a few townspeople who were not in the town at the time of the massacre survived.
The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was never rebuilt, and still stands as a silent monument to Nazi atrocities.
June 12, 1944
Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, ordered the kidnapping of 40,000 Polish children aged ten to fourteen during the “Heuaktion” (Hay Action). They were first imprisoned in a camp in Poland and then transferred to Germany to be used as slave laborers in the Reich.
June 13, 1944
One week after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the first German V-1 rocket (“buzz bomb”) raid on Great Britain was launched against London. The ‘V’ stood for the German word Vergeltungswaffen, meaning weapons of reprisal. The British nicknamed them “buzz bombs” due to the distinct buzzing sound made by the pulse-jet engines powering the bombs.
Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger directed the development of the V-1, which resembled a small aircraft, by German scientists at the Peenemünde research facility on the Baltic Sea.
After launch from a short-length catapult, the bomb then climbed to about 3,000 feet at speeds up to 350 miles per hour. As it approached its target, the buzzing of the V-1 could be heard on the ground. Then the engine would cut out and in a moment of silence, the bomb plunged toward the ground, ending with the explosion of the 1,870 pound warhead.
During this first V-1 bombing campaign, up to 100 V-1’s fell every hour on London. Over the next eighty days, more than 6,000 people were killed, over 17,000 injured, and a million buildings destroyed or damaged.
V-1 bombing raids occurred constantly at all times of day and night, and in all types of weather, terrorizing the populations of London and parts of Kent and Sussex.
According to German records, of the 8,564 V-1’s launched against England and the port of Antwerp, Belgium, about 57 percent hit their targets. Anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons, and fighter planes intercepted the remainder.
Using mainly slave labor at the huge underground V-1 factory near Nordhausen, the Germans built over 29,000 V-1 bombs. In Operation Crossbow, nearly 2,000 Allied airmen were killed in bombing raids against V-1 launch sites and factories.
June 15, 1944
The U.S. Marines invaded Saipan in the Mariana Islands.
June 15/16, 1944
The first bombing raid on Japan since the Doolittle raid of April 1942 was carried out with forty-seven B-29’s based in Bengel, India, targeting the steel works at Yawata, Japan.
June 18 – 22, 1944
The “Auschwitz Report,” written by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, the two Slovak Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, went public worldwide through media channels in Switzerland.
June 19 – 20, 1944
American aircraft carrier-based fighters shot down 220 Japanese planes in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, nicknamed the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” by American aviators. Only twenty American planes were lost.
June 22, 1944
The Soviets launched a massive offensive in eastern Byelorussia (Belarus). They destroyed the German Army Group Center and by August 1, drove westward to the Vistula River across from Warsaw in central Poland.
Operation Bagration (the Soviet summer offensive) began.
June 27, 1944
U.S. troops liberated Cherbourg, France.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Winter 1944
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at January – March 1944 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Winter 1944
January 6, 1944
Soviet troops reached the Polish border and advanced into Poland.
January 9, 1944
British and Indian troops recaptured Maungdaw in Burma.
January 17, 1944
The Allies launched their first attack against the Nazis at Cassino, Italy.
January 22, 1944
The U.S. Fifth Army successfully landed two divisions at Anzio in Italy, 30 miles south of Rome.
January 24, 1944
American president Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board to help Jews under Nazi control. His action was due to political pressure.
January 25, 1944
German politician and lawyer, Hans Frank, who served as Gauleiter (a regional party leader or Governor General) of Poland, recorded on this day in his diary,
At the present time we still have in the General Government perhaps 100,000 Jews.
Frank, who at one time was personal legal adviser to Adolf Hitler, was referencing the fate of the 2.5 million Jews originally under his jurisdiction. After the war, Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. He was executed on October 16, 1946.
January 27, 1944
The German siege of Leningrad ended after nearly 900 days, since July 8, 1941. Soviet soldiers broke through the German line of defense and recaptured hundreds of towns and villages in the region of Leningrad. Estimates of hundreds of thousands to more than one million civilians are thought to have starved to death in the city during that time.
January 31, 1944
American troops invaded Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands.
February 1944
Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann visited Auschwitz.
February 1-7, 1944
American troops captured Kwajalein and Majura Atolls in the Marshall Islands.
February 15, 1944
Due to an error in translation, the Allies bombed and destroyed the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy.
February 16, 1944
On orders of German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the Nazis carried out a counterattack against the Allied beachhead at Anzio, Italy.
February 17/18, 1944
American aircraft carrier-based planes destroyed the Japanese naval base at Truk in the Caroline Islands.
February 20, 1944
American aircraft carrier-based and land-based planes destroyed the Japanese base at Rabaul.
February 20-25, 1944
During “Big Week,” the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and British Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command carried out a joint bombing campaign in a sequence of raids against Nazi Germany. The 384th Bomb Group of the 8th AF participated daily in missions against,
- Aircraft Industry in Leipzig, Germany
- Junkers Aircraft Plant & Airfield, Aircraft Industry in Bernburg, Germany
- Fighter Field & Aircraft Storage Depot, German Air Force (Luftwaffe) in Werl, Germany
- Aircraft Factory, Aircraft Industry in Halberstadt, Germany
- Aircraft Factory, Aircraft Industry in Aschersleben, Germany
- Ball-Bearing Plant, Bearings Industry in Schweinfurt, Germany
- Aircraft Assembly Plant, Aircraft Industry in Augsburg, Germany
- Ball Bearing Plant, Bearings Industry in Stuttgart, Germany
February 23, 1944
American aircraft carrier-based planes attacked the Mariana Islands.
February 24, 1944
Merrill’s “Marauders” (U.S. 5307th Composite Unit, also known as Unit Galahad) began their ground campaign into northern Burma. The unit was named for US Army General Frank Merrill.
March 4, 1944
The Allies bombed Berlin in the first major daylight bombing raid of WWII on Berlin. The mission was originally scheduled for the day before, March 3, but the 8th Air Force recalled it after entering enemy airspace, due to a fuel shortage caused by unexpected maneuvering necessitated by the weather.
Soviet troops began a major offensive along the Belorussian front.
Merrill’s “Marauders” fought their first major action in Burma.
March 5, 1944
British army officer General Orde Wingate’s groups began operations behind the Japanese lines in Burma.
March 15, 1944
The second Allied attempt to capture Monte Cassino, Italy began.
The Japanese began an offensive toward Imphal and Kohima in northeast India.
March 18, 1944
In an air raid, the British dropped 3000 tons of bombs on Hamburg, Germany.
March 19, 1944
Believing Hungary, with its Jewish population of 725,000, intended to leave the Axis, Adolf Eichmann arrived with his Gestapo “Special Section Commandos.” The Nazis occupied Hungary and forced Admiral Miklos Horthy, the regent, to appoint a pro-German minister president, General Dome Sztojay.
March 24, 1944
British army officer General Orde Wingate flew to assess the situations in three Chindit-held bases in Burma and on the return flight the USAAF B-25 Mitchell bomber on which he was flying crashed in India. He and nine others died.
Overnight March 24/25, seventy-six Allied airmen escaped German POW camp Stalag Luft III through an underground tunnel.
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a statement condemning both German and Japanese ongoing “crimes against humanity.”
The United Nations are fighting to make a world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.
In the meantime in most of Europe and in parts of Asia the systematic torture and murder of civilians — men, women, and children — by the Nazis and the Japanese continue unabated. In areas subjugated by the aggressors, innocent Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, French, Greeks, Russians, Chinese, Filipinos — and many others — are being starved or frozen to death or murdered in cold blood in a campaign of savagery.
The slaughters of Warsaw, Lidice, Kharkov, and Nanking — the brutal torture and murder by the Japanese, not only of civilians but of our own gallant American soldiers and fliers — these are startling examples of what goes on day by day, year in and year out, wherever the Nazis and the Japs are in military control — free to follow their barbaric purpose.
In one of the blackest crimes of all history — begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war — the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews, who while living under persecution have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes would be a major tragedy.
It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.
Hitler is committing these crimes against humanity in the name of the German people. I ask every German and every man everywhere under Nazi domination to show the world by his action that in his heart he does not share these insane criminal desires. Let him hide these pursued victims, help them to get over their borders, and do what he can to save them from the Nazi hangman. I ask him also to keep watch, and to record the evidence that will one day be used to convict the guilty.
In the meantime, and until the victory that is now assured is won, the United States will persevere in its efforts to rescue the victims of brutality of the Nazis and the Japs. Insofar as the necessity of military operations permit, this government will use all means at its command to aid the escape of all intended victims of the Nazi and Jap executioner — regardless of race or religion or color. We call upon the free peoples of Europe and Asia temporarily to open their frontiers to all victims of oppression. We shall find havens of refuge for them, and we shall find the means for their maintenance and support until the tyrant is driven from their homelands and they may return.
In the name of justice and humanity let all freedom-loving people rally to this righteous undertaking.
~Franklin D. Roosevelt – March 24, 1944
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
The 900-day Siege of Leningrad
8th AF Mission of March 3, 1944
384th Bomb Group Mission List, 1944
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
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