Eighty Years Ago This Week

    In the final stages of the the German occuption of Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the prominent family of Swedish industrialists, had been sent there to rescue Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps or persecution by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross party. He issued Swedish documentation to Jews and rented properties ostensibly as official Swedish premises, which were used to house Jews. It is unknown how many Jews were saved by his efforts, but it was certainly some thousands. He was detained by the Soviet security forces when the Red Army conquered Budapest and deported to Moscow under a false accusation of espionage but for reasons which remain obscure. He died, possibly murdered, in Soviet captivity. The Red Army took Warsaw with minimal fighting. The Soviet puppet Polish National Committee  was immediately installed there to anchor its claim to be the legitimate government of the country. F. D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his fourth term as US Pres...

  USN Admiral Halsey mounted Operation Gratitude in the South China Sea to eliminate the remains of the IJN Combined Fleet which might have threatened the landings on Luzon.  In the event he did not, as he had expected, find any major surface units in Cam Ranh Bay off Vietnam. Air strikes were conducted over the whole zone including Hong Kong and Taiwan. Severe storms badly hampered sea refuelling operations  but the USN sank 300,000 tons of shipping in port and in convoy including 25 tankers, which crippled Japanese logistics capability. Hitler conferred with von Rundstedt at his headquarters in the West. He authorised a major withdrawal from the Ardennes salient, marking the end of this last, disastrous offensive. He returned to Berlin, never to leave again. Supreme command would henceforth be exercised from the shadows. Adolph Galland was dismissed as the Luftwaffe fighter leader for openly criticising Goering's leadership, notably Operation Bodenplatte which had squ...

  The Bishop of London Geoffrey Fisher became Archibishop of Canterbury in succession to William Temple, who had been his patron and wanted him as the next Archbishop. Temple's early death, though, had deprived the Church of a forward-looking leader who was ready to take it into the vastly changed world after the war. By contrast Fisher was a conservative, albeit far from reactionary. Churchill selected him for his "toughness". The American psychological warfare arm launched Operation Cornflakes . The kindest thing that can be said about it is that it illustrated the vast resources that the US had at their disposal and was willing to deploy. Letters containing defeatist sentiments were forged and addressed to real Germans, complete with forged postage stamps. Sacks of the these were dropped at locations where trains had been derailed in air attacks in the hope that salvage teams would take them to be genuine and ensure the letters reached their addressees. US Navy warship...

  On New Year's Day the Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte (floorplate), a series of attacks mainly by fighter aircraft on allied airfields.  The operation had originally been planned for December 16th to gain air superiority for the Ardennes offensive.  Bodenplatte achieved tactical surprise and perhaps 400 allied aircraft were destroyed or damaged. However as these were on the ground, aircrew casualties were light. The allies were able to replace the lost machines rapidly whilst the 200 odd German losses were nearly irreplaceable. Worse, the pilots lost with them certainly could not be replaced. The ground offensive had already come to a halt so whatever operational value there might have been had evaporated.  Bodenplatte was a marginal tactical victory for the Germans, but a strategic calamity. In the words of fighter commander Adolf Galland, "We sacrificed out last substance." The Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest trapping two German SS div...