Eighty years ago this week the Luftwaffe adopts kamikaze tactics

 

In a last dtich attempt to halt the allied bombing offensive the Luftwaffe sent a special unit, Sonderkommando Elbe, into action. It consisted of some 180 partially trained pliots flying Me-109Gs which did not carry a full load of ammunition. They were to ram US bombers and the pilots would then  supposedly parachute to safety. With 1,200 US bombers in the air that day they found targets easily and destroyed around twenty at the cost of the attacking fighter. US fighter escorts and the bombers themselves destroyed many more. German kamikaze tactics were no sounder than their Japanese variant.

The Soviet Union unilaterally renounced its  neutrality pact with Japan of 1941 which had left it free to concentrate its resources against Germany in the west. The fight against Japan had been left to the British Empire and the USA; a point which the Soviets had skirted in their strident calls for a "second front" against the dictatorships. The US and UK had urged Stalin to join the war against Japan and he now saw greater gains for his empire.

American troops advancing through Germany came upon a salt-mine at Merkers to which treasures of the Nazi regime had been evacuated. These included an estimated 100 tons of gold, banknotes (albeit only £100,000 sterling) and paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, Duerer and Van Dyck, many looted from occupied countries.

The tone of the  general election campaign in Britain rose a notch when Labour's Ernest Bevin responded to wholly mischievous stories spread by his arch-enemy Lord Beaverbrook that he would be willing to serve in a caretaker government. He restated his own wish to nationalise mines, electricity and transport. He made plain that Labour would fight the election united against the Conservative party and that they owed Churchill no loyalty in his role as head of the party. Brendan Bracken, Churchill's close friend, delivered a stinging, personal reply in which he affected to have thought that it had actually been a speech by Aneurin Bevan of the far left which had been reported. He dug up a quote from Bevin from March 1939 questioning the value of rearmament.