Eighty Years Ago This Week

After a lull of two months in the Pacific US forces landed on Iwo Jima, a small island some 1,000km from mainland Japan. The Japanese had reinforced the garrison to about 22,000 troops. The military value of the island was debatable. It was too small to serve as a naval base and its airfield was not being used by fighters to intercept B-29 raids on the home islands. As these faced little fighter opposition over their targets, Iwo Jima's value as a base of long range escort fighters was marginal. A major diplomatic row exploded between General de Gaulle and President Roosevelt. France had not been asked to attend the Yalta conference with the imputation that it did not rank as one of the senior allied powers. With matching insincerity Roosevelt proposed to meet de Gaulle somewhere on his way back to the US and de Gaulle invited Roosevelt to Paris. The first would have cast de Gaulle as a US dependent,  who could be summoned to wait on his master; the second would have implied equali...

  The meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta agreed to split Germany into zones occupied by each power and to recognise the Communist puppet government of Poland. Stalin promised democratic elections in eastern Europe after the war which provided a pretext for accepting the latter. When he briefed the Cabinet Churchill claimed that he could trust Stalin, "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin."    In today's parlour game of comparing Neville Chamberlain's performance at Munich in 1938 with Churchill's at Yalta, this counts against Churchill,  although he was doing little more than accepting a military fait accompli . Moreover Stalin had respected his side of their private deal assigning Greece to the British sphere of influence . RAF Bomber Command attacked Dresden with the aim of disrupting military communications with the eastern front. This was an extension of th...

  The leaders of the principal allied powers, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, met in conference at Yalta in the Crimea to plan the future after the defeat of Germany. Only Stalin had a realistic agenda and that had already been set by the Red Army's advance across Europe. He simply wished to retain Soviet conquests and to ensure that they faced no military challenge. Roosevelt hoped to entice the Soviets into  particpating in the military defeat of Japan; Stalin was aware that Soviet territorial ambitions in the East would be fulfilled by military action which Japan would be powerless to halt especially if the UK and US invaded the home islands. Churchill entertained fantasies of instituting some form of democracy in Soviet occupied eastern Europe. The Bulgarian Communist Party gave a foretaste of politics after Soviet occupation. Ninety three senior figures in Bulgaria's wartime government including the former regents and the prime minister were executed by firing squad afte...

    The Red Army overran the Auschwitz extermination camp. It still held some 7,500 inmates whom the Germans had not been able to evacuate. Most of the gas chambers and crematoria had been dismantled the previous year to remove evidence  in anticipation of Soviet occupation but one crematorium remained to be blown up. The Soviet troops had been warned in advance of what they might see but the sight of the mounds of corpses and the pitiable state of the survivors still shocked them. The advance of the Red Army isolated the city of Koenigberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) in East Prussia trapping about 100,000 troops and 200,000 civilians far behind the new front line. The Soviets were focussed on the advance into Germany and were content to besiege the pocket. The German passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff, originally built as a pleasure cruise liner for Nazi Kraft durch Freude holidays was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine as she sailed from Gdynia in East Prussia with...

    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...