The Second World War.

[Ennath]

August 2, 1933
Russia, Home Front The White Sea-Baltic Canal is completed. The construction, mostly by convict labor, has cost at least 30,000 lives. The canal is too narrow for large ships and it is largely useless.

August 2, 1934
Germany, Politics President Hindenburg dies. Hitler proclaims himself Führer of the Third Reich. The Armed Forces are prevailed upon to swear personal allegiance to the new head of state.

August 2, 1937
United States, Home Front The Dow begins a new decline, bottoming out at 118 in late December.

August 2, 1938
Switzerland There is a major clash between Socialists and Nazis.

August 2, 1939
Atomic Research Prompted by Leo Szilard, Einstein sends a letter to Roosevelt outlining the potential for the creation of an atomic bomb.

August 2, 1940
Mediterranean The carrier Ark Royal with Force H attacks the Italian base at Cagliari, Sardinia. The old carrier Argus, also based on Gibraltar, is at sea to fly off a cargo of Hurricanes to Malta.
Britain, Politics Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, is taken into the inner circle of Churchill’s War Cabinet.
United States, Politics Congress gives the President discretionary authority to prohibit the export of any war materials “in the interests of national defense.”
Canada, Home Front Mayor Houde of Montreal publicly urges Quebecois not to register for war service. He is promptly interned.
German Planning The army is to be increased to 180 divisions.
Battle of the Atlantic Lorient becomes the first fully operational U-Boat base on the Biscay coast.
August 2, 1941
Eastern Front German forces in the north begin to attack Staraya Russa just south of Lake Ilmen on the right of their drive to Leningrad.
German pincers close near Uman, trapping 20 Soviet divisions.
The first Italian divisions go into the line in the south. Rumanian 4th Army attacks over the Dniestr just north of Odessa.
North Africa Australian troops attack positions at Tobruk lost on April 30, but are repulsed by Italian defenders.
War at Sea The British blockade is extended to include Finland.
Norway The Germans confiscate all civilian radios.
United States, Politics Lend-Lease aid begins going to the Soviet Union.

August 2, 1942
War at Sea US troops are now being transported to Britain in the passenger liners Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, and Nieuw Amsterdam. These vessels are too fast for standard escorts. Their routes are based on Admiralty estimates of U-Boat concentrations, but the ships are also too fast for easy submarine interception.
Eastern Front A Soviet partisan brigade is destroyed by the Finns in East Karelia at Lake Seesjärvi.
Black Sea In a night action off the Crimea, Italian MTB’s damage the cruiser Molotov.

August 2, 1943
Sicily The Canadians take Regalbuto and the British fight their way into Centuripe. The American battle for Troina continues. The US advance along the coast is slowed a good deal by minefields and the destruction of bridges.
Poland With the Germans dismantling Treblinka extermination camp, the captive labor involved realize that that they will be killed after finishing the job. They stage a breakout attempt; some 175 reach the woods, but only about a dozen evade the pursuit.
New Georgia The Americans are now fighting on the edge of Munda airfield. The Japanese have decided not to send any more reinforcements to the island and are concentrating instead on Kolombangara. They are able to withdraw some of their forces to here from New Georgia.
The PT-109 is rammed and sunk by the destroyer Amagiri off Arundel Island. Lieutenant John Kennedy and the other survivors are later rescued.
Eastern Front The Soviets take Znamenskaya, near Orel.
United States, Home Front A race riot in Harlem is sparked by the shooting of a black serviceman by a white policeman, leaving 5 dead and 400 injured.

August 2, 1944
Western Front US VIII Corps advances into Brittany, reaching Dinan and the outskirts of Rennes. US 1st Army is attacking around Tessy and toward Mortain, taking Villedieu. British forces grind forward in the area of Vire.
V-Weapons The day marks the heaviest V-1 effort, with 97 explosions in the London area.
Eastern Front Rokossovsky’s troops reach the Vistula at Magnuszew and establish a bridgehead. The insurgents gain in Warsaw. Ordered to break through to Tallinn, the Soviets renew attacks from the Tannenberg Line; gains are few and losses high on both sides. Attacks continue in similar fashion through the 4th.
War Crimes “Gypsy Night” at Auschwitz; some 4000 are gassed.
Diplomatic Relations Turkey breaks relations with Germany.
Marianas The US attack on Guam is renewed. The Americans make good progress on the west side of the island but are repulsed in the east. Tiyan airfield falls.
New Guinea Japanese forces in the area of Aitape attack again but without success in heavy fighting.

August 2-3, 1944
English Channel During the night, 58 German Marder midget submarines attack Allied ships off Courseulles-sur-Mer and sink three vessels, including a destroyer. Only 17 of the German vessels survive.

August 2, 1945
Czechoslovakia and Poland The governments approve measures for the expulsion of their German populations, having already decided that their loyalty cannot be relied upon. Much suffering occurs during the relocations, over the following months. Probably upwards of 50,000 die.
War Crimes On the island of Sado, off Honshu, 387 POW slave laborers working in an ore mine are deliberately entombed and left to suffocate; the Japanese are trying to erase evidence of the slave labor program.

August 2, 1946
Russia Vlasov is executed by the Soviets.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Ennath

August 2, 1945
War Crimes On the island of Sado, off Honshu, 387 POW slave laborers working in an ore mine are deliberately entombed and left to suffocate; the Japanese are trying to erase evidence of the slave labor program.

Was anyone ever hanged for this crime? The cold blooded cruelty of this act makes me blink with astonishment. It must have been a most terrible and slow death. The authors of this crime needed to hang if anyone ever did; but I would have gone one better, given what they did, and buried them alive the legal way; perpetual life imprisonment in solitary.

[squigg58]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Was anyone ever hanged for this crime? The cold blooded cruelty of this act makes me blink with astonishment. It must have been a most terrible and slow death. The authors of this crime needed to hang if anyone ever did; but I would have gone one better, given what they did, and buried them alive the legal way; perpetual life imprisonment in solitary.

I remember reading about this, but at the time there was some dispute about the authenticity of the original report. Some historians believed the whole story to be a fabrication.

I've just done a quick check and it appears the original claim was in a book entitled "Betrayal In High Places". The basis of the claim was a document which purported to give details of the interrogation of a Japanese Officer at the POW camp on Sado Island. However, there are counter-claims that the document is a fake as it contains errors in the format, and appears to have been written in a more modern font than original documents of that era.

It's been said that the author of "Betrayal In High Places" had been criticised for unsubstantiated claims in an earlier book entitled "The Allied-Japanese Conspiracy" which was touted as being an exposé of a vast cover-up of war crimes by the US and Japanese governments. In the preface to "Betrayal In High Places", the author wrote ...

"quite astonishingly ... further material came into my possession that I can only describe as incredible. It supports all the allegations and references identified in the first published book, and removes beyond doubt the suggestion of conjecture and hypothesis."

Critics of the author say it is somewhat convenient that a number of documents suddenly came to light which supported all the previously unsubstantiated claims.

I definitely want to do a bit more research on this one, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be more than grateful.

[Rendell]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

However, when a better engine became available, the LaGG-3 became the basis design for the Lavochkin La-5, a really excellent aeroplane which ate Bf109s like smarties.

Depends on who was flying the 109...

Eric Hartman, Gerhard Barkhorn, Günther Rall...

*snip*

It's a long list.

[DTravel]

Originally Posted by Ennath

August 2, 1945
Czechoslovakia and Poland The governments approve measures for the expulsion of their German populations, having already decided that their loyalty cannot be relied upon. Much suffering occurs during the relocations, over the following months. Probably upwards of 50,000 die.

This is the tip of the iceberg of something that most people today have never heard about. The post-war "relocations" in Europe were one of the largest human mass-migrations in the history of the species. Millions got shuffled around either by the need to find habitable locations, the Iron Curtain coming down or political decisions like the ones referenced above.

[Tmee2020]

Originally Posted by Ennath

August 2, 1942
War at Sea US troops are now being transported to Britain in the passenger liners Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, and Nieuw Amsterdam. These vessels are too fast for standard escorts. Their routes are based on Admiralty estimates of U-Boat concentrations, but the ships are also too fast for easy submarine interception.

My father sailed to the UK on the Nieuw Amsterdam in 1943. At the time she was the 5th biggest ocean liner in the world. She had been built in 1938 and was fitted out as a "ship of peace", deliberately avoiding design features to accommodate military conversion. After the Netherlands was overrun in 1940 she was refitted as a troop transport and could carry about 8,000 troops.

On the voyage from Australia the captain was concerned about u-boat attack and they sailed way up towards the Artic Circle before berthing at Greenock on the Firth of Clyde. You could bathe onboard but only in sea water.

I note she carried 378,631 passengers during the war.

She made an emotional return to her home port of Rotterdam on April 10, 1946.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Rendell

Depends on who was flying the 109...

Eric Hartman, Gerhard Barkhorn, Günther Rall...

*snip*

It's a long list.

Later in the war, the Bf109G2 was upgraded with a stronger cylinder head casting in the engine. Early attempts to run it at boost on MW50 (Germany's methanol based fuel additive) played hell with the cylinder heads. MW50 added over 100hp to the short term power of an engine and made the Bf109 much faster and better in the climb than an La-5, but could only be employed for about 10 seconds at a time and with at least 5 minutes rest in between boost applications.

At altitude, the La-5 was rubbish. It also had short endurance, could only cruise at combat speeds for about 40 minutes a mission. It was designed to meet Eastern Front conditions, where most combat occurred below 10,000 feet and the biggest requirement was close infantry support and control of the sky directly over your tanks. It did this job extremely well, and was most effective against Bf109s piloted by lesser men than the Hartmann's of this world.

I don't know about Barkhorn and Rall, but by July 1944, Hartmann's JG52 had moved over to the FW190. They were operating FW190s when they defended Hungarian airspace against the US 15th Army Air Force and fought against Colonel Blakeslee's 4th Fighter Group. Hartmann made his last kill on 8th May 1945, a Yak 9 which was aerobating over a column of Russian infantry advancing towards Prague; in his autobiography, he noted the futility of his last gesture, but the war was not quite over in that part of Europe, Army Group Centre were fighting on and taking casualties, and it would have been hard to see the victorious Russian enemy deep in the former Reich and do nothing about it. He then returned to base, only 50 kilometers in front of that Russian column, ordered the demolition of the 25 surviving FW190s there, since they had little petrol left and nowhere to run to, and led his men west towards the Americans, who rather spitefully handed him over to the Russians. This was written into the Yalta Agreement, that captured airmen were to be forced to surrender to the side that they had fought.

Hartmann was a very independent and bloody minded character. He was held by the Russians until 1956, convicted absurdly of the crime of destroying 345 expensive Russian aeroplanes. They had hoped to pressurise him into serving in the nascent East German Airforce, but one of the interrogators struck him and he smashed his chair over the man's head; so, 11 years in Siberia. He later served in the West German airforce but made a stink over the Lockheed F104A Starfighter, a very unsafe aeroplane, quite unsuitable for military use, only fit to be converted into aluminum ingots; Lockheed bribed senior German politicians and airforce commanders into buying it in quantities and when Hartmann flew it, he went berserk with anger and officially denounced it in reports to everyone he could write to as being absolutely unfit. The airforce forced him into early retirement; but 282 crashes and 115 dead pilots later, the Starfighter was withdrawn from service in the Bundeswehr and Hartmann had been vindicated.

[squigg58]

Originally Posted by Ennath

August 2-3, 1944
War Crimes On the island of Sado, off Honshu, 387 POW slave laborers working in an ore mine are deliberately entombed and left to suffocate; the Japanese are trying to erase evidence of the slave labor program.

Originally Posted by squigg58

I remember reading about this, but at the time there was some dispute about the authenticity of the original report. Some historians believed the whole story to be a fabrication.

I definitely want to do a bit more research on this one.

After a late night and an early morning, I'm favouring the view that the "Sado Island massacre" is a deliberate fabrication by the author James MacKay.

MacKay claims that the relevant documents had been preserved by Capt. James Godwin, an Investigating Officer attached to an Australian War Crimes Section.

1. MacKay's book was published in 1996. Godwin died in 1995 so was unable to verify, or dispute, any of the claims. His family hold Godwin's original carbon copies of his official weekly investigation summaries, but none make any mention of a massacre on Sado Island.

2. Godwin's widow states that her husband never met James MacKay.

3. MacKay claims that Godwin was one of the best linguists and interpreters involved in the investigation of Japanese war crimes. Godwin's clerk, an associate Investigator, and Godwin's widow state that Godwin could not speak Japanese.

4. The typeface on the Sado Island massacre report does not match those of other documents from the same Australian War Crimes Section. The format for referencing the author and typist does not match that of other official documents, and there are no records of any War Crimes Section typists with the initials shown on the Sado Island massacre report.

5. Godwin's signature shows indications of having been physically cut & pasted onto the Sado Island massacre report. The letters of the typewritten name below the signature do not match the rest of the document and are cut off at the bottom; and part of a letter below the signature is missing, as though covered by the cut-out.

6. A genuine weekly report, written by Godwin on exactly the same date as the disputed report, shows that Godwin was working on two other investigations and makes no reference to Sado Island.

7. There was a forced labour camp on Sado Island but it utilised Korean workers who had previously been contracted to the mine. At the end of the war, several hundred of the Korean workers were repatriated and many were subsequently interviewed. None mentioned any Allied POW's.

8. Since 1875, the mine on Sado Island has had a vertical shaft with winding gear at the top, not horizontal entrance shafts as described by MacKay. After the war, a US team investigated the mine and found it in full working order.

9. MacKay claims that the Japanese officer interrogated was the second in command at the camp and states that he was subsequently held in Sugamo prison. No records exist of anyone of that name being held at that prison.

There are just too many inconsistencies and it's all a bit too convenient that a document suddenly came to light which backed up the unsubstantiated claims made by MacKay in a previous book, and that the source of the document was dead so couldn't verify anything.

In the absence of any further information, I'm going to have to dismiss the Sado Island massacre claim as being fabricated by an author who was determined to "prove" the existence of a conspiracy.

[Ennath]

August 3, 1938
Italy, Home Front Under German influence, Italy introduces sweeping anti-Semitic laws.

August 3, 1940
East Africa The Italians invade British Somaliland. The Italians in East Africa have a total of 350,000 men of whom 70% are native troops. British forces in East Africa, also including many colonial troops, are less than 25,000 men, of whom only four battalions are in Somaliland. The Italians allot 31 battalions to the invasion along with an overwhelmingly superior artillery contingent. General Nasi is in command. There are three main lines of advance: toward Zeila in the north, cutting the route to French Somaliland, Hargeisa in the center on the road to Berbera, and Odweina on the right.

August 3, 1941
Eastern Front In the south, another German encircling move closes near Pervomaysk on the Bug. The Stalin Line is now fully overcome. The last Soviet troops west of the Litsa are evacuated by sea.
United States, Home Front Limited gasoline rationing begins in some eastern states.

August 3, 1942
Eastern Front Army Group B continues its attacks on Kletskaya. 4th Panzer Army, having crossed he Don at Tsimlyansky, is now driving east around Kotelnikovo. 1st Panzer Army is mounting two attacks from its position on the Kuban, east toward Stavropol and south toward Maikop.
British Command Churchill and General Brooke arrive in Cairo to investigate what is wrong with 8th Army and to consider new commanders. Churchill feels that with the lavish resources sent to 8th Army far more should have been achieved.

August 3, 1943
Sicily Axis troops begin evacuating the island and transferring to the mainland.
General Patton visits a field hospital and slaps a shell-shocked soldier, accusing him of cowardice. When the incident hits the papers, there is a storm of controversy. Patton eventually apologizes, but the incident probably costs him any chance of higher command.
Mediterranean Italian manned torpedoes sink three merchant ships in Gibraltar harbor.
New Georgia As the battle for Munda airfield continues, some US troops advance from Bairoko to cut off the enemy’s retreat toward the southern part of the island.

August 3, 1944
Western Front US troops begin the attacks on Rennes while other units bypass the city. Mortain falls to 1st Army. British troops attack Villers Bocage.
Eastern Front Koniev’s troops seize crossings over the Vistula just south of Sandomierz.
Marianas The US advance on the east side of Guam resumes as the Japanese pull back. Defensive positions are being prepared on Mount Santa Rosa and these are shelled by US warships.
New Guinea US troops in the Aitape area attack along the Niumen Stream. Japanese activity around Afua dies down.
Burma Myitkyina is finally taken by Chinese and American troops after the bulk of the garrison has slipped away. The fight has cost the Allies over 6500 casualties. However, it reopens land communications between India and China.
China On the Salween front, the Chinese 8th Army attacks Tengchung and Sung Shan again.

August 3, 1945
Japan An American communiqué announces that air-dropped mines have now sealed off all of Japan’s main ports, leaving the country totally blockaded.

August 3, 1948
United States In testimony before Congress, ex-Communist agent Whittaker Chambers states that Alger Hiss, head of the European Desk at the State Department, had been a Communist and had given him State Department papers. Hiss denies under oath even knowing Chambers, but is proven to be lying and he receives 5 years for perjury on November 17, 1949. There are some who still cannot accept Hiss’s guilt and consider him a victim of anti-Communist hysteria.

[haroldeye]

Scoundrel,

I was once quite pally with a German pilot who flew F104's and he loved the thing. Apparently the first buy had engines that kept failing and with a 104 there was no chance of any sort of glide. Up engined with a more powerful and reliable plant he thought the aircraft was one of the best in the world.

Lampswinging story - We met on a course and because there was nothing better to do the whole course went to see the newly released film Top Gun. At the end of the film I asked my new friend if he had ever done any courses like the one in the film. He said that he had done the same Miramar course. Back in the bar he vanished for five minutes and then reappeared with a photo he knew he had somewhere. It was a photo of him being presented with the Top Gun hat by an American General.