Posted on 01/29/2015 4:43:33 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy
"A page from the Hadamar Institute's death register.
The institute was one of the six major facilities in the German "euthanasia" program.
The document indicates each victim's date of arrival, family and given names, date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and age at death."
"No one is exactly sure how many concentration and work camps the Nazis established.
Many camps had numerous subcamps in which inmates could be housed while they participated in temporary work assignments.
This survivor was discovered in the Vaihingen camp, a subcamp of Natzweiler in Germany."
I don’t know about the carrier Iwo Jima mentioned at the end of today’s entry. There is yet to be a battle to name it after and the first Iwo Jima I could find was commissioned in 1961 - HJS.
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/0/29.htm
January 29th, 1945 (MONDAY)
GERMANY:
U-3509 commissioned.
U-763 scuttled at Köningsberg at the Schichau Shipyard, in position 54.42N, 20.32E, after being damaged by Soviet bombs.
NORWAY: U-636 was attacked by shore-based friendly fire in Norwegian waters, but suffered no damage.
BURMA: Japanese forces try but fail to drive the Chinese from their positions defending the “Stilwell Road” near Lashio.
East INDIAN OCEAN: Operation Meridian II. British carrier-based aircraft have inflicted massive damage on Japan’s main source of aviation fuel with bombing raids on Japanese-controlled Palembang oil refineries in Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies, over the last five days. The loss of the refineries means that crude oil will now have to be shipped to Japan for refining, doubling Japan’s need for tankers.
During this action a Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm air sea rescue Supermarine Sea Otter (operating in conjunction with the RN submarine Rorqual) has an inconclusive contact with an unknown Japanese biplane off the Sumatra coast. (G.A. Mackinlay)
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: US landing at San Antonio, Luzon by XI Corps.
U.S.A.:
Aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima laid down.
Submarine USS Pomodon laid down.
Frigate USS Greensboro commissioned.
USS Iwo Jima was laid down on this date but never finished or christened as she was cancelled after the Jap surrender. The name was selected after the Battle of Iwo Jima.
There were 32(!) Essex class carriers planned, with 24 completed.
We can imagine Douglas MacArthur’s reaction when he read in the NY Times that his participation in the war was coming to an end and that the Navy would take over.
The Soviets will dismantle all the factories they captured in Silesia and relocate back to the USSR. Stalin when discussing the plans for the offensive with the generals pointed to Silesia and remarked something along the lines of “Gold”.
Stalin executed a "Morgenthau Plan" on steroids, taking everything of industrial value.
Morgenthau said the Ruhr area:
His idea was at first endorsed by both Roosevelt and Churchill, but later rejected by Truman & others, after it became clear we needed a strong Germany to bulwark against Soviet expansion.
We should be reading about the raid on Cabanataun in a couple of days. The town is visible on the upper right of the page 10 map.
Part of the justification for the Marshall Plan was that if we didn’t give the Western Euopeans jobs and food, the communists were going to take over by promising them. That included the Germans. We’ve already seen news articles in the Times about the French communists doing exactly that. I believe that even this early, there is a sense that we can’t reduce the Germans to serfs without handing them over to the Soviets. Of course the Soviets didn’t care about this in areas occupied by the Red Army. Nobody was going to promise those peoples anything.
The Cold War began in 1944.
Coincidentally or not, today's US carrier force is still approx. 24 hulls, including our Essex class sized amphibious assault ships.
Yes, from time to time we hear of new enemy weapons which can render our flat-tops obsolete.
At the same time, new defensive weapons could keep them in a modern fight.
But by far, the biggest enemies of US carriers are Democrat defense budget cutters, to the point now where I shudder to think how few of our carrier groups today are fully combat ready.
USS Iowa Jima, 40,000 ton amphibious assault ship:
Although I would consult with FReeper Jeff Head on this, I believe that no other country operates a “carrier” larger than our amphibious assault ships. In other words, only the United States Navy really has a “fleet carrier” in operation. But I’m sure Jeff can provide much more detailed information on how the operational capabilities of the various navies of the world vary.
As for the United States Navy in World War 2, the assembly line production of 24 Essex class carriers is staggering. And we could easily have built 32 of them if we needed them. This does not include the 70 some CVEs we built, which saw duties that varied from anti-submarine operations and aircraft ferrying and amphibious air support. We never intended that they serve as front-line naval combat units (although one fateful morning they did).
The point is that the Japanese never came close to this sort of naval construction. If the Japanese had our CVEs, they would have pressed them into combat as fleet units because they had to. And to the extent they did build those type of ships, the Hiyo and Junyo, they did press them into fleet combat duty. That was the best they could do.
They had no business taking us on.
USS Iowa Jima? Where are the nine 16 inch gun turrets?
Grandpa's detachment will ultimately be assigned to Giessen, a middling size university town. It was also a military headquarters and rail junction suffering heavy bomb damage. The planners believed that after Germany was conquered civil administration would have completely broken down and a lengthy occupation would be needed.
In actuality, civil administration survived surprisingly intact. By November and December 1945, the kreis detachments were being pulled out with liaisons being left in place. In January, 1946 local counsel elections were held with a heavy turnout.
With the Russians refusing to cooperate in organizing a unified German state and the pressing need for a bulwark against them, the German Federal Republic was organized in 1949.
I'm going to blame the software, not my own fat fingers, or blind eyes. ;-)
It was surprising how quickly the Germans recovered from World War 2. Despite the layer of Nazi Party functionaries put on the civil government, there were still enough of the “old guard” civil employees that had not been Nazis to resume day to day operations. And the basic civil workers, the regular police officers, fire fighters, and other civil bureaucrats, were still there or able to return to their old civilian jobs after release from POW camps.
Of course, low ranking Nazis who were competent civil servants got a “blind eye” and stayed on their posts. One of the biggest issues with German “reconstruction” was determining who was a Nazi and who was a Nazi war criminal. And it was an issue at Nuremberg; how to convict the Nazis without indicting the entire German people?
Which gets to another issue for Nuremberg. One of the last pieces of the civil administration to come back was the judiciary. It had been gutted and Nazified more than most branches of government. In fact, it was difficult to find native German defense attorneys for the defendants at Nuremberg. The defendants had sent to the camps so many of the very people who would have wound up defending them against the allegation of crimes committed for sending people to the camps.
I love the ironies of history.
FDR was throwing in with Uncle Joe to rule the post war world because he thought he was somebody he could deal with.
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