Posted on 05/23/2015 4:44:22 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
Major General H.W. Blakeley, USA, Ret., 32d Infantry Division World War II
Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/4/23.htm
May 23rd, 1945 (WEDNESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: British PM Churchill forms a caretaker government to serve until the elections. This action is due to the withdrawal of the Labour Party from the coalition government.
The general election - the first for ten years - will be on 5 July. The run-up to the contest to decide Britain’s post-war future began today with Mr. Churchill going to see the King.
He resigned as prime minister and thus automatically ended the wartime coalition government. The constitutional wheels had been well-oiled. Four hours later the king asked Mr. Churchill to form a new government. He agreed. But would the king then graciously dissolve parliament next month to allow the July election?
The king assented. Mr. Churchill at once started forming a caretaker team in which Labour leaders and most of the Liberals will refuse to serve. Earlier this week the prime minister asked Labour to stay in the coalition government at least until Japan is defeated. Under pressure from party activists Mr. Attlee replied: “We will carry on only until October.”
Mr. Churchill said that this was unacceptable for it would herald a period of damaging uncertainty. There is a feeling at Westminster that Labour’s vote-gathering organization is in a higher state of readiness than that of its rivals. This explains the tactical manoeuvring over the date.
The Allies reveal PLUTO - the Pipeline Under The Ocean - which supplied them with fuel after the D-Day landings.
Minesweeper HMS Mariner commissioned.
HMC MTB 748 paid off.
GERMANY: Heinrich Himmler now captured by the British, commits suicide between being searched and his first questioning. He died as he was being examined by a British doctor at Second Army HQ, Luneburg. He had been stripped and searched, but when the doctor put a finger in his mouth Himmler jerked his head back and crunched a tiny phial of cyanide. Stomach pumps and emetics failed to save him. He was left in a heap on the floor until he had been seen by a Red Army liaison officer. Himmler, who was 44, went on the run after Germany’s surrender. Stopped by a British patrol near Hamburg, he claimed to be a rural policeman called Heinrich Hitzinger, but under interrogation he removed the black eye patch he was wearing and put on the familiar full-moon glasses.
Flensburg: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the so-called Flensburg Führer, was arrested this morning along with members of his “government”. The German high command was also dissolved and the officers placed under arrest on the orders of General Eisenhower. Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, who signed the surrender at Luneburg, was allowed to visit the lavatory after his arrest; there he took poison.
Outside the town, at Schloss Glucksburg, Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, was in his bath when an Allied officer told him that he was under arrest. “A good thing too,” he said. “It was just an opera anyway.”
The Allies were fearful that without a German government acting as a central authority the Wehrmacht units would not surrender smoothly. Now the German surrender is effectively finished.
For some Germans, however, it is a different story. Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists have been taken to France to be put on board a ship for the US. Reinhard Gehlen, a senior intelligence officer, brought with him the files on German agents in the Soviet Union. He too has been made welcome by the Americans.
St. Johann: US troops dig up $4 million in mixed currencies, believed to be Himmler’s personal cache.
ARCTIC OCEAN: Frigate HMCS Loch Alvie departed Kola Inlet with Convoy RA-67.
JAPAN: The 6th Marine Division south of Naha, Okinawa meets heavy resistance.
The USAAF’s Twentieth Air Force based in the Mariana Islands flies Mission 181: During the night of 23/24 May, 520 out of 562 B-29 Superfortresses sent against Tokyo bomb an urban-industrial area south of the Imperial Palace along the western side of the harbor; five others hit targets of opportunity; 17 B-29s are lost; this is the largest number of B-29s participating in a single mission during World War II.
Mines laid by B-29s sink three Japanese cargo vessels and damage a fourth.
U.S.A.: Coast Guard-manned Army vessel FS-251 was commissioned with LT Robert A. Copeland, Jr. USCGR, as first commanding officer. He was succeeded 9 December 1945 by Boatswain Peter Butler, USCG. On 21 June 1944, she departed 3rd Naval District for the Southwest Pacific. On 7 December 1945, she was turned over with all equipment, stores, etc. to U. S. 6th Army at Nagoya, Japan, Captain J. J. Freeman, U. S. Army signing the receipt for the Army.
Corvette HMCS Morden departed New York as escort for Convoy HX-358.
"Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, had attempted to sell Jews to save his own neck during the final months of the war.
At the end of the war he was among the most-wanted war criminals in Occupied Germany.
He attempted to avoid arrest by shaving his mustache, donning an eyepatch and a Wehrmacht uniform, and traveling under the pseudonym Heinrich Hitzinger.
Nonetheless, he was arrested on May 23, 1945, only to commit suicide almost immediately by biting down on a small glass vial of cyanide he had secreted in his mouth."
"Rivka Tuskolaska, a survivor of Auschwitz, was among the inhabitants of Kibbutz (communal farm) Buchenwald, which was founded in June 1945 near the town of Geringshof, Germany, in the American zone of occupation.
The members of the kibbutz immigrated to Palestine in 1946, where they joined the Kibbutz Afikim, but later established their own kibbutz, Netzer Sereni."
"Residents of the Kibbutz Buchenwald, founded by survivors of the infamous Buchenwald, Germany, concentration camp, dance the hora.
This kibbutz, founded on German soil, was designed to prepare its members --through agricultural training--for immigration to Palestine.
Kibbutz Buchenwald was dissolved in 1947 when its inhabitants immigrated to Palestine on the boat Tel Chai."
"German prisoners of war held in American hands were well treated--a situation in marked contrast to the horrors perpetrated by Nazis against Soviet POWs and helpless Jews and other civilians.
These yet-to-be-repatriated German POWs were assembled at New York's Halloran General Hospital on the morning of June 26, 1945, to view films of German atrocities.
Reactions ranged from keen interest to outright shame and grief."
‘He bit on a cyanide capsule and dropped dead’: The final moments of Nazi Heinrich Himmler revealed in soldier’s war diary
Another version. I don’t know which version is true.
THE STRANGE DEATH OF HEINRICH HIMMLER
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/strange-death-heinrich-himmler.html
Joe Pulitzer has reacted to what he saw in Germany's camps by calling for wide-ranging punishment for the perpetrators. Didn't Morgenthau go still further and advocate "bombing Germany back to the Stone Age so they can never do this again"?
Interesting article about Pulitzer wanting
to see a million and a half Germans executed eh.
How times have changed.
Even in the stone age (well, bronze age) they took out three Roman legions.
In the classical Three-Age System (stone, bronze, iron), the "Iron Age" in Europe was typically said to run from 1,000 BC to 100 AD, though it's never made clear exactly what came after.
Since Varus lost his legions at the Teutonburg Forest in 9 AD, that would make it towards the end of the "Iron Age".
The "battle" was a well-prepared ambush against Roman Legions which were strung out over 10 miles and in every way unprepared to fight.
Still, there's no indication that German forces were any less technologically advanced than Romans, and under the circumstances, obviously, were well enough equipped for the task at hand.
In all discussions about how to treat Germany after the Second World War, the harshest proposals merely mimicked those which Nazis themselves imposed on conquered peoples -- Poles and Ukrainians, for example.
As the Iron Curtain descends across Europe during the next three years it will be increasingly apparent that the primary post-War problem will not be how to keep Germany down but how to stop Communist expansionism. To some, like Churchill and Patton, the problem is already apparent. And Truman is much more in tune with the issue in contrast to Roosevelt, who seemed oblivious to it.
Hastings Ismay on the purpose of NATO: “To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
That is a great quote, isn’t it? Could he have imagined Germany as the ruler of Europe as it is today?
The issue was when one state has to recognize a divorce granted in another. By the end of the "progressive" era almost all states had enacted very restrictive divorce laws ostensibly to protect women. It was as true in the liberal North as the conservative South. But some states, like Nevada, enacted quickie divorce laws.
Today's case was the second time the same unfortunate couple had traveled to the Supreme Court. A North Carolina couple traveled to Nevada, divorced their spouses and married, then returned home. The were arrested, tried and convicted of bigamy. A couple of years ago the Court overruled a longstanding precedent and held North Carolina had to respect the Nevada divorce under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. N.C. promplty re-arrested the couple and instructed the jury to consider the question of whether the couple had established Nevada domicile. Not surprisingly, they found the couple had not. This time the Court decided the N.C. court had the authority to revisit the Nevada court's jurisdiction.
This was not the disaster the Times portrays, however. In 1948 the Court will flip-flop again and affirm a challenged Florida divorce. The Court will continue its tortured examination of the issue, but at the end of the day people will be able in most cases to rely on their divorce decree.
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