Posted on 06/22/2010 4:57:35 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
* I didn’t get the conclusion of this article from page 3. Sorry.
Were EuroDisney to declare war against France the French gub mint would immediately surrender.
You just provided me so much intersting reading. Thanks for posting that.
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1940/jun40/f22jun40.htm
France signs armistice with Germany
Saturday, June 22, 1940 www.onwar.com
In Occupied France... General Huntziger, who leads the French delegation, signs the armistice with Germany in the Compiegne railroad carriage specially taken out of its museum. It is perhaps appropriate that Huntziger, who led the 2nd Army at Sedan at the start of the campaign, should be involved in the final act. The French forces which have been driven out of the Maginot Line but are still resisting, finally surrender on Weygand’s order.
In Riga... Latvia meets Soviet demands for a new government and territorial adjustments. There have been Soviet garrisons based in the Baltic states since October 1939.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/22.htm
June 22nd, 1940
UNITED KINGDOM:
RAF Bomber Command: 4 Group (Whitley). Bombing - industrial works at Wedau/Cologne.
102 Sqn. Six aircraft. All bombed. Opposition moderate.
The suspicion held for some time by the Air Ministry scientific intelligence expert Dr R V Jones and others that the Luftwaffe has a system of radio beams for guiding its bombers onto targets in England was finally confirmed last night.
An Avro Anson from the RAF’s Boscombe Down-based Blind Flying Development Unit located one such beam. Using a powerful US Hallicrafter receiver the crew identified a beam transmitted from Germany passing over the Rolls-Royce aeroplane engine factory at Derby. It was tracked down to a transmitter in Schleswig-Holstein. Urgent research is under way to counter the deadly system that the Germans call Knickebein [crooked leg].
Three German airmen who lost their lives when their bomber was brought down in an Essex town during Tuesday night’s raid were buried in the town’s cemetery yesterday. Full military honours were paid by officers and men of the R.A.F. and a firing party fired three volleys over the one large grave in which the three coffins covered with Nazi flags were interred. The Bishop of Chelmsford officiated. The Bishop’s wife was one of the mourners. There was a wreath from the R.A.F. and another from girl telephonists of the A.F.S. stationed in the town inscribed “When duty calls all must obey.”
Manchester Guardian.
U-122 (Type IXB) Missing since today between the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay. 48 dead (all crew lost). (Alex Gordon)
Corvette FS Bastiaise mined and sunk off Hartlepool, having been commissioned that same day at Smith’s Dock Middlesborough.
ASW trawler HMS Pirouette launched.
Corvette HMS Primula launched.
Rescue tug HMS Tenacity launched.
(Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: St-Jean-de-Luz: The remnant of the Polish army sails for England on the liner Batory.
Compeigne: Shortly after 6.30 this evening, General Wilhelm Keitel lost patience with the French. He told them to sign armistice terms within the next hour or they would be sent packing and the war would go on. In less than ten minutes the French capitulated.
In a voice choked with emotion General Charles Huntziger, the leader of the French delegation, said: “Forced by the fortunes of war to give up the struggle in which she was engaged on the side of her Allies, France sees very hard demands imposed on her under conditions which underline their severity.” He expressed the hope that Germany “will be guided by a spirit which will permit the two neighbouring great peoples to live and work in peace.”
Seated at a table in the railway carriage in which the Germans had been forced to sign the surrender at the end of the First World War, Huntziger signed the armistice terms. They are less harsh than had been expected. The Germans will occupy 60% of metropolitan France, but a French government will be responsible for the unoccupied zone and will be permitted to raise a small force for the preservation of order. However, all warships are to be recalled to France and laid up under German or Italian supervision.
France has found it difficult to swallow other German demands. All anti-Nazi German refugees are to be handed over to the German authorities; any French nationals caught fighting for Britain are to be shot at once; all French prisoners of war will remain in German camps. The armistice takes effect as soon as France has signed a similar agreement with Italy tomorrow.
The armistice teams met for the first time yesterday afternoon, with a triumphant Hitler, Göring and von Ribbentrop present. A preamble to the terms, read by Keitel, consisted of a tirade against the 1918 armistice terms imposed on Germany “although the enemy had not defeated the German army, navy or air force in any decisive action.” This ceremony in the coach at Compeigne would “blot out once and for all ... the greatest German humiliation of all time.”
After listening to this polemic, the Fuhrer gave the Nazi salute and left the carriage. Outside, he read, with a grim expression, the inscription on the granite memorial to the 1918 Armistice and then ordered the stone to be blown up.
Since the beginning of the month Weygand and Petain have been resigned to defeat. When de Gaulle urged them to continue the war from North Africa, Weygand responded contemptuously: “Nonsense. In a week Britain will have her neck wrung like a chicken”
As the armistice was being signed, French troops were surrendering en masse. In Alsace-Loraine 500,000 have laid down their arms; in Brittany and the west 200,000; over 1,500,000 French soldiers are now in German hands. Panzers are roaming at will in central France; General Rommel, in a letter to his wife, cheerfully likens his advance to a holiday excursion. The charade of French military press conferences has been abandoned.
After the French had to sign their surrender document in the railroad wagon, Hitler ordered the wagon to be taken to Berlin (Lustgarten) were it was displayed as a monument. Here it becomes a sort of mystery. Some mention, it was destroyed durng an RAF raid in 1943. Other say it was taken to Crawinkel/ Oberhof (Thueringen) at the end of the war. There it was blown up by the SS. When the debris was cleared after the war, they found the Franch emblem on the wagon. After the war the French government places a replica in Compiegne. (Michel van Best)
ITALY: Rome: The Italian High Command announced:
‘The Italian navy and air force have stepped up their activities in the Mediterranean. Powerful air attacks have been made on Marsa Matrub in North Africa. The enemy bombed the hospital and a military hospital in Tobruk. One English aeroplane was shot down. In East Africa a large number of operations have been undertaken against enemy bases in the Sudan and in Kenya. An English aeroplane was shot down during an enemy attack over Dire Dawa.’
MALTA: Flt. Lt. George Burges, in Faith, destroys the first Italian bomber over the island.
GULF of ADEN: Saga of the Galileo. The boat was finding it very difficult to stay surfaced long enough to adequately ventilate the crew compartments, and the noxious gasses were reaching dangerous levels inside, affecting the crew with serious symptoms of gas poisoning (chiefly fainting spells, nosebleeds, and a grotesque and painful swelling of the ankles). Repeatedly it seemed that the sub broke surface only to have to dive again almost at once at the sight of mastheads over the horizon or an approaching aircraft. Finally, on the morning of June 23rd, the GALLILEO’s skipper realized that his men were at the end of their endurance, and determined to try to run for home on the surface. But the familiar pattern re-asserted itself. All too soon, the Italian boat was spotted by a British plane. The GALLILEO’s captain took her down again, not realizing that his vessel was still quite visible from the air in the clear water. Thus the Italian sub continued to be tracked, until surface elements summoned by radio arrived on the scene. The first British sub-chaser to show up was the MOONSTONE, a converted trawler. With a large percentage of the Italian crew now incapacitated by the effects of the malfunctioning air conditioning, the GALLILEO’s skipper made a decision. He had correctly guessed, by the sound of the screws, that his single adversary was a fairly small craft. Since the circling British plane had now also departed (I’m assuming due to lack of fuel), and since the GALLILEO was one of those large ocean-going subs which mounted not one but two 100-mm deck guns, he decided to take his chances shooting it out on the surface. This was not a bad decision, since the Italian boat indeed had the advantage against the MOONSTONE, which had a single 4-inch (102-mm) gun forward. And the Italian skipper’s faith in his men’s efficiency was also apparently warranted. When the GALLILEO burst to the surface, surprisingly close to its pursuer, it was the Italian sub’s forward gun which got off the first shot. However, they missed, despite the point-blank range, and the crew of the MOONSTONE did not give them another chance. Demonstrating their own proficiency at gun drill, the British trawler’s gunscrew rapidly replied with two shots of their own. One of these scored a direct hit on the GALLILEO’s conning tower, which in effect ended the fight, killing the Italian commander and also killing or wounding virtually everyone else on the bridge and in the control room. With many of the crew already disabled by the poisonous gas, and most of the healthy sailors manning the guns (or their ammunition chain) fore and aft, the boat was literally left adrift. The British subsequently boarded it, a fortuitous coup because they thereby recovered documents including one which detailed the adjacent patrol area of the Italian sub GALVANI. Armed with this precise information, the British proceeded to lay on a careful search for the GALVANI, which in due course was also found and sunk. (Mike Yaklich)
K class destroyer HMS in company with HMS KANDAHAR and HMS Kingston and sloops HMS Shoreham and HMS Indus find Italian submarine Torricelli and fight it out for 40 minutes on the surface. Khartoum suffers a hit from a 10 cm shell which splinters the air vessel of a torpedo, and as the resulting fire could not be contained, the ship is beached on Perim Island in the Red Sea at 12 38N 43 24E. (Alex Gordon)(108)
JAPAN: A new Japanese cabinet is formed by Prince Konoye Fumiaro, with General Tojo Hideki as Minister of War and Matsuoka Yosuke as Minster of Foreign Affairs. (Jack McKillop)
ATLANTIC OCEAN: At 0158, the Randsfjord, dispersed from Convoy HX-49, was hit by one torpedo from U-30 about 70 miles SSE of Queenstown. The torpedo struck on the port side in the foreship and caused the ship to sink capsizing after three minutes. The master and three crewmembers were lost. Two men were crushed and injured between the starboard lifeboat and the side of the ship when they lost their grip while lowering themselves down to the boat. Some men jumped overboard and were later picked up by the boat. The U-boat surfaced and the Germans questioned the survivors, handed them a bottle of Brandy before leaving the area at full speed after two destroyers were spotted. The survivors set sail for land, but were picked up after 36 hours by the British steam merchant Port Hobart and landed in Glasgow on 25 June, where three men were admitted to hospital.
The Eli Knudsen had been in Convoy HX-49, which was dispersed approx. 100 miles SW of Cape Clear after U-47 had torpedoed the San Fernando in the middle of the convoy at 2007 on 21 Jun, 1940. At 0336 hours the next day, U-32 torpedoed the Eli Knudsen (one of the slowest ships in the convoy). All crewmembers abandoned ship in lifeboats and were picked up a few hours later by HMS Sandwich and taken to Liverpool. The tanker remained afloat and an attempt was made the next day to tow her to port, but she sank on 24 June in tow of the British tanker Corinda at 50.36N/07.51W.
At 0217, the Neion was hit in the engine room by one stern torpedo from U-38 and sank by the stern after five minutes. The cargo of naphtha drums was recovered in 1948.
At 1804, the unescorted Monique was torpedoed and sunk by U-65 in the Bay of Biscay. (Dave Shirlaw)
http://worldwar2daybyday.blogspot.com/
Day 296 June 22, 1940
At 6.30 PM, French General Huntzinger returns to the railway carriage at Compiègne, site the 1918 Armistice. He and German OKW Chief General Keitel sign the 1940 Franco-German armistice. Article 20 states “French troops in German prison camps will remain prisoners of war until conclusion of a peace”. The French believe it is only a matter of weeks before Britain will also make peace with Germany. Instead, a million Frenchmen will spend the next 5 years as German prisoners. Hitler does not demand the French fleet, but Article 8 leaves the disposition of their warships uncertain, which worries the British. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1940/1940-06-25b.html
General de Gaulle broadcasts a speech from London on the BBC. He is more strident than his famous June 18 speech, uses the term Free French for the first time and declares himself leader in exile. This speech is heard more widely in France than the June 18 broadcast. http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Appel_du_22_juin?match=en
U-boats sink 2 cargo ships and 2 tankers off the South coast of Ireland and in the Bay of Biscay. http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/379.html
http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/381.html
http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/380.html
http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/3554.html
U-122 goes missing in the North Atlantic, somewhere off the British coast (all 49 hands lost).
The Japanese military leaders, intoxicated by Hitler’s easy victories, changed their minds about the war in China and adopted the slogan “Don’t miss the bus!”.................................
Keitel Reads Preamble to Demands in Presence of Hitler and Others
DETAILS KEPT SECRET
The seeds for America's involvement in the war, were sown right here.
Yes. Considering how Neville Chamberlain infamously usedthe term less than three months ago ("Hitler has missed the bus . . ."). That one blew up in his face a couple days later when the Germans invaded Norway.
If I recall corectly, by the time this is final, one of the Waffen SS units [DAS REICH(?)] will be on or near the Spanish border in the vicinity of Bayonne.
I thought that was in New Jersey.
The second is a telephone conversation apparently between General Weygand, and General Huntziger.
Needless to say neither of these are in English.
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