Posted on 01/16/2015 4:21:19 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/0/16.htm
January 16th, 1945 (TUESDAY)
BELGIUM: The 506th Parachute Infantry, working with Combat Command B, 11th Armored Division, attacked north and northeast. The 11th Armored Division seized Houffalize to close off the German salient in the Ardennes. The 506th attacked with three battalion abreast. The 2nd Battalion crossed to the east side of the Bastogne - Houffalize road and seized Rachamps, three kilometres northeast of Noville by 1400. Soon after the Germans shelled the village heavily. The 3rd Battalion attacked and seized its objective in the Neuf Moulin area, 3.2 kilometres south of Houffalize. The 3rd Battalion seized the high ground between the 1st and 3rd Battalions. On this, its last day in the Bastogne area, the regiment took 49 casualties, including 6 officers and 11 enlisted men killed. (Jay Stone)
USS Herndon (DD-198), was commissioned as HMS Churchill (I-45) on 9 Sep. 1940; transferred to Russia as Dyatelnyi on 30 May 1944; is torpedoed and sunk by U-956 today, while escorting a White Sea convoy. This is the last war loss of the class and the only one of the destroyers transferred to Russia to be lost. (Ron Babuka)
Frigate HMS St Brides Bay launched.
GERMANY: Berlin: Hitler leaves the FHQu “Adlerhorst” near Bad Neuheim in the Taunus mountains and returns to the Berlin Reichskanzlei for the final time by special train (Führersonderzug). He moves permanently into the concrete Berlin Bunker located underground at the Reich Chancellery. (Gene Hanson and Russ Folsom)
U-2358, U-2359, U-2524 commissioned.
POLAND: Warsaw is encircled by Russian troops.
FINLAND: The United States establishes a Special Mission in Helsinki. Foreign Service officer Maxwell M. Hamilton is appointed Minister at the Mission.
MARIANAS ISLANDS: USAAF 314th Bombardment Wing (Very Heavy) arrives on the islands.
ATLANTIC OCEAN: Soviet destroyer Dejatelnyj (ex-HMS Churchill) sunk by U-956.
U-248 sunk in the North Atlantic in position 47.43N, 26.37W, by depth charges from destroyer escorts USS Hayter, Otter, Varian and Hubbard. 47 dead (all hands lost).
Starting to look bad for Adolph!
Thanks for the daily postings... they are still very interesting.
That war must have seemed to last forever for the people who lived it.
The Downfall begins....
Interesting to Hitler’s train was originally named Amerika.
The story about the jets and the V2 rockets makes me wonder when the race to grab the best scientists is going to start. The Russians have to be not just thinking about it but planning it. I imagine the U.S. and the British also have to have some unit that is working on it.
I guess that ultimately the brutality of the Russians worked against them in that regard. The best minds fled West, not East, right? :-)
Thank God we were able to reach the Elbe.
Sad that we couldn’t go further.
I didn’t know that. Strange.
What an elegant and moving account and eulogy to the 101st Airborne and the American spirit versus the Nazi regime, climaxed in the amazing stand at Bastogne against all odds.
Makes me proud and grateful to be an American.
How long before he commits suicide and how long after that do we find out he’s committed suicide?
My inlaws had a good German friend who had been in a POW camp in America. He was from Silesia. When he was repatriated, he had the good sense to stay in the Western zone, from which he eventually got clearance to immigrate to the U.S. A couple he worked for on work release from the camp sponsored him. Great guy - always had beer in the fridge.
April 30th he did the deed.
Going totally from memory, it seems to me that the initial German reports were that he died heroically defending Berlin.
I’ll have to go look to see how long before the world learned that he took the coward’s way out.
From wikipedia:
*excerpt*
The first inkling to the outside world that Hitler was dead came from the Germans themselves. On 1 May the radio station Reichssender Hamburg interrupted their normal program to announce that an important broadcast would soon be made. After dramatic funereal music by Wagner and Bruckner, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (appointed as Hitler’s successor in his will) announced that Hitler was dead.[39] Dönitz called upon the German people to mourn their Führer, who died a hero defending the capital of the Reich.[40] Hoping to save the army and the nation by negotiating a partial surrender to the British and Americans, Dönitz authorized a fighting withdrawal to the west. His tactic was somewhat successful: it enabled about 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid capture by the Soviets, but it came at a high cost in bloodshed, as troops continued to fight until 8 May.[41]
On the morning of 1 May, thirteen hours after the event, Stalin was informed of Hitler’s suicide.[42] General Hans Krebs had given this information to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov when they met at 04:00 on 1 May, when the Germans attempted to negotiate acceptable surrender terms.[43][44] Stalin demanded unconditional surrender and asked for confirmation that Hitler was dead. He wanted Hitler’s corpse found.[45] In the early morning hours of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich Chancellery.[46] Down in the Führerbunker, General Krebs and General Burgdorf committed suicide by gunshot to the head.[47]
Later on 2 May, the remains of Hitler, Braun, and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and her offspring, Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by a unit of the Red Army intelligence agency SMERSH tasked with finding Hitler’s body. Stalin was still wary about believing his old nemesis was dead, and restricted what information could be publicly released.[48][49] The remains of Hitler and Braun were repeatedly buried and exhumed by SMERSH during the unit’s relocation from Berlin to a new facility in Magdeburg. The bodies, along with the charred remains of propaganda minister Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children, were buried in an unmarked grave beneath a paved section of the front courtyard. The location was kept secret.[50]
Hitler depicted by the United States Secret Service in 1944 to show how he might disguise himself to escape capture
Different versions of Hitler’s fate were presented by the Soviet Union according to its political desires. In the years immediately following 1945, the Soviets maintained Hitler was not dead, but had fled and was being shielded by the former western allies.[51] This worked for a time to create doubt among western authorities. The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, said: “No one can say he is dead.” When President Harry S. Truman asked Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 whether or not Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, “No”. But by 11 May 1945, the Soviets had already confirmed through Hitler’s dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his dental technician that the dental remains found were Hitler’s and Braun’s.[52] In November 1945, Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin (and later head of MI5 and MI6 in succession), had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate the matter to counter the Soviet claims. His findings were written in a report and published in book form in 1947.[53]
In May 1946, SMERSH agents recovered from the crater where Hitler was buried two burned skull fragments with gunshot damage. These remains were apparently forgotten in the Russian State Archives until 1993, when they were re-found.[54] In 2009 DNA and forensic tests were performed on the skull fragment, which Soviet officials had long believed to be Hitler’s. According to the American researchers, the tests revealed that the skull was actually that of a woman less than 40 years old. The jaw fragments which had been recovered in May 1945 were not tested.[2][3]
In 1969, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky’s book on the death of Hitler was published in the West. It included the SMERSH autopsy report, but because of the earlier disinformation attempts, western historians thought it untrustworthy.[55]
In 1970, the SMERSH facility, by then controlled by the KGB, was scheduled to be handed over to the East German government. Fearing that a known Hitler burial site might become a Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains that had been buried in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946.[56] A Soviet KGB team was given detailed burial charts. On 4 April 1970 they secretly exhumed five wooden boxes containing the remains of “10 or 11 bodies ... in an advanced state of decay”. The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.[57][u]
According to Ian Kershaw the corpses of Braun and Hitler were thoroughly burned when the Red Army found them, and only a lower jaw with dental work could be identified as Hitler’s remains.[58]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Adolf_Hitler
Sorry to jump ahead. But I was asked.
:-)
Zowie. You’ve got the lying Ruskies dealing with the lying Nazis burying and burning the Fuhrer a whole bunch of times.
Dead. Dead dead.
You know, one could probably make the case that WWII didn’t really end until the Berlin Wall fell and the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union collapsed.
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