http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/7/31.htm
August 31st, 1945 (FRIDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: Minesweepers HMS Graylag and Harlequin commissioned.
GERMANY: Allied troops arrest Field Marshal von Brauchitsch and von Manstein.
Europe is full of the flotsam of war, millions of people without food, homes or countries, migrating in search of safety. Some are trying to get back to villages from which they were transported thousands of miles. Others are fleeing from countries overrun by conquering armies.
There are Germans driven out of Poland and Silesia. There are five million Russian prisoners of war and forced labourers making their way home to an uncertain reception. There are eastern Europeans fleeing from the Red Army. There are Jews who, somehow, survived the death camps making their way to ports in the hope of reaching Palestine.
Germans who fled the bombing of their cities are going home to stake their claims in the rubble of their homes. One person in five in the western zone of Germany is a refugee. There are even leftovers from a previous conflict: 200,000 refugees from the Spanish civil war living in southern France.
It is estimated that there are as many as 20 million people on the move in Europe. The care of these “displaced persons” has fallen primarily to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), first set up in 1943 to help refugees from the nations fighting the Axis powers. Financed in the main by the United States, it is trying to bring order to the chaos left behind by the war.
Some, mistrustful of all authority, are making their own way across Europe, begging in a ravaged countryside and risking violence as old scores are settled; retribution is rampant and often brutally indiscriminate. Others have settled into camp life, unwilling to forgo their tents and regular rations. Meagre as they are, these comforts are all-important in a world where a woman can be bought for a bar of soap.
U.S.S.R.: Moscow: The USSR restores diplomatic relations with Finland.
ITALY: HQ US Twelfth Air Force is inactivated.
HONG KONG: The RCN armed merchant cruiser HMCS Prince Robert enters the Crown Colony where her commanding officer represents Canada at the surrender ceremonies of Japanese forces.
JAPAN: In the Kurile Islands, Soviet forces occupy Utruppu Island after fierce fighting with Japanese troops.
Marines of Company “L,” Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, land at Tateyama Naval Base, Honshu, on the northeast shore of Sagami Wan, and accept its surrender. They will reconnoitre the beach approaches and cover the landing of Army’s 112th Cavalry Regiment.
Meanwhile, the Japanese submarine HIJMS I 401 surrenders to submarine USN submarine USS Segundo (SS-398) at the entrance to Tokyo Bay.
Tokyo: The greatest and most destructive conflict that the Pacific has known is now ended. Fanatical resistance by the Japanese military had not availed. Japan is to be occupied, disarmed and treated as a potentially dangerous enemy. The victors are making sure that there will be no repetition of the mistakes which in Germany after the First World War allowed a revival of militarism under Hitler. A great victory has been won, but suppressed antagonisms are now emerging among the Allies. China will succeed Japan as the dominant east Asian nation, and the struggle for control is escalating with the USSR backing the Communist Chinese of Mao Tse-tung against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. In Korea only the USSR and the US have troops available to disarm the Japanese. By agreement, the Russians will occupy the north and the Americans the south.
In the Dutch East Indies a revolutionary Indonesian nationalist movement is preparing for independence, and British troops could be caught up in the inevitable disorders. And in French Indochina the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh plans to declare independence.
Japan: Harrowing tales of cruelty, filth and malnutrition are being told by Allied PoWs who have just been released from Japanese camps following the surrender. An official report on the main camp in the Tokyo Bay area states: “There has never been such a hell-hole.”
Commodore Joe Boone, a doctor who has been involved in the evacuation of PoWs from the camp and the nearby Shinagawa hospital said: “Our prisoners were ill from having to eat rice and grass. Many of the men had dysentery as a result of the filthy conditions in which they were housed.”
Major Maurice Ditton told of his slave labour in Thailand where prisoners were forced to work building the Bangkok to Moulmein railway: “Many men died daily ... The survivors, working in the steaming jungle, became weak. Brutal Korean guards kept the sick working for 18 hours a day.”
So far only 1,000 Allied PoWs have been evacuated to freedom. At least another 36,000 are believed to be awaiting liberation from camps across Japan.
Yokohama: General MacArthur today established supreme Allied command in Yokohama, Tokyo’s main port, as the first foreigner to take charge of Japan in 1,000 years.
Mac Arthur is working on Japan’s formal surrender, which will be signed in two days’ time aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He said “The surrender plan has been going splendidly. There is every indication that the occupation will continue without bloodshed or friction.” In Tokyo quiet has returned, although the corpses of 30 civilians who committed hara-kiri after the initial surrender still lie outside the palace. Since the first wave of 7,500 US airborne troops landed three days ago, the US occupation has continued at a rate of 300 troop planes a day. Yokosuka, on Tokyo Bay, has become Pacific Fleet HQ after its surrender by two Japanese admirals to Admiral Halsey. The main landings at Yokohama and on the southern island of Kyushu will begin after the formal surrender.
MacArthur will accept Japan’s surrender with the foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and the army chief of staff, Yoshijiro Umezu, signing for Japan’s new caretaker government. Representatives of each of the 12 Allied nations will sign the surrender. Britain will be represented by General Percival, the former commander of Singapore, who spent the war in captivity after its fall.
Tokyo: Horrific details of atrocities carried out by Japanese doctors are emerging as Allied PoWs are released. Prisoners have been subjected to vivisection. Others have been used as human guinea-pigs and injected with acid, inoculated with fatal diseases or frozen at -20°C.
Eight US airmen shot down after B-29 raids in May died in vivisection experiments carried out by Professor Fukujiro at Kyushu university. One PoW’s stomach was removed, and an artery cut to see how long before he died.
Many of the atrocities have been at Japan’s top-secret bacteriological warfare Unit 731 at Harbin, in Manchuria. Prisoners were inoculated with anthrax, typhoid and cholera to test germ potency. Others have been boiled or dehydrated to death. Experiments included prolonged exposure to X-rays and prisoners subjected to a pressure chamber where the blood was forced out of their skin as they died in agony.
PoWs fear that 731’s commander, Shiro Ishii, will escape prosecution in return for turning over germ warfare data to the US. Two released US doctors also revealed today how they were made to prepare lethal acid-based solutions for Japanese doctors to inject into US PoWs at a Tokyo hospital.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: Manila: Japanese troops in the Philippines formally surrender.
PACIFIC OCEAN: The Japanese garrison on Marcus Island surrenders to the US.
CANADA: Minesweepers HMCS Suderoy IV and Suderoy VI (ex Norwegian whalers) paid off.
U.S.A.: In baseball, the Washington Senators again muff a chance to go into first place, dropping a pair to the New York Yankees, 3–2 and 3–1, in Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. In between games, Washington pitcher Bert Shepard receives the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service in WWII. When Bert Shepard, a journeyman minor league pitcher, had his right leg amputated after his fighter plane crashed in Germany, he was the only person that believed he would ever play professional baseball again. But through sheer self-belief and determination, the gutsy left-hander from Dana, Indiana, taught himself to walk and then to pitch with an artificial leg — all within the confines of a POW camp in Germany. By February 1945, Shepard was back in the U.S. and determined to pitch in organized baseball. Senators’ owner Clark Griffith took a look at the amputee’s pitching form in spring training and offered Shepard a job as a pitching coach. On 4 August 1945, Shepard became an inspiration to all wartime amputees when he pitched five innings for the Senators against the Boston Red Sox, fulfilling a dream that few could have imagined possible. That was the only major league game he pitched in. Shepard continued playing in the minor leagues until 1954 and later worked for IBM and Hughes Aircraft as a safety engineer.
USAAF”>USAAF 477th Bombardment Group (Medium) is designated combat ready. It will be the first bomber group manned entirely by African-Americans.
Destroyer USS Wiltsie launched.