World War II Diaries:The Complete War Report
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73 episodes · First aired 2017-02-05
Page 3 of 4
Showing 20 at a time
In the Pacific, the Japanese High Command decides to evacuate the island of Guadalcanal. This means giving up complete control of the Solomon Islands and mastery of their northwest shipping routes to Australia and New Zealand. In Stalingrad, General Paulus and his men continue to endure the pressure of the Russian siege; meanwhile Luftwaffe losses increase as it attempts to maintain the feeble airlift of supplies.
In Stalingrad, the men of General Shumilov capture Marshal Friedrich Paulus. The remainders of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzerarmee have surrendered to the Red Army. Twenty-three generals, two thousand officers, and around 90,000 soldiers are estimated to have been taken prisoner along with Paulus. 130,000 still lie among the ruins of the city. Additionally, over thirty thousand wounded men have been previously evacuated.
At Madison Square Garden's in New York, more than 20,000 Jews gather under the banner of the American Jewish Congress, whose aim is to pressurise the U.S. government and its allies into providing refuge for European Jews and to abolish restrictions on immigration to Palestine. RAF planes bomb Berlin in the most devastating attack of the war to date. Goebbels writes in his diary ... Gaering is not fooling himself in the event of our having to lose the war. He is under no illusions, especially as regards the Jewish question; we are so committed that we have no escape route...
Many among the Nazi leadership are convinced that Germany will eventually be defeated. Heinrich Himmler, in anticipation of this possibility, orders that in the reports on the Jewish Question, the term special treatment be omitted so as to conceal the genocide. His aim is to eliminate as much evidence about the Holocaust as possible to avoid being charged for this after the war. In the meantime, the commands of the Third Reich continue despoiling the occupied countries. The works of art taken to Germany comprise thousands of paintings of famous artists, furniture, statues, and tapestries. A large portion of the stolen objects comes from France.
In Poland, over two thousand Jews are transferred from Wlodawa to the Sobibor death camp, directed by the SS general Franz Reichleitner. When they reach the arrivals platform and realise the tragic fate that awaits them, they desperately rebel against the SS guards watching over them, attacking them with sticks and stones. The rioters are gunned down. New Zealander pilot Leonard Henry Trent heads a squadron of 12 aircraft with the mission of bombing the Amsterdam power station in Holland. Before reaching the target, nine of the planes are shot down and only two make it back to base. Captain Trent, going solo, manages to attack the station, but is subsequently brought down and captured by the Germans along with his co-pilot. After the war he was liberated and decorated with the Victoria Cross.
German and Ukrainian soldiers encircle the Lvov ghetto (eastern Poland) to prevent its inhabitants from fleeing. When Nazi units penetrate it to carry out genocide, they encounter strong resistance, so they torch buildings to flush out the inhabitants. More than three thousand Jews are killed and another seven thousand arre captured and sent to Janowska camp, where they will be killed. This action will last until the end of July. Jack Chalder, a British artilleryman captured by the Japanese in 1942 during the fall of Singapore finds himself at the prison camp in Konyu river in Thailand. He secretly draws the hard life of prisoners doing forced labor on the construction of a railway linking the country to Burma. His drawings end up having a massive impact over time. In Berlin, Heinrich Himmler receives the first reports from Professor Carl Clauberg concerning his female sterilization experiments conducted in Block 10 of the extermination camp of Auschwitz.
The losses on both camps are rocketing. The intensity of the fighting is draining the morale out of men who are fighting among rotting corpses and tanks that have been turned into scrap. In the Battle of Kursk, in the course of the Soviet counteroffensive around Prokhorovka the Fourth Panzer Army of Marshal Von Manstein loses over ten thousand men and 350 tanks. In addition, the Germans face the thrust of the Western and Bryansk fronts near Orel. Hitler, summons to his headquarters the generals in charge of Operation Zitadelle. Von Manstein suggests that the offensive be continued with the help of fresh troops, while Von Kluge is in favour of aborting it, in view of the deplorable state of the ninth army. The Fuhrer, to his regret, and in light of the Allied landings in Sicily, decides to temporarily halt Operation Zitadelle. The last major German offensive on the Eastern Front has represented a costly failure.
The American planes take off near Benghazi (Libya) and, after flying 2,400 miles to reach the target, find it are heavily defended by German fighters and anti aircraft batteries. Subjected to incessant artillery fire and attacks by Luftwaffe aircraft, the B-24s launch their explosives on the huge Romanian oil installations, which represent one of the lifelines of the Third Reich. Following the operation, the result was far from what was desired: the Americans have lost 53 aircraft and their crews. The Germans repair the damage and production reaches its highest level within a week. Witold Pilecki, cofounder of Tajna Armia Polska (Polish Secret Army), reaches Warsaw and joins the Polish resistance. After scouting near the death camp of Auschwitz, Pilecki sends a report to London recounting the atrocities by the Nazis who have, according to his data, murdered in the death camps more than 3 million people and he calls for an operation to end the suffering of the inmates.
The American carrier-based fighter plane Grumman F6F “Hellcat sees action for the first time. Protected by a heavy fuselage and armed with six 12.7mm machineguns, it will attain air supremacy. In many ways, it can be considered to be the best naval single-seater fighter of the Second World War. Over 12,000 units of its different models were produced. By the end of the conflict it will have shot down some 6,000 enemy aircraft. Hitler believes that Germany will recoup the initiative thanks to the fighting spirit of the Wehrmacht soldiers, the lack of unity among the Allies, and his new weapons of mass destruction. In order to accelerate the production of war materials, he gives more power to Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production. Walter Funk, the Minister of Economic Affairs, who up to present had been in charge of raw materials, will be subordinated to him.
Hitler orders the Marshal Kesselring to maintain defensive lines south of Rome and use any means necessary to avoid the Allies' advancing north. In Poland, 1196 children arrive at Auschwitz death camp from the Bialystok ghetto. They are sent straight to the gas chambers. In Poznan, Himmler meets again with the main commanders, whom he encourages to murder not only parents, but also Jewish children: to avoid avengers growing up among our own children and grandchildren.
In Europe, Heinrich Himmler has decided to annihilate outright the Jews of the Polish labour camps. He orders Friedrich Wilhelm Kruger, head of the SS and the police in occupied Poland, to direct the extermination. He subsequently passes down the orders to Jakob Sporrenberg, who organizes the Akton Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival), the killing of all the Jews from the Lublin district. In Moscow, Stalin delivers a radio speech praising the bravery of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. For Hitler, the loss of Kiev has been a heavy blow.
Several squadrons of the RAF bomb Berlin, dropping more than 1,500 tons of bombs that destroy two factories owned by Siemens and several railway centers located around the city. Flak and German fighters shoot down 40 Allied aircraft and 228 crew members die. So far 2700 Berliners have been killed and another 250,000 have lost their homes. Nazi Party leaders have ordered swastika pennants to be flown on the piles of rubble to lift the morale of a bewildered population that had believed itself safe from such acts of war. In Warsaw (Poland) German security forces execute a hundred employees of the municipal tram lines in retaliation for the recent acts of sabotage. After the fall of Mussolini, Hitler has strengthened his own security measures to the maximum, to the extent of not revealing to his closest confidantes the dates of his trips. During his stay at headquarters he covers his head with a heavy armoured cap.
In Germany, Hitler, in his New Year's address to the German people, reasserts his will to keep fighting: “No matter how long the war may last, it's better to continue in it than to condemn our homeland to the humiliation of defeat, he says. In Plaszow, a suburb of Cracow (Poland), the Germans set up a new concentration camp. Its commander, the sadistic Ammon Goeth, with the collaboration of SS groups headed by Alice Orlowski, will end up murdering over 80,000 people. In Washington, Treasure Secretary Henry Morgenthau urges President Roosevelt to modify the stringent immigration laws of the State Department to counteract the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews.
Over 800 RAF bombers launch a night-time attack against the German city of Leipzig, which is followed in the morning by an air raid by the Eight US Air Force in what comes to be known as the Big Week, the carpet bombing of the major industrial centers of the Third Reich. The Big Week reaches its peak during an air raid by American bombers. Escorted by fighters, they carry out a day-time incursion against the Messerschmitt plants in Regensburg and Augsburg in Bavaria (Germany). During the operation 35 bombers and 8 Allied fighters are lost, but they shoot down 142 German fighters in the sky and a thousand more in the assembly line. At night two waves of RAF bombers wreck havoc yet again over Augsburg.
Allied commanders estimate that German troops need an average of four thousand tons of supplies daily to supply the forces that are in position on the Gustav Line and surrounding the Anzio beachhead. Their goal is to cut off the supply lines to the rearguard. General Alexander increases the number of U.S. aircraft involved in Operation Strangle, aimed at railway hubs, bridges, roads and supply stores in a broad sweep of the Italian peninsula stretching from the Gustav Line to the Swiss border. In U.S. it is a presidential election year. Voting will take place in November and both Wendel Willkie for the Republicans and Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt are immersed in the primaries organized by their respective parties. Roosevelt is running for a third term, breaking the tradition established by George Washington.
"Hitler issues an order to the commanders on the Eastern Front encouraging them to achieve victory and saying the Russians have exhausted their strength and it's time to finally stop their advance. The German generals cannot believe what they read and consider the Fuhrer has lost his mind. In London, Churchill delivers in the House of Commons casualty figures suffered in the war so far. As regards the United Kingdom, 120,958 soldiers have been killed on the various fronts; 49,730 civilians by German bombing; and 26,317 crew members of merchant ships. With respect to the British Commonwealth, 12,298 Australian soldiers have died, 9209 Canadian, 5912 Indians, 5622 New Zealand troops and 3107 South Africans. In total, the death toll exceeds 233,000 in a period of just over four years.
Stalin claims that Germany has been defeated during a speech delivered during the May Day celebrations. He calls for Romanians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians to rise against Hitler and his occupation forces. He ends by saying: “the Nazi beast is wounded; we must now chase to its lair and destroy it. German journalist Erich Knauf is decapitated in the Brandenburg prison after having been sentenced to death by judge Roland Freisler under the accusation of defeatism. While hiding in a bomb shelter during an air raid with his friend Doctor Erich Ohser, he had commented that “the greatest catastrophe would be a German victory. The work of the British secret services and their team of cryptographers continues to intercept and decode the German encrypted communications system called “Ultra. The Allied strategists are aware of the enemy troops movements and can plan the landings in northern France with greater precision.
In the early hours of the morning, 180 men of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Battalion of the Sixth Airborne Division, known as The Red Devils, parachute into their sector of Normandy and, to the tremendous surprise of the Germans, capture Pegasus Bridge over the Caen Canal in Bénouville, a strategic point for the success of the landing operations. Minutes later, the crossing over the Orne River at Ranville is also captured.
To date, the Allies have landed to date more than one million soldiers and one hundred and seventy thousand vehicles in northern France. The number of captured German prisoners has risen to forty thousand. General George S. Patton lands near Omaha Beach in Normandy (France) aboard a Douglas C-47 plane. He had been in England for months heading Operation Fortitude, one of the major strategies designed to deceive the Germans about the Overlord landings. Having not taken part in D-Day, Patton now has the opportunity to join the fight by commanding the Third Army. But things have greatly changed in recent months, and his subordinate in Sicily - General Omar Bradley, - is now his boss.
Under Hitler's instructions, Heinrich Himmler orders that all family members of Von Stauffenberg be persecuted. His wife Nina, a few months pregnant, is arrested by security forces and sent to prison and then to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Their four children are sent to an internment camp. In Warsaw, Polish and German forces continue to violently clash. SS reinforcement troops begin to the arrive in the city, under General von dem Bach Zelewski of the Kaminski Brigade, composed of Soviet POWs, along with the Dirlewanger Brigade, made up of former German prisoners. Japanese forces in China keep the up various offensives of Operation Ichi-Go against the National Revolutionary Army. After the Battle of Central Henan, they are now involved in the Battle of Changheng in Hunan Province. For the Japanese, the two main objectives in this long and costly operation are to open a land route to French Indochina, and occupy air bases in Chinese territory.
