Posted on 02/07/2015 4:24:22 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/1/07.htm
February 7th, 1945 (WEDNESDAY)
GERMANY:
U-4706 commissioned.
U-3038 launched.
SOUTH AFRICA: The following UP report was released to the newswires - Capetown, South Africa - The British liner Orcades, the largest and finest ship of the Orient line, was sunk near here October 12, 1942, the Navy revealed today. More than 1000 survivors were rescued by the Polish liner Narwik, and approximately 40 lives were lost. En route to England with a passenger load of soldiers and several hundred civilians, many of who were women and children, the Orcades was hit by six torpedoes. The Narwik steamed up in the darkness to pick up survivors while covering the submarine - which surfaced several miles away - with its stern gun. [The Orcades was actually sunk on 10 October 1942 by U-172 (Emmermann)].
BURMA: Flt Sgt Stanley James Woodbridge (b.1921), RAFVR, was beheaded. he was one of six airmen caught after crashing; the Japanese tortured and beheaded his comrades, then tortured him further to try to learn radio secrets. They failed. (George Cross)
PACIFIC OCEAN: 2nd Lt. Louis Curdes, USAAF, 4th FS (Commando), 3rd FG (Commando), shoots down a Japanese Dinah, while flying a P-51D thirty miles SW of Formosa. This feat makes him one of three aces to have shot down enemy aircraft of three Axis powers. (Stuart Kohn)
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: General Douglas MacArthur enters Manila, Luzon. (Drew Halevy)
NEWFOUNDLAND: Corvette HMCS Merrittonia departed St John’s to escort Convoy ON-283.
U.S.A.: The motion picture “Ministry of Fear” opens at the Paramount Theater in New York City. Directed by Fritz Lang, this spy drama based on a Graham Greene novel stars Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds and Dan Duryea.
Submarine USS Carbonero commissioned.
Flt Sgt Stanley James Woodbridge
Unbelievable. Imagine FDR saying, “Well, you know, Christians did bad things during the Crusades as well.”
What a brave, determined man Woodbridge was.
http://www.rquirk.com/japatroc.html
In the East today, the only thing noteworthy on the one map available is the situation around Elbing and the mouth of the Vistula River, where Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front has driven a wedge between German 2nd and 4th Armies. You can see the names of German Corps and Division HQs that have fought together in the East for four years, but now these are little more than blue marks on a map. The formations are spent. You will also notice the German warship in the Bay of Danzig. The Kriegsmarine will have it's final hour serving as floating artillery platforms to provide naval gunfire support to German troops in the Baltic. Mostly provided by heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, they will eventually wear out their gun barrels and lie up in port for lack of fuel.
Interesting article on the refit if HMS Nelson in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Nothing else confirms the ascendancy of the United States and decline of the British Empire. The Royal Navy, pride of Britain and for centuries the symbol of her military power, has to rely on an American naval yard to refit one of their ships. And Nelson was not the only British ship to be serviced; this was a fairly routine happening during the war.
“Manila mopping up operations.” Yeah, right.
The sweeping piece by Hanson W. Baldwin on pg 10 is an amazing piece of poetic writing about the war on the Eastern Front.
In a sense, it seems to me that the United States was the only great power that actually “won” World War II.
Thanks for the tip. I will have to read it later. Right now it is off to the library to gather the new from the first few weeks of May ‘45. I wonder if there will be any significant developments.
Interesting what gets reported in the NY Times.
Whitney Nephew Killed
Daniel C. Payson Army Battle Casualty in Belgium
Most private first class soliders did not get this much lineage in the paper. But he was from a prominent New York family.
His mother Joan Whitney Payson went on to be the first owner of the Mets. Good friends of my family were distantly related to her and we rooted for the 1969 Mets to win the World Series. She had an “summer” estate here in Maine. Her funeral in 1975 was in Falmouth Maine and I was an alcolyte for the service. I don’t know if I ever actually met her when she was in Maine for the summers.
From page 4:
“The pipeline project not only concerns the entire world petroleum picture, with ramifications in international strategy affecting tanker availability, aircraft and war vessels as well as merchant shipping and oil markets and reserves, but also raises questions of a diplomatic in nature. Among these are how extensively the United States wishes to interest itself in Middle Eastern affairs and how closely the American government would participate in such a venture, how much protection it could guarantee it and how the idea would be viewed by interested great powers, such as Britain and France, or by smaller independent nations, such as Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.”
The big items on the agenda in the story, it seems, are such things as “merchant shipping,” Great Britain and France as “interested great powers” and a Lebanon described without irony as an “independent nation”! What ultimately mattered in that part of the world for the next 70 years is nowhere to be seen here, nor in the predictions I would imagine of any other contemporaneous expert. Predicting the human future in any detail is, it seems, an impossibly complex task. Of the extent to which ultimately “the United States wishe[d] to interest itself in Middle Eastern affairs,” little need be said.
I was under a prior impression that the Germans pioneered swept wing design with their rocket and jet powered aircraft.
Because the XP-55 went on the drawing boards in 1939, I now have to assume swept wing design for high speed aircraft was a widely understood technology even though the Germans may have been the first to make use of it in an operational aircraft.
I like the way the plane looks. Because i never before heard of it, I did a little research and concluded that this particular article must have been run on a slow news day because performance-wise, the XP-55 was something of a dog. Even though the author calls it the "ascender", it's climb rate was one third of the P-38 and one half of the P-51's climb rate.
I had not heard of the Battle of Zorndorf. The story of the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War in America, is usually taught from the British and American point of view here, with short shrift given the Prussian contribution. I looked it up and Zorndorf certainly foreshadows the savagery we have witnessed on the Eastern Front in this War.
I find these maps eerily beautiful, despite what they represent.
A foreshadow of Hitler, and of heartless Russian plundering.
It’s no wonder Hitler admired Frederick II. They had a lot in common.
See also the XP-54...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vultee_XP-54
And the XP-56...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_XP-56_Black_Bullet
A trio of experimental aircraft designs that the USAAF looked at as WW-II was ramping up.
Also the Fisher XP-75 while not an experimental, per se, aircraft could fall into this group as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_P-75_Eagle
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
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