25-26 June 1942 The third of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris's 'Thousand Bomber Raids' is mounted against Bremen, with 960 aircraft despatched. The raid marks the last operational sortie of the Avro Manchester, the unsuccessful forerunner of the widely admired Avro Lancaster.
June 26, 1945 U.N. Charter is signed On this day in 1945, the Charter for the United Nations is signed in San Francisco. The United Nations was born of perceived necessity, as a means of better arbitrating international conflict and negotiating peace than was provided for by the old League of Nations. The growing Second World War became the real impetus for the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to begin formulating the original U.N. Declaration, signed by 26 nations in January 1942, as a formal act of opposition to Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers. But now that the war--at least in the West--was over, negotiating and maintaining the peace was the practical responsibility of the new U.N. Security Council, made up of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China. Each would have veto power over the other. A year later, after the war in the East was won as well, Winston Churchill called for the United Nations to employ its Charter in the service of creating a new, united Europe--united in its opposition to communist expansion--East and West. Given the composition of the Security Council, this would prove easier said than done.
26 June 1939 The Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, announces that the Royal Air Force will impress civil aircraft in the event of war.
June 24-25th - Nothing to report. June 26th - Adam Kappeller, former Kreiskassenleiter SPITTAL arrested. June 27th - Nothing to report. June 28th - Karl Kirschbaumer arrested and handed over for investigation. June 29th - Nothing to report. In the days in quetion the 4th QOH were kept busy tracking down wanted war criminals in PostWar Austria
June 26, 1940 Turkey declares nonbelligerency On this day in 1940, Turkey announces neutrality in the widening world war. Turkey was precariously positioned, prime real estate for both the Soviet Union to the north and the Axis Powers to the west. For the Soviets, an occupied or "satellite" Turkey could be yet another buffer zone, protection against invasion. For Germany, it was a means to an end, a bridge to conquests in the Middle East. Turkey could not afford to antagonize one or the other. But that position would not hold. By the time the Soviet Union had reconquered Crimea from Germany in 1944, Turkey needed to be seen as an "ally" of the Russian Bear so as not to invite, unwittingly, Russian troops onto its territory. Consequently, Turkey stopped chrome shipments to Germany and--with added prodding by Winston Churchill--declared itself "pro-Allied" but still not a belligerent. But by February 1945, Turkey, anticipating Hitler's defeat, finally formally declared war on Germany.
June 27, 1940 Germans get Enigma On this day in 1940, the Germans set up two-way radio communication in their newly occupied French territory, employing their most sophisticated coding machine, Enigma, to transmit information. The Germans set up radio stations in Brest and the port town of Cherbourg. Signals would be transmitted to German bombers so as to direct them to targets in Britain. The Enigma coding machine, invented in 1919 by Hugo Koch, a Dutchman, looked like a typewriter and was originally employed for business purposes. The German army adapted the machine for wartime use and considered its encoding system unbreakable. They were wrong. The Brits had broken the code as early as the German invasion of Poland and had intercepted virtually every message sent through the system. Britain nicknamed the intercepted messages Ultra.
USS BUNKER HILL (CV-17) (June 27, 1945) Aircraft carrier operating off the island of Okinawa, hit by a Japanese kamikaze suicide plane piloted by Kiyoshi Ogawa. The ship suffered the loss of 373 crewmen when the re-armed and re-fuelled planes on deck exploded and caught fire. The Bunker Hill did not sink but made it home to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for repairs. Air attacks by Japanese planes on American ships off Okinawa killed 2,658 men during ten kamikaze attacks in which eleven ships were sunk and 102 damaged. During the Pacific War, 288 United States Navy ships were hit by kamikazes, 34 were sunk. (Kamikaze units, was first formed in October 1944, as a Special Attack Force called 'Shimpu' by Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi and included 23 volunteer pilots) A second unit was formed soon afterwards under the name Kamikaze "Divine Wind" after a typhoon that destroyed a Mongol invasion fleet way back in 1281 AD. In their suicide attempts, 1,465 kamikaze aircraft were destroyed. Damage caused to a British aircraft carrier by a Japanese Kamikaze aircraft.
June 28, 1940 Britain recognizes General Charles de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French On this day in 1940, General Charles de Gaulle, having set up headquarters in England upon the establishment of a puppet government in his native France, is recognized as the leader of the Free French Forces, dedicated to the defeat of Germany and the liberation of all France. For Charles de Gaulle, fighting Germans was an old story. He sustained multiple injuries fighting at Verdun in World War I. He escaped German POW camps five times, only to be recaptured each time. (At 6 feet 4 inches in height, it was hard for de Gaulle to remain inconspicuous.) At the beginning of World War II, de Gaulle was commander of a tank brigade. He was admired as a courageous leader and made a brigadier general in May 1940. After the German invasion of France, he became undersecretary of state for defense and war in the Reynaud government, but when Reynaud resigned, and Field Marshal Philippe Petain stepped in, a virtual puppet of the German occupiers, he left for England. On June 18, de Gaulle took to the radio airwaves to make an appeal to his fellow French not to accept the armistice being sought by Petain, but to continue fighting under his command. Ten days later, Britain formally acknowledged de Gaulle as the leader of the "Free French Forces," which was at first little more than those French troops stationed in England, volunteers from Frenchmen already living in England, and units of the French navy. On August 2, a French military court sentenced de Gaulle to death in absentia for his actions. (No doubt at the instigation of the German occupiers.) De Gaulle would prove an adept wartime politician, finally winning recognition and respect from the Allies and his fellow countrymen. He returned to Paris from Algiers, where he had moved the headquarters of the Free French Forces and formed a "shadow government," in September 1943. He went on to head two provisional governments before resigning.
MV PAGANINI (June 28, 1940) The Italian passenger Motor Vessel Paganini, 2427 tons and built in 1928, was in convoy bound for Durres (Albania) when at 11.00hrs a fire occurred in the engine room. A subsequent explosion caused the loss of the vessel in position 41°27'N 19°11'E. A total of 147 men were drowned.
ESPERO (June 28, 1940) Italian destroyer (Captain Enrico Baroni) lead escort of a three ship troop convoy including the destroyers Ostro and Zaffiro, sunk while transporting 160 Black Shirt soldiers from Taranto to the Italian garrison at Tobruk. When 100 miles north of its destination the convoy was spotted by Vice-Admiral Tovey's 7th Cruiser Squadron at around 6.30 PM. The 1st Division of the Cruiser Squadron, which included HMS Neptune, HMS Orian and the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, gave chase and caught up with the convoy at 7.20 PM. Hit by several salvoes the Espero engaged the British ships while making smoke thus allowing the Ostro and Zaffiro to escape. The Espero was again hit and sunk by shells from the Sydney which later picked up 47 survivors. Captain Baroni was posthumously awarded Italy's highest honour, the 'Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare'.
28 June 1943 Royal Air Force (RAF) photographic reconnaissance reveals that rockets with an estimated range of up to 130 miles are being developed at the German research facility at Peenemunde on the Baltic coast.
June 29, 1941 Germans capture Lvov-and slaughter ensues On this day in 1941, the Germans, having already launched their invasion of Soviet territory, invade and occupy Lvov, in eastern Galicia, in Ukraine, slaughtering thousands. The Russians followed a scorched-earth policy upon being invaded by the Germans; that is, they would destroy, burn, flood, dismantle, and remove anything and everything in territory they were forced to give up to the invader upon retreating, thereby leaving the Germans little in the way of crops, supplies, industrial plants, or equipment. (It was a policy that had proved very successful against Napoleon in the previous century.) This time, as the Germans captured Lvov, the Soviet NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB secret police, proceeded to murder 3,000 Ukrainian political prisoners. Lvov had had a long history of being occupied by foreign powers: Sweden, Austria, Russia, Poland, and since 1939, the Soviet Union, which had proved especially repressive. The German invaders were seen as liberators, if for no other reason than they were the enemy of Poland and Russia-two of Lvov's, and Ukraine's-- enemies. But release from the Soviet grip only meant subjection to Nazi terror. Within days, administrative control of Ukraine was split up between Poland, Romania, and Germany. Some 2.5 million Ukrainians were shipped to Germany as slave laborers, and Ukrainian Jews were subjected to the same vicious racial policies as in Poland: Some 600,000 were murdered. (Ukrainian nationalists also had blood on their hands in this respect, having gone on the rampage upon the withdrawal of Russian troops by scapegoating Jews for "Bolshevism," killing them in the streets.)
29 June 1942. United States Army Air Force (USAAF) aircrew bomb a target in enemy-occupied Europe for the first time. Captain Charles Kegelman and his crew from the 15th Bombardment Squadron (Light), US Eighth Air Force, fly a Douglas Boston light bomber of No.226 Squadron, No.2 Group, RAF Bomber Command during an attack by twelve Bostons from that squadron on the marshalling yard at Hazebrouck. No aircraft are lost.
TOYAMA MARU (June 29, 1944) Japanese 7,089-ton troop transport torpedoed by the USS Sturgeon. The vessel was carrying over 6,000 men of the Japanese 44th Independent Mixed Brigade from Kyushu to Okinawa. As the torpedoes hit, thousands of drums of gasoline exploded turning the holds into a fiery hell. There were about 600 survivors, a death toll of around 5,400. The year before, on December 15, 1943, a total of 504 Canadian POWs from the Sham Shui Camp in Hong Kong were transported on the Soung Cheong to Japan via Takao, Formosa. At Takao, the prisoners were then embarked on the Toyama Maru and all were transported safely to Moji, Japan, on the 5/6th January, 1944. During the voyage, Rifleman Doucet of the Royal Rifles of Canada was beaten in a most brutal manner by the Japanese interpreter Nimori. Kicked in the stomach as he lay on the deck he never recovered from this attack and died in the Marumi POW camp a month later. Nimori was eventually tried by a British Military Court in Hong Kong and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment.
June 30, 1943 Operation Cartwheel is launched On this day in 1943, General Douglas MacArthur launches Operation Cartwheel, a multi-pronged assault on Rabaul and several islands in the Solomon Sea in the South Pacific. The joint effort takes nine months to complete but succeeds in recapturing more Japanese-controlled territory, further eroding their supremacy in the East. The purpose of Cartwheel was to destroy the barrier formation Japan had created in the Bismark Archipelago, a collection of islands east of New Guinea in the Solomon Sea. The Japanese considered this area vital to the protection of their conquests in the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. For the Allies, Rabaul, in New Britain, was the key to winning control of this theater of operations, as it served as the Japanese naval headquarters and main base. On June 30, General MacArthur, strategic commander of the area, launched a simultaneous attack, on New Guinea and on New Georgia, as a setup and staging maneuver for the ultimate assault, that on Rabaul. The landing on New Georgia, led by Admiral William Halsey, proved particularly difficult, given the large Japanese garrison stationed there and the harsh climate and topography. Substantial reinforcements were needed before the region could be controlled, in August. One consequence of Cartwheel was a lesson in future strategy. By establishing a "step-by-step" approach to invasion, the Allies unwittingly gave the Japanese time to regroup and establish their next line of defense. The Allies then decided that a new strategy was to be deployed, that of leaving certain islands, or parts thereof, to "wither on the vine," rather than waste valuable time and manpower in fighting it out for marginal gains. A leapfrogging strategy was then employed by MacArthur, whereby he left in place smaller Japanese strongholds in order to concentrate on "bigger fish."
30 June 1943 Serrate operations - fighter interception by homing on to enemy transmissions; combined with airborne interception radar to give range indications - begin against German nightfighters
HyperWar: Royal Air Force 1939–1945: Volume I: The Fight at Odds [Appendix II] TRAINING COMMAND Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur M. Longmore, K.C.B., D.S.O., Date of Appointment.1st July 1939
On this day in 1942, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is brought to a standstill in the battle for control of North Africa. In June, the British had succeeded in driving Rommel into a defensive position in Libya. But Rommel repelled repeated air and tank attacks, delivering heavy losses to the armored strength of the British, and finally, using his panzer divisions, managed to force a British retreat-a retreat so rapid that a huge quantity of supplies was left behind. In fact, Rommel managed to push the British into Egypt using mostly captured vehicles. Rommel's Afrika Korps was now in Egypt, in El Alamein, only 60 miles west of the British naval base in Alexandria. The Axis powers smelled blood. The Italian troops that had preceded Rommel's German forces in North Africa, only to be beaten back by the British, then saved from complete defeat by the arrival of Rommel, were now back on the winning side, their dwindled numbers having fought alongside the Afrika Korps. Naturally, Benito Mussolini saw this as his opportunity to partake of the victors' spoils. And Hitler anticipated adding Egypt to his empire. But the Allies were not finished. Reinforced by American supplies, and reorganized and reinvigorated by British General Claude Auchinleck, British, Indian, South African, and New Zealand troops battled Rommel, and his by now exhausted men, to a standstill in Egypt. Auchinleck denied the Axis Egypt. Rommel was back on the defensive-a definite turning point in the war in North Africa.
Sunk by the American submarine USS Sturgeon (Lieutenant Commander Wright) about sixty-five miles west of Cape Bojidoru, Luzon, in the Philippines. She was heading for Japan from Rabaul, New Britain, carrying 1,035 Australian nationals including 845 army prisoners of war, the bulk of the 2/22 Battalion, Australian 8th Division (Lark Force). The 7,267 ton passenger ship had left Rabaul on the 22nd of June, unescorted and unmarked when at 0225 hrs on July 1st, was hit by two torpedoes from a four torpedo spread from the Sturgeon at a range of 4,000 yards. Developing a list to starboard, the ship sank stern first at 0240. Later reports indicated that 845 army personnel, 208 civilian P.O.W.s, including twenty missionaries, who had been living and working on New Britain when the Japanese came, 71 Japanese crew and 62 naval guards (a total of 1,186) made up the ships complement. Among the 208 civilian prisoners were the 36 crewmembers of the Swedish cargo ship Herstein which was bombed and set on fire while loading copra in Matupi Harbour. From the Allied contingent on board, there were no survivors. Lives lost amounted to 1,053. A week later, on the 6th, the rest of Lark Force (168 men) and some civilian nurses, were herded on board the Naruto Maru and nine days later, dirty and half starved, arrived safely at Yokohama. All survived the war. After the war, Japanese sources state that seventeen Japanese crew and guards had survived the sinking of the Montevideo Maru and reached the shores of Luzon Island. Their fate is uncertain, they have not been heard of since and it is presumed that they were attacked and killed by Philippine guerrillas.
