On this day during W.W. 2

Thanks Kreuzfeld. I thought it was today, but have done some work this morning and have not opened any books as yet!

Are you by any chance a native of either country?

Edited as I misspelt your name; apologies.

Yes, I am a native of norway. My grandfather was in the norwegian merchant fleet, and was in london during the blitz, one of the nights the building he was in collapsed, but the blast threw him under an iron table saving his life. He was dug out the next morning.

Should also add;

The german attack on norway would probably benefit the allies more than the axis. The norwegian merchant fleet was the 4th biggest in the world, with about 7% of the worlds merchant tonnage, and 18% of all the worlds oiltankers. The average age of the norwegian merchant fleet was lower than the other allies, and more of the ships where disel ships.

Norway contributed with more than 1000 merchant ships and 30000 sailors to the allied wareffort.

Thank you for that addition: wonder why Norway had such a big fleet.
Glad your grandfather survived too.

Norway had such a big fleet because norway always had such a big fleet. Shipping have been a big part of norwegian economy since the viking age, except for a dryspell in the late middle ages. Shipping is still one of the biggest parts of the norwegian economy, It is still quite big http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_marine_capacity_by_country

in 1940 whaling and shipping where basicly the only thing norwegians did economically, so there where alot of ships in norway that the british got (85% of them), while not much on the mainland for the germans,

The most valuable thing about the norwegian mainland at this point was that Narvik was the closest port to kiruna, a swedish mine that had and still have a HUGE metal production, one of the biggest productions in europe.

Thank you again. I knew about Sweden, but you have taught me much.
Those modern figures threw up a few surprises.

20th April is Hitler’s birthday(born in 1889).
The last live footage of him was taken today in 1945, as he surfaced from the Bunker, looking gaunt and unwell, to decorate some Hitler Youths with the Iron Cross.
He would be dead in 10 days and the war all but over.

For any of you who have not seen it, I can strongly recommend:Der Untergang(Downfall), with Bruno Ganz playing Hitler.

Good movie

April 23rd 1941: the Greek King George II fled Athens for the island of Crete as the Germans were threatening his capital.(They had invaded on the 6th April to help the Italians.) In May he had to leave again as the German Para Division attacked Crete. His home for the rest of the war would be Britain.

In 42 the Germans bombed historic Exeter, Devon, in the start of retaliatory raids on historic cities in England after the Allied bombing of beautiful Lubeck, Northern Germany.  These raids were known as the Baedeker Blitz, after the Guide book used by the Luftwaffe to pinpoint which targets to choose. Incendiary bombing did much damage the centre of Exeter, which would be attacked 16 times between 40-42. Bath, Norwich and york were targeted later in April and May. The raids cost Germany more in losses than they did the English.

28th April 1944: Operation Tiger.
The Allies were doing an exercise, practising for the landings in France when disaster struck. It was at Slapton Sands in Devon(3 miles from where my wife’s grandmother lives) when a mix up caused a friendly fire incident: a British ship was bombarding the shore to simulate a real war landing situation.  To compound matters, a handful of German E-Boats got close to the shore and caused more casualties: four of the landing craft were torpedoed, two of which sank. A total of 946 Americans died and the incident was hushed up at the time.
There is a Sherman and a tiny memorial on the beach now.

29th April 1945: Hitler married his longtime girlfriend. Eva Braun, in the Fuhrerbunker where they were now living.
He also named Grossadmiral Donitz as his successor. (Goering had been his successor, but he had angered Hitler just days before, so he changed his mind.)

Donitz had been head of the Navy since January 43, when he replaced Raeder.
During WW1 he had been on board the light Cruiser, Breslau, fighting the Russians in the Black Sea. The Breslau was later given to the Ottoman Empire and he decided to transfer to Submarines.
He ended WW1 as a Submarine commander, captured by the English when his ship was sunk.

@wittmann:

He also named Grossadmiral Donitz as his successor.

I once heard Dönitz described as the “second and last Führer of the Third Reich”, but in actual fact Hitler disassembled the centralized powers and titles he had held as Führer and gave only part of them to Dönitz.  A couple of months ago I tried to read Dönitz’s memoirs, but I gave up before getting to the end: the tone was naive and self-serving, as if Dönitz was trying to project the image of a correct, respectable, professional naval officer who had fought the war in a purely technical and non-political way.

I commend you for trying. I have read books and had to put them down, as the author bored me to tears.
I thought I remembered Donitz was a commited Nazi.

May 8, 1945 - VE day  8-)

Thanks 221B Baker Street.
Was in London(on a short holiday) and you see that date quite a lot if you go to WW2 museums. Even went to the Churchill War Rooms at Whitehall. 
I forgot May 8th in all the excirement!

May 9th 1941: the damaged U110, a type IX Sub, was forced to surface after being chased by 2 British Destroyers, Bulldog and Broadway after she sank two convoy ships. Despite the Submarine’s Captain thinking his ship would sink, it did not. It was boarded and the enigma machine and codes were captured. The Captain, Lemp,aware of the danger of having his ship captured with the secret machine and codes still intact, had dived into the Sea and was killed trying to correct his crew’s mistake.
Both the machine and codes were sent to Bletchley Park, where the information was used by British Intelligence Officers to break the  Reserve Hand Procedure, used when the Enigma Machine was broken or not available.
1400 messages were read by breaking this code, which also led to later breaking Enigma.

In the afternoon of May 9th, 1940, a Thursday like today, Hitler and a few members of his staff left the Reichskanzlei in Berlin by car and boarded a train at an inconspicuous site somewhere to the north of the city. The train drove north, and Hitler jokingly promised his secretary a fur coat. Many aboard assumed that a trip to recently invaded Norway had been planned.
However, as the night fell, the train turned west, to reach new headquarters in the Eifel mountains in the early hours of the 10th. And on it’s way there, it stopped at Celle near Hannover, where a phone call to Berlin was made. After a confirmation that auspicious weather was to be expected, the order was given at 9 PM to issue the code word “Danzig” to all Wehrmacht and SS units in the west. This was the signal that Fall Gelb, the attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and France, would start at daybreak.

Earlier that day, back in Berlin, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr informed his close friend Bert Sas, the Dutch military attache, that the orders had been given and unless they were revoked by 9:30 PM, the invasion would start tomorrow morning. Sas immediately informed his Belgian colleague, and then, contrary to his expectations, he managed to contact the Dutch authorities in the Hague by phone and tried to warn them of the imminent danger, but while the overall tension was high, they were not quite ready to believe him. Fall Gelb had been planned and postponed many times before, and each time Oster had warned Sas, and Sas had warned the Dutch government.

This time, he was right.