What happened on your birthday in WW2?

wow that’s right battle of the bulge. I remembered pearl harbor day but … hey Happy Birthday!

Of course mine is a great day:

April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for one day.  Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building.

There was one other reference which is less well known:

April 30, 1943: The submarine HMS Seraph surfaces in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain to deposit a dead man planted with false invasion plans and dressed as a British military intelligence officer.  (G40 Editor’s note: the man was probably alive until Churchill realized that a sub alone does not stop the Italian Mediterranean NO…  :lol: )

@DizzKneeLand33:

(G40 Editor’s note: the man was probably alive until Churchill realized that a sub alone does not stop the Italian Mediterranean NO…  :lol: )

All kidding aside, the corpse actually had been dead for a few weeks, most of which time it had spent in a London morgue’s refrigeration facility until the deception operation was ready to go.  The body belonged to a man called, I believe, Glendawr Michael, a homeless man who had died from accidentally or deliberately ingesting a form of rat poison. Naval Intelligence officer Owen Montague (who worked down the hall from the future James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming) convinced a coroner to discretely release the body to him for unspecified national security purposes.  The corpse was given false identity papers, and fabricated letters suggesting that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily were planted on him.  The Germans fell for it.  They didn’t leave Sicily totally undefended (and indeed Montague wasn’t aiming for them to go that far), but they did thin their defenses there somewhat to reinforce Greece.

An odd footnote to this story is that Montague’s brother (whose name I forget) was a spy working in wartime Britain for Soviet Intelligence.  Montague never suspected it then or at any later point in his life, but during the war MI6 (unbeknownst to Montague) had its suspicions about his brother (who made no secret of his Communist sympathies) and was very nervous about the fact that a possible Soviet agent was closely related to a naval intelligence officer who was authorized to view the highly classified ULTRA decrypts.  It was only much later, when the VENONA transcripts came into the light, that Montague’s brother was exposed as a spy who’d worked for the Soviets.

http://ww2db.com/event/timeline/

Jan 28 1940

• U-34 sinks Greek freighter Eleni Stathatou off the French coast

• U-44 sinks Greek freighter Flora off the Portugese coast

• Soviet forces continue shelling of Finnish forts along the Mannerheim line

• Finnish forces eliminate the Soviets trapped in the Pieni-Kelivaara pocket

• Chinese troops captured Lucheng, Shanxi Province

• Japanese 26th Division attacked Wuyuan, Suiyuan Province

Jan 28 1941

• HMS Naiad spots cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, prompting the Germans to use the Denmark Strait instead of the Iceland-Faroe Islands Passage for the breakout commencing Operation Berlin

• Italian submarine Luigi Torelli sinks British submarine Urla off the Irish coast.

• Italian artillery at Wadi Derna in Libya continues to pin down Australian 6th Division

• B-10 medium bombers of the Royal Thai Air Force bomb Sisophon in French Indochina. It is the last offensive action of the Franco-Thai War. A Japanese mediated cease fire between Thailand and Vichy is signed three days later.

Jan 28 1942

• Japanese troops land at Pemangkat, Dutch Borneo.

• Japanese troops occupy Rossel Island off southwestern New Guinea.

• Japanese troops outflank and wipe out Indian 22nd Brigade at Layang Layang, British Malaya.

• US B-17 Bombers stationed in Java bomb Kuala Lumpur and Japanese positions on Celebes.

• Münster, Germany is bombed for the first time by RAF Bomber Command.

• British fighter ace Robert Roland Stanford Tuck (27 kills) is shot down and taken prisoner in Germany

• British submarine HMS Thorn sinks Italian tanker Ninuccia off the Yugoslav coast.

• Indian troops destroy port facilities at Benghazi, Libya as German forces approach.

• After gaining 60 miles, the Soviet offensive under Timoshenko in Ukraine begins to slow.

Jan 28, 1943

• Germany finally mobilizes it’s work force for total war, requiring registration of men aged 16 to 65 and women aged 17 to 50.

• The German forces in Stalingrad, Russia are divided into three pockets by Soviet attacks.

Jan 28, 1944

• In an effort to stop Spain from supporting Germany on the Russian Front, the US and Britain announce an oil embargo.

• Several German divisions are cut off and surrounded near Cherkassy, Ukraine.

• The RAF raids Berlin with 677 aircraft, losing 46.

• German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring orders a counterattack against the Allied beachhead at Anzio, Italy.

• Allied convoy JW-56A arrives at Arkhangelsk, Russia.

Jan 28, 1945

• The Ardennes bulge is finally pushed back to its original lines, thus ending the Battle of the Bulge.

• Soviet troops capture Katowice, Poland.

• Anglo-Indian troops capture Pauk, Burma

• Submarines USS Spadefish and USS Pompon attack a Japanese convoy in the southern Yellow Sea, sinking two ships.

@CWO:

@DizzKneeLand33:

(G40 Editor’s note: the man was probably alive until Churchill realized that a sub alone does not stop the Italian Mediterranean NO… Â :lol: )

All kidding aside, the corpse actually had been dead for a few weeks, most of which time it had spent in a London morgue’s refrigeration facility until the deception operation was ready to go.  The body belonged to a man called, I believe, Glendawr Michael, a homeless man who had died from accidentally or deliberately ingesting a form of rat poison. Naval Intelligence officer Owen Montague (who worked down the hall from the future James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming) convinced a coroner to discretely release the body to him for unspecified national security purposes.  The corpse was given false identity papers, and fabricated letters suggesting that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily were planted on him.  The Germans fell for it.  They didn’t leave Sicily totally undefended (and indeed Montague wasn’t aiming for them to go that far), but they did thin their defenses there somewhat to reinforce Greece.

An odd footnote to this story is that Montague’s brother (whose name I forget) was a spy working in wartime Britain for Soviet Intelligence.  Montague never suspected it then or at any later point in his life, but during the war MI6 (unbeknownst to Montague) had its suspicions about his brother (who made no secret of his Communist sympathies) and was very nervous about the fact that a possible Soviet agent was closely related to a naval intelligence officer who was authorized to view the highly classified ULTRA decrypts.  It was only much later, when the VENONA transcripts came into the light, that Montague’s brother was exposed as a spy who’d worked for the Soviets.

Good stuff CWO  Never knew about the Fleming and commie angle

Aretaku you are a fountain of information:)

Hadn’t heard of half that stuff. Almost said Happy Birthday but it’s not the 28th:)

May 18- German withdrawal from Monte Cassino.