This Day in WWII 04-18-1940 - 1945

[Donster]

1940: British submarine Starlet sunk off Norway.

1940: Germans advance further north of Oslo. More British troops are landed at Aandalesnes in Norway with the plan of co-operating with the British and French troops already at Namsos to surround and then retake Trondheim. However, the Norwegian commander, General Ruge persuaded the Aandalesnes force, to move south in order to give support to his troops still holding out at Lillehammer.

1941: Britain warns that if Cairo is bombed, then the RAF will attack Rome.

1941: The German 12th Army forces a crossing of the river Aliakmon between the Greek First Army and the British forces. Athens is placed under martial law. Greek Prime Minister, Alexandros Korizis commits suicide.

1942: The entire US eastern seaboard is ordered to black-out its lights at night, in an attempt to reduce the success of the U-boats at night.

1942: Colonel James H. Doolittle leads 16 US Army B25 bombers from the carrier Hornet in first ever air raid on Japan. They took of from the carrier Hornet, about 750 miles east of Tokyo. Escort fighters were provided by the carrier Enterprise. Bombs were dropped on Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya and Yokosuka. Only one aircraft was damaged during the raid, although all 16 were lost on crash landings in China. The material damage inflicted by the raid was minimal, although the damage to Japanese prestige was considerable and gave the allies a boost when their fortunes in the Pacific were at a low ebb.

1942: The Headquarters of the southwest Pacific theatre are established in Melbourne.

1943: The German 17th Army begins its attacks to eliminate the Russian beachhead at Novorossiysk, but fails and gives up on the 23rd April.

1943: U.S. code breakers pinpoint the location of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto flying in a Japanese bomber near Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Eighteen P-38 fighters then locate and shoot down Yamamoto.

Martha O'Driscoll

1944: The Foreign Office bans all coded messages from foreign embassies and says that diplomatic bags are to be censored. Only the fighting allies are to be excluded from the ban.

1944: The Russians take Balaclava.

1944: The first reinforcements for the British garrison at Kohima begin to arrive. Japanese forces launch a new offensive in central China.

1945: The Ruhr pocket is finally annihilated, with 317,000 Germans being captured, including 29 generals. The U.S. Ninth Army takes Magdeburg. The U.S. First Army enters Düsseldorf. General De Lattre’s French troops link up at Freudenstadt behind the Black Forest. The British Second Army captures Ülzen and Lüneburg. The US Third Army captures Nürnberg advancing units across the German/Czechoslovakian frontier.

1945: Between Stettin and Schwedt the 2nd Belorussian front breaks through the Oder defenses, pressuring Army Group Weichsel even more. The 1st Ukrainian Front captures Forst on the Neisse river. North of Frankfurt, while the 1st Belorussian Front continues its attack to take the Seelow Heights, gradually wearing down the vastly outnumbered German defenders.

1945: The British Fourteenth Army in central Burma captures the Chaulk oil centre on the Irrawaddy.

1945: Famed American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, 44, was killed by Japanese gunfire on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, off Okinawa.

[Canuck]

[Stans]

[Cyclone]

[The Dude]

Great stuff, Donnie.

The VMF-124 boys will have to fly a mission in honor of ol' Doolittle and company

Martha O'Driscoll, eh? Never even heard of her.

[Donster]

Martha O'Driscoll, eh? Never even heard of her.

Martha O'Driscoll filmography