Ian Kershaw. The End: Germany 1944-45. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Decided to wait for the paperback edition when this first came out, a safe enough bet where Kershaw is concerned. Among other things, should be useful for placing Dresden in the wider context of what else was happening in Germany in these months. Marilyn Lake […]
The Observer reports that Japan now claims to have captured Mandalay, ‘second city and former capital of Burma (5). This seems not to have been confirmed by official British sources yet; however It was stated in authoritative circles in London yesterday that with Lashio already in enemy hands, it would not be worth while suffering
All the newspapers today carry news of the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in Salzburg; only the Daily Express leads with it. Its angle is that there is ‘STRONG evidence’ that the two dictators agreed that Italy would sent ‘a large part’ of its army to Russia, while Germany would send ‘thousands’ of its soldiers
This news has been coming for the last few days: Lashio has fallen to the Japanese. As the Daily Express reports, the town was ‘pounded by artillery and dive-bombers before the final assault’ (1): Then large numbers of tanks and armoured cars rumbled forward into the inferno as a battering ram for the enemy. General
Most newspapers in my sample today lead with the further grim news from Burma (the Japanese army has now reached the suburbs of Lashio) but The Times chooses to go with the latest Bomber Command raids on Kiel and, for the second night running, Trondheim, both the locations of key German warships (4): The heavier
The situation in Burma is getting worse, as the Daily Mirror (above, 1) and most other papers note in their lead stories. The whole length of the vital Lashio-Mandalay railway is in grave danger as five Japanese divisions, totalling 100,000 men, supported by panzers and bombers, are storming the southern edge of the Upper Burma
The Yorkshire Post, (above, 1), again leads with Rostock, which has been bombed by the RAF for the fourth consecutive night. The city ‘is a heap of smouldering ruins, crushed by nearly 800 tons of British bombs. Its population is fleeing in panic. Its war production has ceased’: PHOTOGRAPHS taken after the third night’s raid
Just at the moment, this war seems mainly to be an air war. The main news today is that Rostock has been bombed for the third night in a row. In addition Stirling bombers carried out a low-level raid on the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia, and six targets in northern France were were attacked by
The Observer‘s lead story (5) is about Japan’s continuing advance in Burma. It’s very hard to work out what exactly is going on based on the summary report: there are at least three fronts, their relation to each other is not stated, and the map provided is too small-scale to be of much use. The
Lots of interesting things in today’s papers about the campaign in Burma, the future of India, Anzac Day, and so on — but there’s also a lot on bombing, so I’m going to talk about that. The predominant theme is, as the Daily Mirror‘s front page headlines above claim, that Bomber Command is now delivering
