U.S.President Franklin D. Roosevelt reported to Congress on the Yalta Conference. He acknowledged his paralytic illness in public when he opened his speech by saying, "I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs."[1]
Iran declared war on Japan retroactive to the previous day.[2]
The German XXIV (24th) Panzer Corp launched a counteroffensive on the Eastern Front around Lauban.[3]
The Germans began Operation Gisela, an aerial intruder operation.
Finland declared war on Germany retroactive to September 15, 1944.[2]
In the Pawłokoma massacre, a few hundred Ukrainians were murdered by Poles in the village of Pawłokoma in what was believed to be an act of retaliation for an earlier alleged murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Died:Aleksandra Samusenko, 22 or 23, Soviet tank commander (crushed under a tank in the dark)
U.S. warplanes began a 48-hour firebombing of Tokyo that destroyed almost 16 square miles in and around the city and killed between 80,000 and 130,000 civilians.[13]
Italian Fascist soldiers carried out the Salussola massacre, executing 20 Italian Partisans.
Benito Mussolini sent a priest to Switzerland to make a proposal to a Vatican envoy that Italy and Germany join with the Allies to defeat Soviet communism. The proposal was not treated seriously.[12]
U.S. Congress passed the McCarran–Ferguson Act, exempting the business of insurance from most federal regulation.
Adolf Hitler paid his final visit to the front when he traveled to Bad Freienwalde on the Oder. In a meeting at the Schloss Freienwalde with 9th Army commander Theodor Busse, Hitler implored his officers to hold back the Russians long enough until his new weapons were ready, but he did not disclose what the new weapon was.[15][19]
German submarine U-682 was destroyed at Hamburg in an American air raid.
Santa Fe riot: Four internees at a Japanese internment camp near Santa Fe, New Mexico were seriously wounded after a scuffle broke out between internees and Border Patrol agents guarding the facility that resulted in the use of tear gas and batons.
Benito Mussolini escaped injury when an Allied fighter plane strafed his convoy of cars near Lake Garda.[12]
German submarine U-260 struck a mine and was scuttled south of Ireland.
Died:Friedrich Fromm, 56, German army officer (executed by the Nazis by firing squad for failing to act against the 20 July bomb plot)
EC Comics published its first comic book, the concluding half of a biography of Jesus called Picture Stories from the Bible. The first issue of the series had been published by DC Comics.[21][22]
German submarine U-367 struck a mine and sank northeast of Danzig.
President Roosevelt said at a news conference that as a matter of decency, Americans would have to tighten their belts so food could be shipped to war-ravaged countries to keep people from starving.[23]
The Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen collapsed and killed 25 American engineers, although the First U.S. Army had already constructed other crossings.[11][25]
The Kriegsmarine completed the evacuation of 75,000 civilians and soldiers from the Kolberg pocket overnight.[25]
An air battle was fought in the skies over Berlin when 1,329 Allied bombers and 700 long-range fighters were met by the Luftwaffe using the new Me 262s and air-to-air rockets. The U.S. Eighth Air Force lost six Mustangs and 13 bombers while the Luftwaffe only lost two planes in return despite being outnumbered 32 to 1. However, the Allies still dropped 3,000 tons of bombs in the heaviest daylight raid on Berlin of the war.[7][26]
The Battle of the Ligurian Sea was fought between British and German naval forces in the Gulf of Genoa. The Germans lost two torpedo boats and had a destroyer damaged while the British took light damage to one destroyer in return.
The aircraft carrier USS Franklin was bombed and heavily damaged off the Japanese mainland by Japanese aircraft, killing more than 800 crew.
Hitler issued the Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of German infrastructure to prevent their use by Allied forces. Albert Speer and the army chiefs strongly resisted this and conspired to delay the order's implementation.[15]
All remaining U-boats in the Baltic Sea were withdrawn and transferred to the west.[27]
The Battle of Bacsil Ridge was fought between Japanese and Filipino forces, resulting in Filipino victory.
The Soviet Union notified Turkey that their non-aggression pact signed in 1925 would not be renewed after it expired in November.[27] Turkey responded by rejecting Soviet demands for territorial concessions and a revision of the Montreux Convention.[28]
Australian forces carried out Operation Platypus, in which troops from Z Special Unit were inserted into the Balikpapan area of Borneo to gather information and organize locals for resistance against the Japanese.
The Japanese deployed the first Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka suicide aircraft, slung under 16 Betty bombers that were part of a group sent to attack the American fleet off Okinawa. The flight was a disaster for the Japanese when the group was intercepted by American fighters a full 60 miles (97 km) from the American task force, and all the bombers were shot down. American pilots noted that the Bettys were flying unusually slow and carrying an unusual payload, but the significance of this was not realized at the time.[30]
British aircraft executed Operation Carthage, an air raid on Copenhagen, Denmark. The Danish headquarters of the Gestapo was destroyed but a nearby boarding school was also hit and the raid caused a total of 125 civilian deaths.
As part of Operation Plunder, American, British and Canadian troops carried out Operation Varsity, an airborne drop around Wesel, Germany.
It was reported from Cairo that archaeologists had located the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis.[31]
Billboard magazine revised its system for tabulating a chart of the leading songs in the United States with the creation of a new composite chart called the Honor Roll of Hits, combining best-selling retail records, records most played on the air and the most played jukebox records. "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" by Johnny Mercer was the first #1 of this new chart, which would exist until being supplanted by the creation of the Hot 100 in 1958.
Winston Churchill, accompanied by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, briefly crossed the Rhine near Wesel in an Allied landing craft, symbolizing the crossing of the top British leader over the traditional frontier of Germany that no foreign army had crossed since the age of Napoleon. The excursion, which ventured as far as a bridge still under enemy fire, was quite dangerous and General Eisenhower later noted that if he had been there he never would have allowed Churchill to cross the river at that time.[32]
The Battle of Iwo Jima ended in American victory. Japanese general Tadamichi Kuribayashi is believed to have died on or around this date, probably killed in action.
Died:David Lloyd George, 82, British Liberal politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922; Tadamichi Kuribayashi, 53, Japanese general (believed to have been killed in action on this date on Iwo Jima although his body was never identified); Boris Shaposhnikov, 62, Soviet military commander
The Germans fired their last V-2 rockets from their only remaining launch site in the Netherlands. Almost 200 civilians in England and Belgium were killed in this final attack.[33]
The Soviet 3rd Belorussian Front captured the medieval castle of Balga and completed the destruction of the German 4th Army except for those who had managed to evacuate.[34]
Hitler sacked Heinz Guderian as Chief of the OKH General Staff, the last battlefield commander from the early days of the war still active. Guderian was replaced with Hans Krebs.
Died:Élise Rivet, 55, Algerian-born nun (killed in Ravensbrück concentration camp); Maurice Rose, 45, U.S. Army general (killed in action near Paderborn, Germany)
^ abChronology and Index of the Second World War, 1938–1945. Research Publications. 1990. p. 333. ISBN978-0-88736-568-3.
^"Die Kinder vom Kamper See" [The children from Lake Kamper]. Deutsche Welle (in German). 7 March 2012. Archived from the original on 15 February 2022. Retrieved 9 February 2024.
^ abcd"1945". MusicAndHistory.com. Archived from the original on September 23, 2013. Retrieved March 28, 2016.
