A British tank in Burma, 1945.
The southward drive by armored columns was supported by parachute troops who dropped between Rangoon and the coast and by British assault troops who poured ashore on both banks of the Rangoon River at a point twenty miles below the city of 400,000 in the largest amphibious operation in this war theatre.
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was believed to have concentrated troops above Rangoon, ready for an immediate strike eastward into Thailand, French Indo-China and Malaya, with its great naval base at Singapore. Some units chasing fleeing Japanese troops have been reported only a few miles from the Thailand border.
The reconquest of Burma—now all but completed after three years of some of the most difficult fighting the world has ever known—was across country so difficult that the entire Fourteenth Army was supplied by air. During the campaign entire divisions were transported by plane in a new technique of aerial warfare.
Recapture of Rangoon, which fell to the Japanese on the Sunday of May 8, 1942, cuts off all supplies for the disintegrated Japanese troops in lower Burma. Except for mopping up these hopelessly trapped pockets of resistance, the heartbreaking campaign is over.
The recapture of all Burma except for the thin sliver paralleling Thailand to the south and east, was almost entirely carried out during the past year.
FOE AT IMPHAL A YEAR AGO
A year ago the Japanese opened an offensive toward New Delhi and reached the Indian border at Imphal and Kohima, while other forces from the mountainous Arakan region drove on to Calcutta along the Bay of Bengal. Both drives were stopped and British, American and Chinese forces began pushing south.
The drive has been made almost entirely by the Fourteenth Army, with American and Chinese forces participating in the early stages to open up the Stil-well Road to China. The Fifteenth Indian Corps meanwhile killed or trapped the few thousand enemy remaining in the Arakan, and provided additional airdromes for the air-supplied army.
British officers here disclosed meanwhile that the Burma National Army is operating with the British Fourteenth in blocking escape routes and sniping and ambushing Japanese troop concentrations. The announcement was the first that loyal Burmese are openly fighting the Japanese.
MAY 4, 1945
Russians Find No Trace of Hitler In Berlin, Moscow Paper Reports
By Wireless to The New York Times.
MOSCOW, May 3—Soviet security troops and military police hunted hard through the wreckage of Berlin today for wanted war criminals and sought to check and double check the whereabouts of Adolf Hitler’s body, not yet by any means convinced that he, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and other members of the Nazi hierarchy actually had committed suicide.
The skeptical view prevailing in Soviet circles, who are determined to give these top enemies no chance to escape through trickery, was expressed by the well-known Pravda writer Nikolai Tikhonoff, who wrote that in the devastated occupied capital “there is no Hitler himself.”
Since Mr. Tikhonoff can have no special information on this subject that would not have been officially announced, it can be assumed that he means that no living Fuehrer dominates Berlin today. This he makes clear by promising that the riddle of Hitler’s final fate will be ferreted out.
“Whether he escaped to hell, to the devil’s paws or to the arms of some Fascist protectors, still he is no more,” the Soviet writer says. “We shall see what has really happened to him. And if he escaped, we shall find him, no matter where he is.”
STIMSON ACCEPTS DEATH STORY
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson today followed the lead of President Truman in expressing the opinion that Hitler is dead. Referring at his press conference to the execution of Benito Mussolini and the “reported death” of Hitler, he observed:
“Since information indicates that the Nazi leader has in fact died, both men have escaped trial as war criminals. But they both stand convicted in the minds of all peoples and in the annals of history as men with the blood of innocent millions on their hands.”
He was asked if he could amplify this comment by saying whether the evidence had convinced him beyond doubt that Hitler no longer is alive.
“I have no more evidence than has been given from general sources,” Mr. Stimson replied. “But that is my conclusion.”
JAPANESE SEND CONDOLENCES
Japan, troubled by faulty communications with her dying Axis partner in Europe, has decided to accept the news of Hitler’s death as certain, it was indicated when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo called at the residence of Nazi Ambassador Heinrich Stahmer to express the condolences of the Japanese Government.
The Japanese Domei Agency, in a series of transmissions recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, reported Togo’s visit and said Stahmer had issued a statement declaring that “the Fuehrer is dead, but his struggle continues.”
MAY 8, 1945
GERMANY SURRENDERS: NEW YORKERS MASSED UNDER SYMBOL OF LIBERTY
Thousands filling Times Square in spontaneous celebration yesterday
By FRANK S. ADAMS
New York City’s millions reacted in two sharply contrasting ways yesterday to the news of the unconditional surrender of the German armies. A large and noisy minority greeted it with the turbulent enthusiasm of New Year’s Eve and Election Night rolled into one. However, the great bulk of the city’s population responded with quiet thanksgiving that the war in Europe was won, tempered by the realization that a grim and bitter struggle still was ahead in the Pacific and the fact that the nation is still in mourning for its fallen President and Commander in Chief.
Times Square, the financial section and the garment district were thronged from mid-morning on with wildly jubilant celebrators who tooted horns, staged impromptu parades and filled the canyons between the skyscrapers with fluttering scraps of paper. Elsewhere in the metropolitan area, however, war plants continued to hum, schools, offices and factories carried on their normal activities, and residential areas were calmly joyful.
One factor that helped to dampen the celebration was the bewilderment of large segments of the population at the absence of an official proclamation to back up the news contained in flaring headlines and radio bulletins. With the premature rumor of ten days ago fresh in everyone’s mind, and millions still mindful of the false armistice of 1918, there was wide spread skepticism over the authenticity of the news.
By mid-afternoon loudspeakers were blaring into the ears of the exulting thousands in the amusement district the news that President Truman’s proclamation was being held up by the necessity of coordinating it with the announcements from London and Moscow, and that the formal celebration of the long-awaited V-E Day would be delayed until today. The news spread through these areas almost as rapidly as it did in the business centers of the city, but it brought a very different re action. Residents smiled their happiness, but they were too keenly aware of the bereavements that many families had suffered in three years of war, and of the dangers that millions of our fighting men must still face in fighting the Japanese, for any great display of ardor.
Suburban communities seemed to share this sentiment. In northern New Jersey a few large war plants closed, but elsewhere most of them kept on working, in response to the Government’s appeal stressing the urgent need of planes, guns and tanks in the Pacific. In New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island alike, schools and business establishments kept steadily at their tasks.
Thousands of men, women and children flocked to the churches and synagogues of the city for solemn prayers of thanksgiving at the news of the surrender. Many of the churches held special services, among them the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At the latter edifice two special services were held in the early afternoon, but others that had been planned for the remainder of the day were canceled when it was realized that V-E Day would not be proclaimed officially until today. Many churches announced they would re peat their special observances to day.
; The Associated Press flash at 9:35 A.M. had given the world its first news of the surrender. For six hours Times Square was closed to all vehicular traffic by a crowd that the police placed at 500,000 between noon and 1 P.M., but by 4:30 P.M. the police had cleared the streets sufficiently for street cars and buses to operate.
Jubilation in the other areas in which crowds gathered, such as the district centering about Wall and Broad Streets, the Borough Hall section of Brooklyn, Union, Madison and Herald Squares, and the garment manufacturing center in the West Thirties, followed an almost identical pattern. Along Fifth Avenue, on the other hand, the excitement never attained the crescendo that it did elsewhere.
NEWS SPREADS RAPIDLY
Only the usual handful of morning idlers was watching The New York Times bulletins on Times Tower when the electrifying news was posted there. Their outward response was not spectacular, but from mouth to mouth the news spread with astonishing speed. Meanwhile, from offices and loft buildings, thousands who had heard it on the radio were pouring into the streets and the crowds grew steadily larger until the police estimated that 500,000 were in the Times Square area.
A few blocks to the south, in the garment district, the enthusiasm reached an even more ecstatic level. From their loft windows towering many stories above the street, workers threw odds and ends of brightly colored materials into the breeze. Then they dropped their work and rushed pell-mell into the sunshine to help celebrate.
Outside the New York Stock Exchange, where trading was continued, the crowd grew so thick that by 10:20 A.M. the police were forced to shut off vehicular traffic along Wall Street from Broad Street to Broadway. They also closed Broad Street from Wall Street to Exchange Place. Extra police details were sent into the area to handle the congestion.
MAY 8, 1945
GERMANS CAPITULATE ON ALL FRONTS
American, Russian and French Generals Accept Surrender in Eisenhower Headquarters, a Reims School
By EDWARD KENNEDY
Associated Press Correspondent
REIMS, France, May 7—Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union at 2:41 A.M. French time today. [This was at 8:41 P.M.. Eastern Wartime Sunday.]
The surrender took place at a little red school-house that is the headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The surrender, which brought the war in Europe to a formal end after five years, eight months and six days of bloodshed and destruction, was signed for Germany by Col. Gen. Gustav Jodl. General Jodl is the new Chief of Staff of the German Army.
The surrender was signed for the Supreme Allied Command by Lieut. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff for General Eisenhower.
It was also signed by Gen. Ivan Susloparoff for the Soviet Union and by Gen. François Sevez for France.
[The official Allied announcement will be made at 9 o’clock Tuesday morning when President Truman will broadcast a statement and Prime Minister
Crowds celebrate Victory in Europe day in Times Square, New York, on May 7, 1945.
Churchill will issue a V-E Day proclamation. Gen. Charles de Gaulle also will address the French at the same time.]
General Eisenhower was not present at the signing, but immediately afterward General Jodl and his fellow delegate, Gen. Admiral Hans Georg Friedeburg, were received by the Supreme Commander.
GERMANS SAY THEY UNDERSTAND TERMS
They were asked sternly if they understood the surrender terms imposed upon Germany and if they would be carried out by Germany.
They answered Yes.
Germany, which began the war with a ruthless attack upon Poland, followed by successive aggressions and brutality in internment camps, surrendered with an appeal to the victors for mercy toward the German people and armed forces.
After having signed the full surrender, General Jodl said he wanted to speak and received leave to do so.
“With this signature,” he said in soft-spoken German, “the German people and armed forces are for better or worse delivered into the victors’ hands.
“In this war, which has lasted more than five years, both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world.”
MAY 8, 1945
OSWIECIM KILLINGS PLACED AT 4,000,000
Soviet Commission Reports Death Camp In Poland Was Founded by Himmler
By C. L. SULZBERGER
By Wireless to The New York Times.
MOSCOW, May 7—More than 4,000,000 persons were systematically slaughtered in a single German concentration camp—that at Oswiecim in Poland, near Cracow—from 1939 to 1944. The Germans thus accomplished with scientific efficiency the greatest incidence of mass murder in recorded history.
This slaughter exceeds in barbaric intention and method not only the greatest brutalities of such infamous conquerors as Genghis Khan but also surpasses even Germany’s own record in her previous prize exhibitions at Maidanek, Dachau and Buchenwald.
Such is the miserable tale made public today—on the eve of the official end of the European war—by the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary State Commission investigating the extermination center at Oswiecim. For some time various Russians have had a pretty good idea of the abysmal tale of Oswiecim, especially those now working on a Black Book of German infamy, but these are the first statistical data of the horrible camp’s record.
According to the Soviet commission, “more than 4,000,000 citizens” of the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and other countries, including the non-Allied lands of Hungary and Rumania, were exterminated in Oswiecim. The means used were “shooting, famine, poisoning and monstrous tortures.”
The report states that gas chambers, crematoria, surgical wards, laboratories and clinics were erected around Oswiecim to accomplish this mass-production monstrosity.
Such a report would seem incredible to American readers, except that now they have been “conditioned” by the horrors of Buchenwald, which already have been fully investigated.
According to the Soviet report, which included interviews with 2,819 liberated prisoners at Oswiecim, German professors and doctors conducted their experiments on healthy persons, including castration, sterilization of women, artificial infection with cancer, typhus and malaria germs, tests of the effects of poisons and the destruction of children by injections into the heart of carbolic acid or the simpler method of heaving them into furnaces.
The camp, it is charged, was organized by Heinrich Himmler, built in 1939 by his order and constructed in a huge series of buildings around the Oswiecim suburbs to house between 180,000 and 250,000 prisoners simultaneously.
The first crematorium was erected in 1941, but the next year, it is stated, Himmler inspected the camp and decided that “improvements” were necessary, so new furnaces were built by the German firm of Topf & Sons.
Public baths were installed for group cyanide poisoning, and because “the baths” output exceeded the crematoria’s capacity, deep pits were dug where excess bodies were burned over huge fires.
The report states that in 1943 the frugal Germans decided to sell the un-burned bones to the firm of Schterhm to be used for the production of super-phosphates, which was done, and that, in addition to almost 113 tons of crushed bones, loads of women’s hair were sold for industrial purposes.
Within twenty-four hours, each crematorium was able to consume more than 10,000 bodies, it is stated on the basis of information provided by Polish, Hungarian, French, Czechoslovak, Netherland, Yugoslav, Italian, Greek, Rumanian and Belgian survivors interviewed.
Still shot from a film recorded by Alezandra Woroncewa after his release from Oswiecim (Auschwitz) concentration camp in January 1945.
MAY 10, 1945
KEITEL IS DEFIANT AT BERLIN RITUAL
RUSSIA RATIFIES THE UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER OF GERMANY IN BERLIN
By JOSEPH W. GRIGG Jr.
United Press War Correspondent For the Combined Allied Press
MARSHAL ZHUKOF
F’S HEADQUARTERS, Berlin, May 9—The final seal was set on the Wehrmacht’s defeat and humiliation before the world when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, titular head of the once proud Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, was brought to Marshal Gregory K. Zhukoff’s headquarters in the devastated German capital early this morning to sign the formal ratification of Germany’s unconditional surrender.
As one of the first two American newspaper men officially permitted to go to Berlin since the Russian occupation, I witnessed the signature in the large whitewashed hall of an army technical school in the eastern residential suburb of Karlshorst, now used by Marshal Zhukoff as his headquarters.
The document was more or less identical in terms with that signed at Reims Monday morning, with certain additions requested by the Russians defining more closely the details of the surrender of German troops and equipment.
KEITEL ARROGRANT TO END
On the Allied side it was signed by Marshal Zhukoff for the Russians and by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur W. Tedder on behalf of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was witnessed by Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces, and Gen. Jean de Lattre, commander of the First French Army. On the German side, Keitel, as Oberkommando der Wehrmaeht, signed together with Gen. Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, Commander in Chief of the German Navy, and Col. Gen. Paul Stumpff, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 144
