As presented to the King, the alternative to defeat left little of his already shriveled empire and meant the abandonment of more than half of his country. His refusal was emphatic: the nation stood or fell, but it did one or the other together “despite the lacerations the nation has suffered” at the hands of the Fascist party.
The King then “accepted” the resignations of the Fascist government.
JULY 26, 1943
Biggest RAF-U.S. Raids on Reich Blast Hamburg, Hit Baltic Cities
By The United Press.
LONDON, July 26—United States heavy bombers struck deep and hard into Germany by daylight yesterday, hammering aircraft factories at the Baltic port of Warnemuende and showering hundreds of high explosives into the smoking ruins of Hamburg, gutted by the British Royal Air Force’s night bombers twelve hours earlier in the greatest bombing assault of the war.
At the same time, other American heavies struck in force at the great German shipyards in Kiel and raided the Baltic industrial center of Wustrow, twenty-five miles west of Rostock.
The attack marked the biggest around-the-clock aerial assaults yet made by the American-British bombing teams. The raid on Warnemuende, seaport for the big manufacturing center of Rostock, was the deepest penetration of Germany yet made by the United States Eighth Air Force.
The RAF’s night bombers in fifty blazing minutes blasted Hamburg with 2,300 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs, a far greater weight of bombs than ever before had been dropped in a single operation. [The British Air Ministry gives its figures in tons of 2,240 pounds; at 2,000 pounds to the ton, the RAF blasted Hamburg with 2,576 tons of bombs.]
RAF heavy bombers returned to the assault on Germany during last night, British officials reported early today. Channel coast watchers reported that a ninety-minute procession of heavy bombers flew out of Britain toward occupied Europe just after midnight.
Large formations of American Flying Fortresses staged the follow-up daylight raid on Hamburg, raining hundreds of 500-pound bombs in mid-afternoon through great clouds of smoke rising thousands of feet from the fires started by the RAF armada.
Nazi fighters swarmed up to attack the American raiders before they completed their crossing of the North Sea en route to the targets, and German ground batteries in every town on their route threw up barrages of anti-aircraft fire and smoke screens.
Returning American crewmen reported that as many as 300 Nazi fighters intercepted their formations as the German defenders, apparently angered and shaken by the fury of the RAF’s Saturday night attack, strove desperately to prevent further damage to the vital port of Hamburg.
HAMBURG RAIDS COORDINATED
Brig. Gen. Frederick L. Anderson, chief of the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command, described the day’s operations as the biggest ever undertaken by the American bombing fleets. The Hamburg assault, he said, was “coordination with the RAF, both in the planning and execution.”
The four-pronged American heavy bomber raids were made at a cost of nine-teen planes missing. The RAF over Saturday night, operating in what the Air Ministry, called “very great strength” [an Associated Press account from London cited an estimate of 1,000 British planes used], lost twelve bombers. Paced by the Flying Fortresses’ major raids, medium bombers of the Eighth Air Force and RAF bombers and fighters delivered many other blows at the Nazis in the occupied Low Countries and France.
The American medium bombers pounded factories near Ghent, Belgium, returning without loss. Escorted Mitchells of the RAF wrecked a Fokker aircraft factory at Amsterdam, while American Thunderbolts and Allied fighters swept over France and Belgium. Four Nazi fighters were destroyed.
Typhoon bombers attacked the enemy airfield at Woensdrecht, north of Antwerp. Boston bombers hit the Schipol airfield near Amsterdam.
FORTRESS GUNNERS DO JOB
The Flying Fortress gunners were credited with shooting down a “large number” of the Nazi fighters.
Official reports on the series of American heavy raids stated that bomb bursts were observed flush on the targets of Hamburg, Kiel, Warnemuende and Wurtow, with the weight of the American attack apparently centered on Hamburg.
In the Saturday night blow, far exceeding history’s previous heaviest air attack, the RAF dropped an average of nearly fifty-two tons of explosives and incendiaries every minute on Hamburg harbor and its shipbuilding yards and vital industrial plants, smashing ground defenses and scattering them.
The Allied air offensive against the Nazis in Western Europe was in high gear again. It was resumed after eight days of bad weather when large formations of American Flying Fortresses attacked U-boat installations at Trondheim and an aluminum and magnesium plant at Heroya, Norway, by daylight Saturday.
The Air Ministry announced that the RAF’s Hamburg assault began at 1 A.M. yesterday and soon afterward “dense black smoke rose four miles into the air and there were many reports of violent explosions.”
Fierce, fast-spreading fires roared through the city, illuminating the inky sky with a brilliant yellow glow.
One flier, who had participated in the last seven raids on the Ruhr, said the Nazis, ground defenses at Hamburg were quickly swamped. The raid set a record for concentration as well as for weight. In attacks on Dortmund, Muenster, Bochum and Duesseldorf, the RAF had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs in a little more than an hour.
Hamburg in ruins after being heavily bombed by the RAF in July, 1943.
JULY 26, 1943
PRESIDENT PLEDGES AID TO SAVE JEWS
President Roosevelt, in a message read last night to the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, promised that this Government would not cease its efforts to save those who could be saved.
This message and another from Secretary of State Cordell Hull, with which the President concurred, were read at the closing session of the conference in the Hotel Commodore. Mr. Hull said the final defeat of Hitler and the rooting out of the Nazi system were the only complete answer to the problem of saving the 4,000,000 Jews in Europe.
Former President Herbert Hoover, speaking by telephone from San Francisco, suggested development of the uplands of Central Africa as refuges for the oppressed minorities of the Axis-dominated countries.
Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, at the afternoon session, urged the United States and its Allies to serve notice on the Axis that all persons responsible for the deaths of Jews or non-Jews would be tried for murder. Meanwhile there would be practical steps taken for re-settling those who desired to emigrate from Europe, he said.
THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
The message from President Roosevelt, addressed to Dr. Max Lerner, read:
“In reply to your telegram of July 15, 1943, asking a message to the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, I am glad to transmit a message from the Hon. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, which has my full concurrence. You are aware of the interest of this Government in the terrible condition of the European Jews and of our repeated endeavors to save those who could be saved. These endeavors will not cease until Nazi power is forever crushed.”
Mr. Hull’s message read: “The rescue of the Jewish people, of course, and of other peoples likewise marked for slaughter by Nazi savagery, is under constant examination by the State Department, and any suggestion calculated to that end will be gladly considered. An inter governmental agency has been created designed to deal with these problems. You will readily realize that no measure is practicable unless it is consistent with the destruction of Nazi tyranny; and that the final defeat of Hitler and the rooting out of the Nazi system is the only complete answer. This Government in cooperation with the British Government has agreed upon those measures which have been found to be practicable under war conditions and steps are now being taken to put them into effect.”
The messages were addressed to Dr. Lerner in his capacity as chairman of the panel on international relations.
GREAT PROBLEM, SAYS HOOVER
Mr. Hoover de
clared that to find relief for the Jews in Europe was one of the great human problems and that it required temporary and long-view measures.
“There should be more systematic temporary measures,” he said. “There are groups of Jews who have escaped into the neutral countries of Europe. They and any other refugees from the persecution of fascism should be assured of support by the United Nations. This step should go further. Definite refugee stations should be arranged in these neutral countries for those who may escape. But these measures should be accompanied by arrangements to steadily transfer them from these refugee stations in neutral countries to other quarters. Possibly the release of greater numbers of refugees could be secured from the Nazi countries by European neutrals.”
He said he had been urging for more than two years systematic food relief for the starving in the occupied countries. Referring to the aid given to Greece he asked: “Does not this experience warrant its extension to other occupied countries? It would save the lives of thousands of Jews.”
THE LONG-RANGE VIEW
The long-view solution, he said, resolves itself into two phases—where to move these people so as to give them permanent security and how to establish them there.
“We must accept the fact that the older and more fully settled countries have no longer any land and opportunity to absorb the migration of the oppressed,” he said. “Most Jews recognize that it is not in their interest to force such an issue. Palestine could take more of them. But after all, Palestine would absorb only a part of the three or four millions whom this conference has been discussing as needing relief. That could be accomplished only by moving the Arab population to some other quarter. These are problems impossible to settle during the war.
“But I am one of those who do not believe in half measures. And I believe in realism in physical problems.
“The world today needs an outlet for the persecuted of all lands and all faiths, not Jew alone. There should be some place where they may build a new civilization, as they did on this continent during the last century. The newest continent, from the point of view of development, is Africa. It is as yet comparatively unsettled and underdeveloped.
“Particularly in the uplands of Central Africa. Large areas of this upland are suitable for a white civilization. They are rich in material resources. But if we are to make use of them, there must be vast preparation. Men, women and children today cannot be dumped into new lands. There must be definitely organized advance preparation of housing, transportation, industrial establishments and agriculture on a huge scale. Many of these great African areas are mandates established from the last war, in trust for all the world. Such an area in Africa could be considered sentimentally an annex to Palestine.
“At least the time has arrived when we should demand that a real solution be found, and further that the United Nations undertake to finance and manage a real solution as part of the war. And that the enemy countries after the war be required to restore the property of these persecuted peoples and help fiancially their new settlements.
“After all, it is a great human problem that ranks with the other human problems we must meet as part of the reconstruction of the world.”
MAYOR URGES UNITED STATES TO ACT
The Mayor, in proposing that the United Nations serve notice that those responsible for the slaughter of the Jews would be held strictly accountable, said:
“With regard to this action and other actions which might be taken, I have to point out that our own Government cannot urge other nations to take the initiative before it takes action of its own.
“I refer here also to plans of emigration and colonization which have been put forward. We cannot tell others to take in the doomed while we keep our own doors closed. While we consider emigration and colonization, however, we must realize that taking the Jews and other minorities out of terrorist-ruled lands is not really the solution. The rights of the Jews and other minorities must be made safe in every country in the world. Therefore I can tell the Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe that what it is striving for is an important part of what the United Nations are fighting for.”
Francis B. MacMahon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and president of the Catholic Association for International Peace, characterized the plight of the Jewish people in Europe under Hitler as “the most terrible single tragedy of the present war.” “Passive acquiescence will make us moral participants in the crime of the Nazis,” he said.
Professor MacMahon said that Pope Pius XII had sought in many ways to save the Jews and that the full story could not be told today about the action of the Vatican. “It will be revealed when Germany is conquered,” he added.
Sigrid Undset, author, after denouncing anti-Semitism, said:
“It is the right of the Jewish nation to get the opportunity to defend itself in the future from a national stronghold, as an independent nation, in possession of all the organs of a national life of its own,” she added.
The conference adopted resolutions regarding ways to rescue the Jews of Europe and post-war aid based on previous findings by its various panels.
Chapter 16
“RUSSIA STILL ASKS FOR SECOND FRONT”
August–September 1943
The popular interest in the Italian campaign continued to dwarf all other news. American and British forces were winning there while news from the Russian Front and the Pacific was patchy and unclear. On August 17 the conquest of Sicily was over, though one-third of Axis forces managed to escape across the Straits of Messina before the Allied trap could be closed. There were around 20,000 Allied casualties while the Axis lost 160,000, most of them Italian soldiers only too willing to be captured. The Allies pursued what seemed to be a beaten enemy onto mainland Italy, their first steps on European soil. The new government in Rome, led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, kept fighting out of fear of what the Germans might do if Italy surrendered. Within weeks of Mussolini’s fall in late July, the number of German divisions in Italy increased from six to eighteen. Continuous bombing forced Badoglio’s hand and on September 3 an armistice was signed.
Montgomery began to move his army to Calabria and on September 9, the day after the armistice was formally announced, General Mark Clark led a combined Anglo-American force to storm the beaches at Salerno, in the Bay of Naples. The landing was strongly opposed by a German Army now occupying its former ally’s territory. Mussolini was rescued from prison by a unit of German commandos and an Italian social republic was declared at the northern Italian city of Salò, establishing what The Times called a “New Kind of Regime.” The fight for Salerno was the toughest so far, but by September 20 the German counterattack had been repulsed. The German Army retreated to a line north of Naples, after first wrecking the port. The city was liberated on October 1.
The invasion of Italy, even more than the invasion of North Africa, posed complicated challenges for American diplomacy. “It was a test,” wrote Times correspondent Harold Callender, “of our ability to comprehend as well as to liberate Europe.” From Washington it was difficult to grasp European realities. The long arguments about whether to support de Gaulle or Giraud continued to take up column inches in The Times. On August 27 Roosevelt finally made a halfhearted gesture by agreeing to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation, dominated by de Gaulle, as representative of French overseas territory, but not as a potential government for France. The situation in Italy was also complex, since Badoglio was a former supporter of Fascism and the king, Victor Emanuel III, was widely unpopular. No commitments were made this time to the conquered regime, but with Rome still in German hands it was hard to come up with an alternative.
The Times took a strong stand on the need to ensure that America would play its part in restructuring world politics after the war. In an editorial on September 14 The Times reminded readers that “this time the United States intends to help enforce a world peace when it is won.” This was easier said than done, and there was a
long road ahead before peace could be certain. Stalin in Moscow repeated his demands for a second front in Europe to take the pressure off Russian armies. The Soviet leadership regarded the Italian campaign as a sideshow, as did many Americans. By this time the Red Army had consolidated its victory in the summer at Kursk and pushed the German Army back on every front. Smolensk was liberated on September 25 and bridgeheads were made over the Dnieper River toward the city of Kiev. On September 26 The Times ran another article by the famous Soviet correspondent, Ilya Ehrenburg, who had popularized the propaganda of hate against the Fascist enemy in 1942 and 1943. In “Hate Marches with the Red Army” Ehrenburg explained that a war like this “plows up men’s souls.”
AUGUST 2, 1943
PLOESTI SMASHED
300 Tons Rain On Major Gasoline Source of Reich Air Force
RAID MADE AT LOW LEVEL
Delayed-Action Bombs Enable 2,000 Fliers to Get Away, Leaving Great Fires
By A. C. SEDGWICK
By Cable to The New York Times.
CAIRO, Egypt, Aug. 1—A day-light air attack that “may materially affect the course of the war” smashed the oil refineries and dependent installations at Ploesti, Rumania, where fully one-third of the Axis’ petroleum supplies for use in aircraft, tanks, transport vehicles, submarines and surface hips is believed to originate.
[The area produces 90 per cent of the German Air Force’s gasoline, according to The United Press. The distance flown by its attackers was believed to have set a record for aerial warfare.]
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 96