The USS Spadefish sank the Japanese fleet aircraft carrier Shin’yō in 1944. Of the carrier’s crew of over 1,200, only 70 survived.
By Phil Kohn. Dedicated to the memory of his father, GM3 Walter Kohn, U.S. Navy Armed Guard, USNR, and all men and women who have answered the country’s call in time of need. Phil can be contacted at ww2remembered@yahoo.com.
The Germans give up Tirana, Albania, on November 17, 1944; the capital is immediately occupied by Albanian partisans aligned with the Allies. In the China Sea, the submarine USS Spadefish sinks the Japanese fleet aircraft carrier Shin’yō. Of the carrier’s crew of over 1,200, only 70 survive. In Belgium, Allied representatives meet with members of the government and agree to try to persuade Belgian resistance members to lay down their arms.
The German hospital ship HS Tübingen is sunk on November 18 by two RAF Bristol Beaufighter maritime-strike aircraft in the Adriatic Sea, some three miles south of Cap Premantura Pula, Croatia. Fortunately, no wounded are aboard. The British government expresses its regrets to German authorities about the incident. In Belgium, resistance leaders agree to surrender their arms. British troops capture Jülich, Germany, 25 miles west of Cologne.
On November 19, in Yugoslavia, the RAF’s destruction of a bridge over the River Drina at Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina, causes an 85-mile-long traffic jam of German military vehicles. U.S. Navy air strikes continue hitting targets on Luzon and shipping in Manila Bay in the Philippines. In Washington, D.C., the government estimates the cost of the war at $250 million per day. The British Second Army captures Geilenkirchen, Germany, near the border with the Netherlands. In Asia, the British Army launches an offensive into Burma from India.
Elements of the U.S. Third Army continue the siege of Metz, France, on November 20. Patrols from the French First Army reach Mulhouse, France, and the Rhine River. With artillery fire audible in the distance, Adolf Hitler leaves his wartime headquarters at Rastenburg, in East Prussia. He goes to Berlin, where he will soon establish his center of operations in a highly fortified bunker — the Führerbunker — located 28 feet below the Reich Chancellery garden.
In the China Sea northwest of Keelung, Formosa, on November 21, the submarine USS Sealion sinks the Japanese battleship Kongō, with a loss of 1,200 men, and the destroyer Urakaze with the loss of 240 crewmen. In France, the French First Army captures Belfort, roughly midway between Lyon and Strasbourg.
The French First Army on November 22 takes Mulhouse, in eastern France near the German and Swiss borders. In the U.S., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer releases the Technicolor musical film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” starring Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien. Songs sung by Garland that debut in the movie are “The Boy Next Door,” “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and “The Trolley Song,” which is nominated for an Academy Award as Best Song. The film is a critical and commercial hit.
Metz, France, is taken by Gen. George Patton’s U.S. Third Army troops on November 23. Meanwhile, French forces capture Strasbourg, in eastern France. The French also liberate the nearby Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Primarily a labor and transit camp, the facility later became an execution site as the war wound on. An estimated 22,000 inmates die there during the three years the camp is in operation, most from the exertions of their forced labor while being poorly fed. In Moscow, the Soviets announce that the Red Army, with the assistance of Finnish troops, has cleared Finnish Lapland of German forces.
From bases on Saipan and Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, 111 U.S. B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers take off on November 24 for a raid on Tokyo. It is the first attack on the Japanese capital since the Doolittle raid in April 1942. (Tokyo is too far for B-29s to reach from bases in China.) Near Luzon, the Philippines, the Japanese launch an air raid on the U.S. Navy’s Fast Carrier Task Force 38. The aircraft carrier USS Intrepid is hit (for the third time on its current patrol) by two Japanese kamikaze aircraft, killing 66 crewmen and starting serious fires. Other U.S. Navy ships are also heavily damaged in the attack. In Europe, the U.S. Third Army captures crossings over the Saar River in France. In Canada, the Royal Canadian Navy corvette HMCS Shawinigan is sunk by German submarine U-1228 in the Cabot Strait between Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. The entire crew of 91 is lost.
The Allies lose Nanking, in eastern China, on November 25 as the Japanese continue to make gains in that theater. The Americans abandon their airbase at Yongning, China. On Peleliu, in the Palau Group of the Caroline Islands, the last Japanese resistance ends. Over 14,000 Japanese are killed or captured while the U.S. suffers 9,300 casualties. A German V-2 rocket lands on a department store in Deptford, East London, England, killing 168 people.
The Red Army advances into Slovakia (eastern Czechoslovakia) on November 26. Allied troops move into the harbor area of Antwerp, Belgium. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the destruction of the crematoria at the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in order to eliminate evidence of the mass murders that have taken place there. All Sonderkommandos (camp inmates forced to drag corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria) are murdered when they finish their grisly task.
The German vessel M/S Rigel is sunk off Norway by planes from the British Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Implacable on November 27. Of the 2,838 people packed aboard the vessel, 2,571 drown, with most of them, it is discovered later, being Soviet, Polish and Serbian prisoners of war. The Red Army breaks through German-Hungarian defensive lines and captures Mohács, in southern Hungary on the right bank of the Danube. In the Pacific, off Japan’s main island of Honshu, the submarine USS Archerfish sinks the brand-new Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano — the world’s largest, converted from the hull of a super-battleship — only 10 days after it is commissioned. (At 64,800 long tons of standard displacement, Shinano remains the largest warship to be sunk by a submarine.) A German V-2 rocket hits Antwerp, Belgium, killing 157 people.
On November 28, the first Allied ship sails into the harbor of Antwerp, Belgium. A mob of over 400 citizens of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, attacks a German-controlled coal warehouse attempting to obtain fuel for heat. In reprisal, German troops execute 40 Dutch men. The Japanese conduct night attacks on Leyte Island, the Philippines.
Soviet troops on November 29 cross the Danube into southwest Hungary. Albania is liberated from German control. In Baltimore, Maryland, surgeons at Johns Hopkins University Hospital perform the first successful pediatric open-heart surgery, on a one-year-old girl.
HMS Vanguard, the biggest (and, as it turns out, the last) battleship to be built by the British Royal Navy, is launched at Clydebank, Scotland. The launching ceremony is presided over by HRH Princess Elizabeth, the elder daughter of King George VI. A German V-2 rocket strikes a neighborhood in southeast London at 1:00 a.m., killing 23 people.
