Army trucks wind along the Stilwell Road in Burma. The inset shows how treacherous the road was to personnel who were trying to negotiate the road. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
On January 12, 1945, with the Japanese having been cleared out of the area, the first Allied convoy moves over the Stilwell Road in Burma, which links India with China. In Europe, the Red Army, as promised by Stalin, begins an offensive in East Prussia from the Baltic to the Carpathians. The Germans there are outnumbered by 4 or 5 to 1 in numbers and in all classes of equipment and find themselves incapable of halting the Soviet advance. Carrier-based U.S. Navy planes attack installations and shipping at the Japanese naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, French Indochina, sinking 40 vessels there, and causing damage at other ports as well. In Burma, Indian troops establish bridgeheads across the Irawaddy River at Kyaukmyaung and Thabeikkyin, north of Mandalay.
German forces of Army Group E complete their withdrawal from Greece and Albania on January 13. In Norway, the Jørstad River railway bridge at Snåsa is blown up by the Norwegian Resistance. Six hours later, a military troop train arrives — unaware of the missing bridge — and plunges into the river, killing 70-80 people and injuring over 100 more. Farther east, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front begins an offensive toward East Prussia, against which there is stiff resistance from the 3rd Panzer Army.
The British 19th Indian Division on January 14 crosses the Irawaddy River, north of Mandalay, in Burma. Adolf Hitler finally gives Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt permission to withdraw from the Ardennes. The Germans will abandon Houffalize and Bastogne. The Red Army captures Lučenec, Czechoslovakia, 120 miles east of Bratislava.
In France on January 15, American forces encounter heavy resistance in attacks toward St. Vith, an important road and railway junction in the Flemish (Germanic-speaking) part of Belgium. U.S. First Army troops reach Houffalize, Belgium, cutting off German forces remaining to the west in the Ardennes salient. Houffalize lies roughly halfway between Bastogne and St. Vith. Der Führer meets with Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt and Walter Model near Bad Nauheim, in western Germany, and tells them to hold the Allies up for as long as possible. Hitler then heads by train for Berlin and his Führerbunker.
On January 16, the U.S. First and Third Armies link up in the Ardennes. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the Red Army lays siege to Budapest, Hungary. The Soviet 1st Belorussian Front captures Radom, Poland, about 62 miles south of Warsaw. Chinese troops capture Namkham, Burma, 160 miles northeast of Mandalay.
Soviet troops advance 100 miles on a 160-mile front, forcing the Germans to evacuate Warsaw, which falls to the Red Army on January 17. A government aligned with the communists is installed in the Polish capital. The German defenders encircled at Budapest withdraw to the city of Buda, on the western bank of the Danube. The Soviets liberate 94,000 Jews that were left in two ghettoes in Pest, on the eastern bank of the Danube. The Red Army captures Częstochowa, Poland. In Belgium, the Allies officially announce that “The Battle of the Bulge” has been successfully fought and is over. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis, is arrested in Budapest, Hungary, by the Soviet secret police on suspicion of espionage. He is sent to Moscow and imprisoned. (Wallenberg is reported to have died in Moscow in July 1947 while in custody of the KGB secret police. The motives behind his arrest and imprisonment by the Soviets, and the details of his death, yet remain a mystery.)
American troops drive on Manila, the Philippines, on January 18. German troops evacuate Kraków, Poland. The SS evacuates 58,000 inmates from Auschwitz; some are moved by rail, while others are forced to march in freezing temperatures. In Hungary, a German offensive begins from Lake Balaton, with the aim of lifting the Red Army’s siege of Budapest. Over Japan, the first raid on Tokyo Bay by U.S. carrier-based planes occurs. In London, casualty statistics for British Empire forces are published: casualties total 1,043,554 of all ranks, including 282,000 dead and 80,000 missing.
U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 bombers on January 19, 1945, destroy the Kawasaki aircraft works, near Kobe, Japan. Soviet forces capture Kraków and Łódź, in Poland, and enter East Prussia from the south. With the Germans mostly driven from Poland, Leopold Okulicki, commander of Armia Krajowa, orders the disbanding of the Polish Home Army. He makes the move out of concern that a Western-allied force in what is now Soviet-occupied Poland would only trigger the arrest and murder of more people by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). Okulicki says, “ . . . in comparison with the NKVD, the Gestapo methods are child’s play.”
On January 20, Franklin D. Roosevelt is sworn in for his fourth term as President of the United States. Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office as Vice President. Chinese troops capture Muse, Burma, on the Sino-Burmese border.
British forces enter Monywa, Burma, 60 miles west of Mandalay, on January 21. The Soviet 1st Belorussian Front reaches Konin, Poland, within 200 miles of Berlin, along the road connecting Warsaw with the German capital. Hungary declares war on Germany. Hitler orders every commanding officer at division level or higher to inform him of any planned movements so he may countermand or veto the plan if he sees fit. In Tokyo, the government adopts drastic manpower-mobilization powers. From this point forward, all citizens can be conscripted for war work at any time.
The Burma Road — the main land route from India to China through Burma — is declared free of Japanese troops on January 22 and open once again to vehicle convoys. In the Netherlands, four squadrons of RAF Supermarine Spitfire fighters destroy a factory at Alblasserdam that is manufacturing liquid oxygen for use in German rockets.
The Red Army’s 1st Ukrainian Front reaches the Oder River near Oppeln and Steinau in Silesia, in western Poland, on January 23. The Kriegsmarine (German navy) begins evacuating civilian refugees by sea from East Prussia and from the Danzig area, the Red Army having cut all land communications with the rest of Germany. (The operation continues through the end of the war and is generally considered the greatest evacuation in history, with between 1.5 million and 2 million people removed.) The U.S. First Army captures St. Vith, Belgium, the last German stronghold in the Ardennes “bulge.” In Asia, the British 20th Indian Division takes Myinmu, on the Irawaddy River in central Burma.
On January 24, U.S. troops recapture Clark Field, which had become the main Japanese airbase on Luzon, the Philippines. They also take Calapan, essentially ending Japanese opposition on the island of Mindoro, the Philippines. In the Dutch East Indies, British planes destroy Japanese oil refineries at Palembang, on the island of Sumatra. In Europe, German forces begin evacuating Slovakia. In Austria, at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, near Linz, Associated Press war correspondent Joseph “Joe” Morton, an American, is summarily executed by the SS along with 13 Allied officers under Hitler’s “Commando Order,” which states that captured Allied commandos, even if in full uniform, should be killed immediately without trial. The group had been captured in December 1944 during an OSS operation in Slovakia. Morton, who had a non-combatant, war correspondent’s ID, was along to report on the raid. Morton is the only Allied war correspondent executed by any of the Axis governments during the war.
The U.S. Navy begins bombarding Iwo Jima on January 25 in preparation for landings on the island. The British Army’s 82nd West African Division occupies Myohaung, Burma. In Europe, the Germans — ahead of advancing Soviet troops — blow up and abandon “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s former Eastern Front headquarters, located about 5 miles east of Rastenburg, East Prussia. In the U.S., Dan Topping, Del Webb and Larry McPhail purchase the New York Yankees baseball club from the estate of politician and brewer Jacob Ruppert for $2.8 million.
SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler is placed in command of Army Group Vistula by Hitler on January 26, 1945, despite Himmler having no experience (he served one year in the Bavarian Army, 1917-1918, but saw no combat) nor having demonstrated any aptitude for operational command. His appointment is widely viewed by the military and many civilians as an insult to the German Army and, especially, the General Staff. The Soviets isolate three German armies in East Prussia. The Red Army captures Katowice, in Upper Silesia, in Poland. Auschwitz concentration camp, in Oświęcim, Poland, is reached by the Soviets, but they find fewer than 7,000 barely alive survivors there, as the SS has moved most of the remaining prisoners to camps inside Germany. Near Holtzwihr, in northeastern France, 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division saves his company from encirclement by an advancing German unit. He climbs aboard a burning U.S. M-10 tank destroyer and, firing the vehicle’s .50-caliber machine gun until its ammunition is exhausted, kills or wounds 50 German soldiers. Then, despite being wounded in the leg in the firefight, Murphy makes it back to his company where he organizes a counterattack that forces the Germans to retreat. For his actions, Murphy is awarded the Medal of Honor. He goes on to become one of the most-decorated combat soldiers of the war, receiving every combat-valor award available.
The Ledo Road, linking India with China, is officially cleared of Japanese as two Chinese forces — one from China, one from Burma — link up on January 27 at Mong-Yu, Burma, at the junction of the Ledo and Burma Roads near the Burma-China border. Lead elements of the Red Army are about 100 miles from Berlin. Soviet troops examining the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp estimate that two million people, including 1.5 million Jews, have been murdered there. (Postwar estimates place the number who died at Auschwitz at between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people, 90% of whom were Jews. Among others murdered there: non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani (gypsies), Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexual men. Some studies indicate that of the more than six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, roughly one in six were murdered at Auschwitz.)
The Red Army completes its liberation of Lithuania on January 28. The first vehicle convoy in three years reaches China from India over the Stilwell and Burma Roads, newly reopened by the Allies.
The Allied thrust into Rhineland — a section of western Germany along the middle section of the Rhine River — continues with the capture on January 29 of Oberhausen, 8 miles west of Essen and 25 miles north of Düsseldorf. Vidkun Quisling, Minister-President of the collaborationist Norwegian Nazi government, meets with Hitler in Berlin. It will be the last meeting between the two.
In the Philippines, 121 American soldiers (of the 6th Ranger Battalion and the U.S. Sixth Army Alamo Scouts) and 800 Filipino guerrillas kill 225 Japanese guards and free 813 American POWs from the Japanese-held prison camp at Cabanatuan City, Luzon, on January 30. On the twelfth anniversary of his coming to power, Adolf Hitler in a radio address calls for fanatical resistance by soldiers and civilians and predicts that “. . . in this struggle for survival it will not be inner Asia that will conquer, but the people that has [sic] defended Europe for centuries against the onslaughts from the East, the German nation . . .” In the Baltic Sea, Soviet submarine S-13 fires three torpedoes at the German liner SS Wilhelm Gustloff, which is carrying 10,600 civilian refugees and wounded soldiers from Gotenhafen (the German name for Gdynia), Poland. Gustloff sinks within 50 minutes, drowning 9,343, including some 5,000 children, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship-sinking in history. In the Mediterranean, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meet at Malta to hold preparatory talks for the upcoming Yalta Conference with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
The Red Army crosses the Oder River into Germany from Poland on January 31 and is less than 50 miles from Berlin. U.S. Army Pvt. Edward “Eddie” Slovik is shot by a firing squad at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, France. He is the only U.S. Army deserter of World War II to be tried, convicted, sentenced and executed, and the first U.S. Army deserter to be executed since 1864. (In actuality, thousands of U.S. soldiers deserted in the European Theatre of Operations. Most are returned to the lines, either voluntarily or forcibly. Of those captured and court martialed — including those sentenced to die — only Slovik — recalcitrant about deserting — is executed. His sentence is reviewed and approved by Gen. Eisenhower, who vigorously defends both Slovik’s sentence and his approval of it.) U.S. planes destroy the Imperial Japanese Navy’s floating dock at Singapore.
U.S. troops land unopposed southwest of Manila, the Philippines, on February 1, 1944, but advances are slowed by fierce Japanese resistance. In Europe, the Kriegsmarine (German navy), since the 20th of January, has evacuated 140,000 civilian refugees and 18,000 wounded soldiers by sea from East Prussia and Danzig. U.S. Army Air Force B-24 and B-29 bombers begin daily raids on Iwo Jima, in the Volcano Islands, in preparation for landings scheduled later in the month. Over the course of 15 days, 6,800 tons of bombs are dropped on the island. In former-Axis-partner Bulgaria, where a communist government is now in place, Prince Kyril, the nation’s prince regent, former prime minister Bogdan Filov and 92 cabinet ministers, royal advisors and members of parliament are executed for treason and war crimes.
