President Franklin Roosevelt, left, meets with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Malta. 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.
Japanese naval docks at Singapore are destroyed by Allied B-29 attacks on February 2, 1945. Ecuador declares war on Germany. The Soviet 1st Belorussian Front reaches the Oder River, south of Frankfurt an der Oder, in northeastern Germany. The four-day conference on Malta between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill ends. They agree to pull troops out of Greece and Italy to reinforce those in northwestern Europe. The two then depart for Yalta to meet with Joseph Stalin.
U.S. forces, aided by Filipino troops and guerrilla groups, enter Manila, the Philippines, on February 3. The Allies liberate a POW camp on the way. A vicious urban battle ensues that lasts for several weeks. Japanese troops massacre over 100,000 Filipino citizens and devastate the city. The U.S. 8th Air Force, with 937 bombers and 613 fighters, carries out the heaviest attack to date against Berlin. It levels large areas of the city and kills more than 25,000 civilians. The Soviets capture Landsberg, Germany, 80 miles northeast of Berlin. American and French units capture Colmar, France, 40 miles south of Strasbourg.
The Yalta Conference begins on February 4 at the recently liberated resort town on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin discuss post-war spheres of influence. The Soviet Union agrees to enter the war against Japan once hostilities against Germany are concluded. The Allies announce that all German troops have been expelled from Belgium.
Attacks on German positions around Poznań, Poland, by the Red Army make some progress on February 5. In the Philippines, U.S. forces close in tighter around Manila. Ecuador declares war on Japan. As the Yalta Conference proceeds, President Roosevelt’s physical condition alarms some observers, among them Winston Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, who believes the American president has only a short time to live. He writes: “. . . but men shut their eyes when they do not want to see, and the Americans here cannot bring themselves to believe that he is finished.”
Southeast of Wrocław, Poland, the Red Army on February 6 starts to push across the Oder River, causing hundreds of thousands of panicked civilians to flee westward from Wrocław (Breslau, in German) towards Dresden, Germany. In a controversial incident, French author and journalist Robert Brasillach is executed by a firing squad in Paris. Brasillach was tried and convicted by the French government — not for military or political crimes, but for “intellectual crimes,” because his writings “advocated collaborationism.” A petition— signed by many leading French literary figures, and even some of Brasillach’s political opponents — sent to Charles de Gaulle pleading for the commutation of Brasillach’s sentence is ignored.
On February 7, the Germans blow up floodgates on dams in the industrial Ruhr region of Germany, flooding the area west of Cologne and preventing the use of floating assault bridges by the Allies and slowing their advance. In the Philippines, Gen. Douglas MacArthur returns to Manila. In South America, Paraguay declares war on Germany.
Almost 50,000 British and Canadian troops, with 500 tanks and 1,034 guns, on February 8 launch a new offensive into the Reichswald, to the southeast of Nijmegen, considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. The British government reports that U.K. civilian war casualties up to September 1944 are 57,468 killed and 89,178 injured. In Oslo, Generalmajor Karl Marthinsen, the head of the Norwegian State Police, is assassinated in his car by operatives of the Norwegian resistance movement Milorg. The Germans execute 29 Norwegians in retaliation.
In Alsace, France, the “Colmar Pocket” is eliminated on February 9, 1945, by troops of the U.S. Sixth Army Group, commanded by Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers. Held by the German Nineteenth Army since November 1944, the pocket is the last German foothold west of the Rhine River. In Burma, the British 26th Indian Division captures Ramree Island off the Burmese coast in the Arakan area. After roughly three weeks of fighting, troops of the Australian 31st/51st Infantry Battalion defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Tsimba Ridge, on Bougainville Island, Papua-New Guinea. The Australians arrived in November 1944 to relieve the U.S. Army’s XIV Corps, permitting it to be transferred to the Philippines.
Some 16,000 Germans and Hungarians of the remaining defenders of Budapest try to break out of their encirclement by the Red Army on February 10, but most are killed or captured. In the Baltic Sea, the German liner SS General von Steuben is sunk by two torpedoes from Soviet submarine S-13; 3,000–4,000 people, mostly wounded German soldiers, die. In the U.S., “Rum and Coca-Cola” by the Andrews Sisters hits #1 on the song-popularity charts.
Stopping in Egypt on his way back from Yalta on February 11, President Roosevelt meets briefly with kings Farouk of Egypt, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Abdulaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia. Among other things, the president is concerned about oil, aware that the U.S. is using up petroleum reserves faster than it is discovering new ones. American oilmen have been allowed in Saudi Arabia since the 1930s, and the Saudi monarch prefers ties to businesses from the U.S. — which seems to have no colonial ambitions in the Middle East — as opposed to those from Great Britain. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud emerge from their meeting favorably impressed with each other, and U.S. and Saudi ties will continue to grow stronger. Walter Ulbricht becomes the leader of German communists in Moscow. In Germany, the nation’s entire gold reserve — about 100 tons — is transferred from Berlin to a salt mine near Eisenach, in the center of the country.
In the Philippines, the U.S. XI Corps on February 12 has closed the neck of the Bataan Peninsula and is advancing southward, clearing Japanese forces ahead of it. In South America, Peru declares war on Germany. San Francisco, California, is selected as the site for the upcoming United Nations Conference on International Organization, a convention of delegates from 50 Allied nations.
In the Philippines, the U.S. Navy begins operations in Manila Bay on February 13, clearing mines and bombarding the Japanese garrison on Corregidor Island. The Battle of Budapest comes to an end, after a 49-day-long, but unsuccessful, defense by Germans and Hungarians. 159,000 soldiers and civilians have perished, and over 100,000 prisoners are taken by the Soviets.
The very early hours of February 14 marks the culmination of three days of alternating raids by 773 RAF and 527 USAAF bombers, that have dropped 3,900 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany. The attack generates a firestorm that burns for 8 nights and 7 days and destroys over 90% of the historic city that is packed with civilian refugees from the Eastern Front. The raid is estimated to kill between 23,000 and 25,000 people and turns out to be the most destructive raid of the war in Europe. One eyewitness is U.S. Army POW Kurt Vonnegut, being held in the city, who will vividly describe the destruction in his 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five.” (Vonnegut and other POWs were incarcerated in a Dresden slaughterhouse. When the air-raid sirens sounded on February 14, they took refuge in a meat locker three stories below ground level. Vonnegut wrote: “When we came up, the city was gone . . . .”) In Burma, the British Indian IV Corps begins to cross the Irawaddy River and strike into the Japanese rear. Uruguay declares war on Germany.
Soviet troops on February 15 are covering the approaches to Danzig (Gdańsk, in Polish), a major port on the Baltic Sea. Forces of the Red Army’s 1st Ukrainian Front surround Wrocław, Poland, which straddles the Oder River.
