President Harry Truman at the Army-Navy football game in 1945.
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.
In Austria, the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division is deactivated on November 30, 1945. In California, the U.S. Naval Drydocks, Roosevelt Base, near Los Angeles, is re-named Terminal Island Naval Shipyard. The Chinese Communists enter Shantung Province, in the country’s northeast, that was formerly held by the Japanese.
In Germany, British security troops on December 1 sweep the Ruhr and the Rhineland and arrest 76 German industrialists who aided the Nazi war effort. Allied troops withdraw from Czechoslovakia. In Philadelphia, 100,000 fans, including President Truman, watch the Army-Navy football game. Both teams, undefeated, are ranked one and two in the nation. Army beats Navy 32-13 in the contest, which is televised for the first time.
In Japan, Allied occupation authorities arrest 59 Japanese on December 2 on suspicion of having committed war crimes. In Albania’s parliamentary elections, the communist-led Democratic Front wins all 82 seats.
Communist demonstrations in Athens on December 3 presage the Greek Civil War. Meeting in Cairo, Egypt, the Arab League votes to boycott all products from Jewish Palestine.
The U.S. Senate on December 4 votes 65-7 to allow the U.S. to join the United Nations and to permit the UN to use American forces to preserve peace and security around the world.
On December 5, a group of five U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers, known as Flight 19, disappears while on a training mission off the coast of Florida over a section of ocean later dubbed “The Bermuda Triangle.” A U.S. Navy PBM Mariner flying boat, sent out to search for the missing planes, also disappears. All told, 27 personnel are lost: 14 in the five Avengers and 13 aboard the rescue plane. Investigators believe the PBM may have exploded in mid-air from accumulated gasoline vapors in its bilges (a known problem in this type of aircraft). However, there is no definitive explanation for Flight 19’s disappearance.
In an effort to revitalize the precarious British economy, the U.S. government on December 6 grants a loan of $3.75 billion to the United Kingdom. The Canadian government subsequently also provides a loan, of $1.25 billion, to the British as well. In Tokyo, Gen. of the Army Douglas MacArthur orders the arrest of former Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and eight others as war criminals. At an inquiry into the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, Gen. of the Army George C. Marshall, former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, testifies that he did not anticipate the attack, but that an “alert” defense would have limited the damage done.
In Manila, the Philippines, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita on December 7 is found guilty of war crimes committed by his troops during the Japanese defense of the Philippines and is sentenced to death. (Afterward, the legitimacy of Yamashita’s conviction is called into question because there was no proof offered at trial that Yamashita approved of the atrocities or even knew about them. In fact, many of the atrocities were committed by troops that were not even under Yamashita’s command. The case is appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declines to hear arguments. The finding against Yamashita — that a commanding officer can be held accountable for crimes committed by his troops even though he did not order them, did not stand by and allow them, possibly did not even know about them, and be unable to stop them if he did know of them — has been incorporated into the so-called Yamashita Standard or Standard of Command Responsibility. This doctrine of command accountability has been integrated into the Geneva Convention on Warfare, and has been adopted by the International Criminal Court, established in 2002.) A U.S. patent is granted to the Raytheon Mfg. Co. for the process of cooking food in an electronic (later called “microwave”) oven.
In Tokyo, Gen. of the Army Douglas MacArthur on December 8 orders Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma and four other Japanese commanders to be put on trial for their roles in the Bataan Death March of April 1942. On the island of Guam, three U.S. Marines are ambushed and killed by Japanese soldiers who had fled into the jungle at the island’s capitulation in August 1944. (The last of the Japanese holdouts on Guam is discovered on January 24, 1972.) The prototype Bell Model 47 helicopter makes its maiden flight. In 1946, the aircraft type will receive the first commercial helicopter certification in the U.S. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, armed Perónistas fire into a rally of their opponents — the Democratic Union — killing four people and wounding 40.
Gen. George S. Patton’s car collides at low speed with a U.S. Army truck near Mannheim, Germany, on December 9. While others in the vehicle suffer minor injuries, Patton, a passenger in the back seat, is thrown forward and hits his head, breaking his neck and injuring his spinal cord. Paralyzed from the neck down, he is rushed to a hospital in Heidelberg. In the Netherlands East Indies, Indonesian nationalists attack a British military truck convoy at Cibadak, about 58 miles south of Batavia.
In the Dutch East Indies, a sortie by the RAF causes major damage to the town of Cibadak. The raid is in retaliation for the attack on a British Army convoy the previous day. U.S. entrepreneur Preston Tucker on December 10 announces plans to manufacture the “Torpedo,” an automobile with a hydraulic drive that will be capable of reaching a speed of 150 miles per hour. (The first “Torpedo” produced —called the Tucker 48 — debuts in 1948. It can reach speeds of 114 miles per hour, but only 50 vehicles are made before the company goes out of business.)
On December 11, Beatrice Patton, the wife of Gen. Patton, paralyzed after his automobile accident, arrives at the hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, where he is being treated. In the U.S., the members of the United Steelworkers union vote to begin a nationwide strike on January 14. Some 700,000 steelworkers plan to walk off the job to support demands for a wage increase of two dollars per day.
Soviet forces on December 12 establish an Azerbaijan People’s Government in Iranian territory that they occupy and from which they refuse to withdraw.
Under a tripartite agreement with the Syrian government, the British and French governments on December 13 agree to evacuate their military forces from that Middle Eastern nation. The evacuation is to be completed by April 15, 1946. Josef Kramer, commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps — and 10 others on his staffs— are hanged at Hamelin, Germany, for crimes against humanity. In the Netherlands East Indies, British troops burn the town of Bekasi — 10 miles east of Batavia — in retaliation for the massacre by Indonesians of British and Indian survivors of an RAF Dakota (Douglas DC-3) transport plane that had crashed nearby three weeks earlier.
