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05/01/1945 Gurkha paratroopers establish an air head 20 miles from Rangoon as a British amphibious force nears the Burmese capital. The liberation of the Dutch East Indies begins when the Australian 9th division lands on Tarakan, an oil-rich island off Borneo's east coast.
On Okinawa, the 77th "Statue of Liberty" division uses ladders and mountaineering gear to scale the Shuri Line's Maeda Escarpment. They are driven back by a ferocious counterattack.
Radio Hamburg announces Hitler's death and proclaims Grand Admiral Karl Donitz the new leader of the Third Reich. Donitz hopes to reach a separate peace with the Western Allies "to save the German people from destruction by the Bolshevists."
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and his wife poison their six children and commit suicide in Berlin. Nazi party chief Martin Bormann is killed trying to escape from the city. Gen. Hans Krebs, the Wehrmacht's chief of staff, commits suicide after negotiating Berlin's surrender. The 36th "Texas" division captures Field Marshal von Rundstedt in Bad Tolz, Bavaria.
05/02/1945 In Asia, the 24th "Victory" division enters Davao, Mindanao's largest city, and the 26th British-Indian division establishes two beachheads near Rangoon.
The war ends in Italy as Gen. Heinrich von Vietinghoff's 10th and 14th armies surrender to Gen. Mark Clark's American-British army group.
The American 5th Army continues driving toward the Brenner Pass in the Alps, and the 2nd New Zealand division reaches Trieste, an Italian port on the Adriatic which has been seized by Yugoslav partisans.
Berlin's last pocket of resistance is wiped out and Rokossovsky's army takes Rostock-on-the-Baltic. In Oberammergau, Bavaria, Werner von Braun and his top rocket experts surrender to GIs of the American 7th Army.
Montgomery's 2nd British Army takes the German naval base at Lubeck-on-the-Baltic and prevents the Soviets from occupying Denmark. The RAF makes Kiel its final target of the war.
05/03/1945 Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima launches an offensive on Okinawa, with amphibious landings on the island's east and west coasts and attacks on the 7th "Bayonet" and 77th "Statue of Liberty" divisions. The Japanese assaults are repulsed and the 77th reaches the top of the Maeda Escarpment.
Offshore, kamikazes and suicide bomb-riders hit 22 warships. Destroyers Little, Luce, Morrison and three amphibious ships are sunk, destroyer Aaron Ward and Ingraham damaged. Cruiser Birmingham and other ships are hit. In the southern Ryukyus, a kamikaze wrecks escort carrier Sangamon beyond repair.
In Burma, the 26th British-Indian divisions takes Rangoon.
Emissaries from Adm. Donitz try to persuade Montgomery to accept the surrender of German forces on behalf of the Western allies but not the Soviets. Monty says no.
The British 2nd Army takes Hamburg, Europe's largest seaport, and meets Soviet spearheads near the Baltic. Patton's 3rd Army takes Passau in southeast Germany.
05/04/1945 Britain's 6 ½ year war against the Third Reich ends as Wehrmacht forces in Netherlands, Denmark and northwest Germany surrenders.
The capitulation, effective tomorrow morning, is signed by German envoys at Montgomery's headquarters 25 miles from Hamburg.
Patton launches the last American offensive in Europe as his 3rd Army drives into Czechoslovakia and northern Austria. Patton asks for permission to liberate Prague, but Ike orders him to take Pilsen, then halt to allow the Soviets to take the Czech capital.
Patch's 3rd "Spearhead" Armored division seizes Salzburg and Hitler's Eagle's Nest retreat at Berchtesgaden.
The Japanese counteroffensive on Okinawa fails as the 7th "Bayonet" and 77th "Statue of Liberty" divisions inflict 5,000 casualties. Organized Japanese resistance ends on Masbate in the central Philippines.
05/05/1945 In southern Germany, the Wehrmacht's 1st and 19th armies surrender. There will be no last stand by German diehards in the Alpine redoubt.
Fighting erupts in Copenhagen and Prague as freedom fighters try to liberate their capitals. British troops calm the situation in Denmark, but SS Storm troopers battle Czech partisans. Patton's 3rd Army takes Linz, Austria.
The war's only enemy caused casualties in the continental United states occurs in Lake County, Ore., when a Japanese incendiary balloon bomb explodes and kills a woman and five children.
During the past year, hundreds of balloon bombs have ridden the trans-Pacific winds from Japan to the United States and Canada. The Japanese had hoped the bombs would cause forest fires. Remnants of 200 balloons are found in the United States.
05/06/1945 The Japanese end their failed offensive on Okinawa.
British forces isolate the Japanese 28th Army in southern Burma when Gen. William Slim's army joins hands with units that recently captured Rangoon. The Australian 9th division overruns Tarakan, largest town on oil-rich Tarakan island in the Dutch East Indies.
A German delegation headed by Gen. Alfred Jodl again offers to surrender the remaining military forces to the Western Allies but not to the Soviets.
Eisenhower rejects the offer and demands an immediate end to hostilities. He threatened to force fleeing Germans to surrender to the Soviets.
The war ends for Patton's 3rd Army when it takes Pilsen and Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia. After a month long wait, Simpson's 9th Army finally links up with Zhukov's troops near Magdeburg in central Germany.
05/07/1945 On Okinawa, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner orders a May 11, all-out assault on Shuri Line.
The war in Europe is over. Gen. Alfred Jodl and Adm. Hans Georg von Friedenburg sign an unconditional surrender at Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims, France.
The cease-fire goes into effect one minute after midnight on May 9. Ike's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, directs the negotiations and signs for the United States. British, French and Soviet representatives also sign. The Soviets demand another surrender ceremony in Berlin.
News of the war's end is revealed during a German radio broadcast by Donitz's foreign minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk. Riotous celebrations erupt in London and throughout the United States.
Despite the surrender, Germans continue fighting in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and East Prussia, and a U-boat sinks two freighters off Scotland's Firth of Forth.
05/08/1945 At high noon every American warship off Okinawa salutes V-E Day by blasting the Japanese with three rounds of gunfire.
Fearing a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, the Japanese order their troops to evacuate southern China.
Truman and Churchill make victory broadcasts. Truman, who is 61 today, says "the flags of freedom fly all over Europe" and urges the Japanese to surrender. Churchill tells cheering Londoners: "In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this."
The British 1st Airborne division and Norwegian troops liberate Oslo.
Konev's 1st Ukrainian Army takes gutted Dresden, Germany's last major unconquered city. Tito's Yugoslav partisans liberate Zagreb, capital of Croatia.
Germans make fighting retreats in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in desperate and doomed attempts to surrender to the Western allies instead of Russians.
05/09/1945 Kamikazes hit British carriers Victorious and Formidable near the Ryukyus. The U. S. 7th "Bayonet" division captures most of Okinawa's Kochi ridge, a strong point a mile from Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima's headquarters.
The Third Reich's final surrender is staged in Berlin. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel leads the German delegation. Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz signs for the United States, Zhukov for the Russians, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder for the British, and De Lattre de Tassigny for the French.
Germans capitulate in East Prussia, Pomerania, Prague and Britain's Channel Islands. The Americans capture Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Fighting continues in Austria, Croatia and Czechoslovakia.
Norwegians arrest Vidkun Quisling, Europe's most infamous Nazi collaborator. He'll be executed for treason.
05/10/1945 Kamikazes begin their sixth "Floating Chrysanthemum" attack near Okinawa. In a two-day assault, suicide planes wreck destroyers Evans and Hadley and send destroyer Bache and destroyer escort Bright to stateside repair yards. The attacks cost the Japanese 150 planes.
On Okinawa, the 6th Marine division begins a battering ram offensive by crossing the Asa River, a mile north of Naha, the island's capital.
The Australian 9th Division lands at Brunei Bay, Borneo where Japanese sappers ignite 37 oil well fires.
The U. S. 40th "Grizzly" division establishes a beachhead at Mindanao's Macajalar Bay.
05/11/1945 Kamikazes knock carrier Bunker Hill out of the war and damage two destroyers near Okinawa.
The Hill, flagship of Adm. Marc. Mitscher, is crippled by two suicide planes, suffers 653 casualties, and heads for extensive repairs at Bremerton, Washington.
Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner's 10th Army begins a massive assault on Okinawa's 10-mile-long Shuri defense Line. The 77th and 96th Infantry and 1st and 6th Marines face formidable fortifications. They make small gains and suffer heavy casualties.
In northern Yugoslavia, the Wehrmacht's Army Group E makes a fighting retreat toward Austria, but German forces in Czechoslovakia surrender to the Russians after failing to break through to Patton's 3rd Army.
Eisenhower announces that anyone who fought in both Africa and Europe will not be sent to the Pacific. Patton's war ends when his 3rd Army meets Soviet forces in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and Chemnitz, Germany.
05/12/1945 The 6th Marine division stumbles into a bloodbath when it attacks the Sugar Loaf, overlooking Naha, Okinawa's capital.
Nazi bigshot and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering is indicted by the United Nations' War Crimes Commission.
05/13/1945 The 6th Marine division again suffers heavy casualties trying to take Okinawa's Sugar Loaf Hill, but the 96th "Deadeye" Infantry takes and holds the crest of Conical Hill, one of the Shuri Line's most powerful strong points.
Planes from eight carriers of Mitscher's Task Force 58 begin a two-day raid on Kyushu's kamakaze airfields. Despite heavy losses, the Japanese still have thousands of flyable planes and pilots willing to death-dive into American ships.
In the Philippines, the 40th "Grizzly" division takes Del Monte airfield on northern Mindanao.
Gen. Alexander Lohr's Army Group E surrenders to Russians and Yugoslav partisans.
Holland's Queen Wilhelmina returns home after five years in exile. Norway's Prince Olav arrives in Oslo and announces all traitors will be tried and executed.
05/14/1945 A Kamikaze badly damages the Navy's most famous carrier, the Enterprise, forcing Adm. Marc Mitscher to change flagships for the second time in three days.
"Big E" heads for Puget Sound Navy Yard after the suicide plane destroys its forward elevator and causes 48 casualties.
Enterprise has 20 battle stars, including Midway, Guadalcanal, Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Enterprise pilots have shot down 911 Japanese planes and sunk 71 ships.
A battalion of the 6th Marine division led by Maj. Harry Courtney makes an American banzai charge on Okinawa's Sugar Loaf hill, The Marines take the hill, then are driven off. Courtney is awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
B-29s destroy the Mitsubishi aircraft engine plant and 3.6 square miles of Nagoya.
U. S. scientists and bomb experts at Los Alamos, N. M., select Hiroshima, Kokura, Kyoto and Yokohama as likely targets for atomic bombs. Hiroshima seems especially good because surrounding hills will focus the blast.
05/15/1945 The Americans on Okinawa suffer bloody repulses. The 6th Marine division again fails to take Sugar Loaf; the 1st Marines are rebuffed at nearby Wana Ridge and Wana Draw; the 96th "Deadeye" division can't finish off the Japanese on Conical Hill. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima sends most of his last reserves to reinforce Sugar Loaf.
Casualties are heavy: one regiment of the 77th "Statue of Liberty" Infantry has lost three-quarters of its riflemen.
The shooting in Europe finally ends -- six days after the final German capitulation in Berlin -- as the last holdouts of the Wehrmacht's Army Group E surrender in northern Yugoslavia.
Austria regains its independence as the Allies negate its 1938 annexation to Germany.
05/16/1945 B-29 Superfortresses firebomb Nagoya, home of much of Japan's aviation industry. The city is so badly devastated that Gen. Curtis LeMay deletes it from his target list.
The 6th Marine division suffers its worst losses of the war during another attempt to take the crest of Sugar Loaf on Okinawa.
Japanese Shuri Line defenders also defeat attacks by the 1st Marine and 77th divisions. The day's only success is scored by the 96th "Deadeye" Infantry which reaches the ruins of Yonabaru village on the island's east coast.
In the Philippines, the 11th "Angels" Airborne and 158th Regimental Combat Team end a two-month cleanup of Japanese units in southern Luzon. More than 8,000 Japanese have been killed and 750 taken prisoner. American losses are fewer than 1,500.
Five British destroyers ambush and sink cruiser Haguro off Malaya in the last naval surface engagement of the war.
05/17/1945 The 6th Marine division makes its 11th attack on Sugar Loaf after a pulverizing bombardment by artillery, fighter-bombers and naval gunfire.
Once again, the Marines take the hillcrest but suffer heavy casualties and must withdraw. Nearby, the 1st Marine division takes Wana Draw and knocks out some of the Japanese big guns zeroed in on Sugar Loaf.
A surprise dawn attack by the 77th "Statue of Liberty" division takes a ridge on the Shuri Line's eastern end.
05/18/1945 The 6th Marine division finally wins its nightmare nine-day battle for Okinawa's Sugar Loaf hill.
Instead of attacking head on, a battalion of 29th Marine regiment and supporting tanks bypass both ends of Sugar Loaf and knock out Japanese positions on its reverse slope. The 6th also overruns nearby Half Moon and Horseshoe hills, the other bastions of the Japanese three-hill defense complex.
Sugar Loaf is the Pacific's bloodiest battle and perhaps the hardest fight Americans have encountered anywhere during the war. Its 3,000 casualties equal the entire battle of Tarawa. Nearby the 1st Marine division still can't take Wana Ridge.
05/19/1945 Organized Japanese resistance northeast of Manila ends as the U. S. 6th Army ends a four-month campaign against Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama's 30,000-man Shimbu Group.
Since the liberation of Manila, Gen. Walter Krueger's army has battered the Shimbu to prevent a counteroffensive against the Philippine capital and to break Japanese dominance of the city's water supply.
The victory is secured by GIs of the 6th, 38th, 43rd and 1st Cavalry divisions, the 112th Regimental Combat Team and 10,000 Philippine guerrillas. Japanese survivors flee into central Luzon's mountainous jungles; only 6,300 will surrender at the end of the war.
On Okinawa, the 6th Marine division smashes a Japanese counterattack near Sugar Loaf.
MacArthur announces the 9th Australian division has overcome Japanese resistance on Tarakan island in the Dutch East Indies.
05/20/1945 Okinawa's Shuri Line strong points continue to fall as the 6th Marine division uses flamethrowers and satchel charges to knock out Japanese holdouts on Horseshoe and Half Moon hills near the Sugar Loaf.
The 1st Marine division finally takes nearby Wana Ridge with a bloody, two-pronged assault.
The Marines and GIs have suffered 12,000 casualties during their nine-day battle to crack the Shuri, but Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima has lost half of his 115,000 troops since the U. S. landing seven weeks ago.
05/21/1945 With GIs and Marines closing in from three sides, Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima decides to abandon the Shuri Line and retreat to a last-stand fortress near Okinawa's southern tip.
The 6th Marine division slogs toward Naha, Okinawa's smashed capital, wiping out Japanese diehards on Horseshoe and Crescent hills.
The 96th "Deadeye" Infantry clears Conical hill, the Shuri's eastern stronghold, and the 7th "Bayonet" division pushes southward along the island's eastern shore.
In Great Britain, Labor Party leader Clement Attlee announces Labor is withdrawing from Britain's wartime coalition government.
The move forces Churchill to call a July 5 election.
British troops use flamethrowers to destroy the huts of Belsen concentration camp near Hanover, Germany, death site of 50,000 Nazi victims, including 16-year-old Anne Frank, who will be immortalized through her diary.
05/22/1945 Low clouds and rain hide the Japanese withdrawal from Okinawa's Shuri Line. The downpour will continue into early June.
GIs and Marines cautiously follow Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima's retreating forces. The bulk of his army is moving toward a stronghold near the island's southern tip, while 5,000 marines have holed up in the Oroku peninsula on the island's west coast.
The 6th Marine division reaches the Asato river in Naha, the island's capital, and the 7th "Bayonet" Infantry division captures the ruins of Yonabaru on Okinawa's east coast.
SS leader Heinrich Himmler is arrested near Bremen by a British unit.
An American unit seizes 400 tons of V-2 rockets and documents at the Nordhausen rocket assembly plant in central Germany. Rocketmeister Werner von Braun and his top aides will be reunited with the V-2s at White Sands Missile Range, N. M.
05/23/1945 B-29s incinerate 5.3 square miles of Tokyo as Gen. Curtis LeMay resumes firebomb attacks on Japan's largest industrial cities.
The 6th Marine division pushes into the ruins of Naha, Okinawa's capital, once home to 65,000 people and now a deserted pile of rubble without a standing building or passable street. Offshore, kamikazes begin their seventh "Floating Chrysanthemum" assault on Allied ships. They'll hit nine ships in three days.
In the Philippines, the 25th "Tropic Lightning" division breaks into northern Luzon's Cagayan valley, the rice bowl of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita's isolated 14th Army.
The British arrest Adm. Karl Donitz, Hitler's successor; Gen. Alfred Jodl, once Hitler's top military adviser; Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, and other leading Nazis. Himmler commits suicide by biting a concealed cyanide capsule.
05/24/1945 A Japanese suicide commando raid on Okinawa's Yomitan airfield destroys or damages 27 American planes, 70,000 gallons of aviation fuel and some ammunition.
Ten commandos wound 18 and damage the planes and facilities before being wiped out. Americans clean up the mess and the field will be operational tomorrow.
05/25/1945 The heart of Tokyo, including the Ginza and part of the Emperor's palace, is incinerated by 500 B29 Superfortresses.
The last fire raid on the Japanese capital destroys 16.8 square miles of the city. Half of Tokyo now has been leveled. Twenty-six Superforts are shot down and 100 damaged.
Battleship Mississippi begins smashing Shuri Castle, the picturesque, ancient capital of Okinawa. Mississippi's 14-inch guns crush the castle's 20-foot-thick walls but don't touch Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima's underground headquarters.
The U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff issue plans for the invasion of Japan, MacArthur will use the 6th Army, now in the Philippines, to invade Kyushu on Nov. 1.
Honshu, Japan's main home island, will be invaded in March 1946 by the 8th Army, also in the Philippines, and the 1st Army, now in Europe.
05/26/1945 U. S. artillery and naval guns harass Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima's army as it retreats toward its last stand three miles from Okinawa's southern tip.
In the Philippines, GIs of the 25th "Tropic Lightning" Infantry division take Sante Fe in Luzon's Cagayan Valley.
Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita leads the 65,000 survivors of his 14th Army into Luzon's jungle-covered eastern mountains where they'll distract four American divisions until the end of the war.
05/27/1945 Kamikazes begin their eighth "Floating Chrysanthemum" attack near Okinawa, a two-day assault that hits eight American warships. Destroyer Drexler is sunk, tincans Anthony and Braine sent Stateside for repairs, and five other ships damaged. The Japanese lose 100 planes.
Since March 17, 90 ships have been sunk or badly damaged off Okinawa, making it the war's costliest naval campaign.
Jeep carrier Sangamon has been mangled and scuttled, carriers Franklin, Wasp, Bunker Hill and Enterprise badly damaged; and 11 other American and British flattops hit.
05/28/1945 The British begin preparations for liberating Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. The campaigns, scheduled for later this year, are assigned to the British 12th Army commanded by Gen. Montagu Stopfored. The war will end before the British get moving.
The sea war in the Atlantic, Indian and Arctic oceans ends. Allied navy spokesmen say merchant ships will no longer sail in armed convoys and no longer need to be blacked out at night.
During the past six years, German U-boats, surface raiders and bombers have sunk 3,500 Allied ships and killed 45,000 merchant seaman, mostly in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. But 784 U-boats with 28,000 crewmen -- 70 percent of Germany's submarine force -- have lost their lives. Except for kamikazes, that's the war's highest casualty rate for any military organization.
05/29/1945 LeMay's B29 Superfortresses rain 3,200 tons of incendiaries on Yokohama, a Honshu seaport 18 miles from Tokyo. The firebombs devastate the city's industries and torch 60,000 homes.
Leathernecks of the 1st Marine division take Shuri Castle and the abandoned underground headquarters of Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, now directing his army's retreat toward its final stronghold near Okinawa's southern tip.
Offshore, kamikazes mangle destroyer Shubrick and hit destroyer-transport Tatum.
GIs of the 37th "Buckeye" Infantry division and Filipino guerrillas are ordered to overrun the Cagayan Valley and prevent Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita's famished troops from harvesting the valley's crops.
05/30/1945 Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima successfully finishes his retreat to his final Okinawan defense line. Covered by low clouds and heavy rain, more than 30,000 men of his 32nd Army and hordes of Okinawan civilians have fallen back to a mountainous, 8-square-mile refuge near the island's southern tip. Ushijima's new line is anchored by two tunnel-pierced mountains, Yoza-dake and Yaeju-dake.
But the Japanese have lost 50,000 men in the battle for the Shuri Line, abandoned most of their artillery and are short of food and medical supplies.
Pursuing GIs and Marines encounter little opposition as they take Shuri village, a trio of abandoned Shuri Line fortresses and push along Okinawa's east coast.
Planes from the escort carrier Anzio sink Japanese sub I361 in the western Pacific.
05/31/1945 Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner tells the press the battle of Okinawa is over except for cleaning out pockets of resistance. He's wrong. It will continue for three bloody weeks.
Organized Japanese resistance ends on Negros in the central Philippines.
At home, President Truman tells White House counselor James Byrnes that he has reluctantly decided to use the atomic bomb. Truman says the bomb might save 1 million American casualties and shorten the war by a year.
During a Pentagon meeting, bomb-builder J. Robert Oppenheimer predicts radiation will kill everyone within two-thirds of a mile of an A-bomb detonation and unleash a tremendously bright flash that will reach 10,000 to 20,000 feet.
Odilo Globocnik, director of the holocaust in Poland and a death camp organizer, is arrested by a British patrol in Austria. He commits suicide by biting a hidden cyanide capsule.
