The Second World War was drawing to a close. In January the Red
Army launched a major offensive which came earlier than originally planned
and was meant to ease the plight of the Western Allies still hurting from
the thrashing they had suffered in the massive German counterstroke in
the Ardennes. As part of the Vistula-Oder operation, the Russian troops
crossed the German border and kept moving westward until they came within
barely 60 kilometers of Berlin. It was against this backdrop that Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea on February 4 through 11
for another conference to decide, among other things, the future of Germany.
The Allied leaders agreed to press for an unconditional German surrender
and a subsequent occupation of the whole country.
In February the Western Allies launched a general offensive and
in March they crossed the Rhine. A 325,000- strong German force was encircled
and forced to lay down their arms. From then on, the Allies' advance became
a procession…
On April 16 the Red Army commenced its final advance on Berlin.
Three fronts led by the outstanding Soviet Marshals Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin
Rokossovsky and Ivan Konev burst out of their bridgeheads and within a
week they were driving into the suburbs of the embattled German capital.
At 3 a.m. Berlin time the Soviet tanks and infantry, backed by the dazzling
light coming from hundreds of powerful searchlights, charged forward… Four
days later Berlin had been completely isolated by the encircling armies
of Zhukov and Konev. The agonizing Nazi regime was bracing up for its last
battle. Almost all of Hitler's henchmen had already deserted him and were
desperately seeking contact with the Americans to establish a united front
against Russia. Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, still counted on some miracle
to bring salvation almost until the last hour. That was his state of mind
when at midnight on April 12, 1945, the news reached him that Franklin
Roosevelt had died suddenly. Hitler hoped that the alliance between the
Eastern and Western Powers would now break up through the clash of their
rival interests. Despaired of seeing his hopes fulfilled, Hitler decided
to commit suicide. On the same day on April 29 he learned that Benito Mussolini
had been caught and executed by the Italian partisans who hanged him, his
head downward, near a gas station in Milan for the people to spit on. On
April 30, shortly after a red flag had been hoisted over the Reichstag,
the Fuhrer killed himself in the ruins of the of the Chancellery. Hitler's
body was hurriedly cremated in the garden in accord with his instructions…
The German troops surrendered on May 7 and, in the early hours
of May 9, Field Marshal Keitel signed an unconditional surrender in the
presence Marshal Georgy Zhukov and American, British and French representatives.
From that day on the German troops started laying down their arms. The
war in Europe was over…
With Japan now almost completely routed, nuclear physicists working
at a top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, were finishing their work
on a testable atomic bomb… On June 16, 1945, in a desert area at Alamogordo,
New Mexico, an implosion device was set off generating explosive power
equivalent to about 20,000 tons of TNT. On the morning of August 6, just
two days prior to Russia's expected entering the war, a specially-equipped
B-29 heavy bomber dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. A second bomb
was dropped on August 9 over Nagasaki. The combined death toll from the
two explosions reached 200,000 lives. War is a cruel thing, but there can
be no justification for anyone using nuclear weapons against peaceful civilians.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dictated not so much by military
needs as by the US desire to rule supreme over the post-war world.
Meanwhile, the Red Army directed its main blow at the 1 million-strong
Kwantung Army which had dug its heels in Manchuria. The Japanese proved
a hard nut to crack. Braving mountains, rivers, the taiga and the marshlands,
the Russian troops faced stiff, even fanatical, resistance by the Japanese,
especially their Kamikaze units. On August 14 the Japanese government took
a decision to surrender, but the Kwantung Army kept fighting on and even
counterattacked at some points. The Red Army was hard to beat though and
so, on September 2, 1945, the Japanese emissaries signed an unconditional
surrender on board the US battleship Missouri in the presence of representatives
of all the countries who had fought Japan during the war. The Red Army's
entire campaign in the Far East took a mere 24 days to complete .
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE
