Kent, August 12th, 1944
Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy USN, flinched as he hit the ground and he released his parachute. The BQ-8 he had took off with earlier was supposed to be on its way to its target in Germany. Whether it would reach it was not his problem. His work for today was over...
Moldavia, August 13th, 1944
The Soviet 2nd Ukrainian front was not yet completely ready to launch its offensive that would hopefully knock Romania out of the war, existing plans called for the offensive to begin in a week's time. But Rodion Malinovsky had no intention to let the Germans and Romanians retreat to their new defensive line between the Carpathians and the Danube unhindered and had little trouble convincing the STAVKA and Stalin that the date of the offensive should be brought forward. Nearly 1.3 million Soviet soldiers went to the attack. The German-Romanian redeployment was still underway...
Bucharest, August 13th, 1944
The politicians making up the National Democratic Front met in a hurry. The Soviet offensive had caught them by surprise, they were supposed to be negotiating with the Soviets in Stockholm. Immediate action against Antonescu was now needed before it was too late. The plans for a coup were set to motion in parallel with a last attempt to convince Antonescu to agree to an armistice. Antonescu shaken by the early success of the Soviet offensive, German and Romanian divisions had already begun crumbling under the Soviet attack, was willing to discuss an armistice but for now was insisting the Romanian army should first retreat to its new line of defense...
Constantinople, August 13th 1944
The Bosporus remained quiet. Earlier in the day the Soviet ambassador in Sofia had handed prime minister Muraviev much to his shock a Soviet declaration o war against Bulgaria. But the Soviet soldiers in Uskudar had hardly fired a shot so far. As long as they did not the Bulgarian soldiers on the European side were under strict orders.
Thrace, August 14th, 1944
Komotini was liberated by the Greek army. Thrace was turning in something of a sideshow as both the Greek and the Bulgarian armies where concentrating their attention on the Greek advance to Sofia. But the Greek D Corps under the newly promoted general Euripidis Bakirtzis kept pushing eastwards, its advance spearheaded by the Greek III Armoured Division and supported by elements of the Greek navy.
Belgrade, August 14th, 1944
Hermann Neubacher, was usually a composed man. Today he was literally screaming to
Milan Stojadinovic at the top of his lungs. Stojadinovic had been prime minister of Yugoslavia till prince Paul had unceremoniously kicked him out in Christmas 1937, only for the Italians to install him as head of the new puppet government of occupied Serbia. The Germans had kept him, as despite the increasing sabotage and guerilla activity he did manage to keep a lid on things. Nit any more. Earlier in the day Serbia and Montenegro had erupted into all out revolt as the Chetnik command had proclaimed a general uprising in the name of the Royal government, with BBC and Radio Athens making sure the message of revolt reached far and wide. This was the last thing the German army fighting in the south needed and Stojadinovic appeared completely unable to be of any help. The Serbian State Guard and the "legal Chetniks" of the late Kosta Pecanac, Pecanac himself had been captured and executed by Chetnik units loyal to the Athens government earlier in the year, were deserting or outright joining the rebels, in hopes of escaping retribution. The only force still loyal to the puppet government and the Germans was the Serbian Volunteer Corps of
Dimitrije Ljotić which numbered fewer than ten thousand men...
Cote D' Azur, August 15th, 1944
Ten Allied battleships and over two dozen cruisers, from the US, Britain, France, Greece and Italy provided gunfire support to the American and French troops hitting the beaches as operation Anvil begun. Earlier in the day US and Canadian paratroopers had opened the liberation of South France. The Germans were supposed to have an entire army group occupying the area and were expecting an Allied Aphibius assault in the Mediterranean. And yet there was very little the could do to stop it against overwhelming Allied naval and air superiority, nearly 3,500 aircraft were flying shorties in support of the landings. By nighttime three American divisions were securely ashore with minimal casualties...
Spanish-French frontier, August 15th, 1944
450,000 Spanish soldiers attacked over the border. The handful of German units covering the border and the roughly 40,000 Falangists that had escaped into France earlier in the year were hardly a match for all the difficult terrain. The Spanish army was lacking inn armor and modern equipment, its most modern arms ironically enough had been German designs locally build in Spain and German arms captured in North Africa ad the Balkans and delivers to Spain. But no man had ever accused Spanish soldiers of lack of courage annd the Spanish provisional government under general Ochoa had a lot of scores to close with the Germans for instigating the second civil war. Besides Ochoa could well see which side was winning the world war and that his own nationalists despite disassociating themselves from the Falange were still tarnished in the eyes of broad swaths of the Western public for their collusion with Italy and Germany in the first civil war...
Off Toulon, August 16th, 1944
The crew of the destroyer Meliti [1], the latest and last of of the J class destroyers built in Greece, was in a dark mood, the previous day its sister ship Sachturis had been hit and sunk by a Hs 293 guided bomb, dropped by a German Do.217 that had managed to slip through the Allied air cover. Then the ship's ASDIC pinged something and all else was forgotten as the ship took a swift turn towards the contact. Not long later Meliti's Hedgehog launcher begun firing sinking the contact. The submarine would be identified after the German surrended as U407. The Kriegsmarine had begun the year with 25 submarines in the Mediterranean. Now none remained. Its foray in the Mediterranean had cost it 68 submarines in total since 1941.
Paris, August 16th, 1944
Erwin Rommel shook the hand of Walter Model and left headquarters. His insistence to retreat from Falaise had cost him his position as commander of Army Group B. Ironically enough Model after an initial order to hold the pocket would proceed with convincing Hitler to allow him to retreat. In the meantime news from the frontline were an endless litany of defeats, the latest the liberation of Chartres by the US army.
Bucharest, August 16th, 1944
The Iron Guard was on the move. News had reached Corneliu Codreanu and the German embassy of Antonescu discussing with the politicians his resignation and an armistice with the Soviets. This would not do. Codreanu was determined that Romania would fight to the last drop of blood against both the communists and the capitalists. The Guard backed by German soldiers would soon capture the ministry of the interior and manage to arrest Antonescu. But their initial attack on the ministry of war would be beaten back and Iuliu Maniu the leading politician of the National Democratic Front was nowhere to be found, he had gone in hiding days before the coup in anticipation of the NDF's own coup planned for the 18th...
Zonguldak, Turkey, August 16th, 1944
The quartet of surviving Turkish navy destroyers, laid up since May begun raising steam again. Their crews looked with some curiosity at the quartet of Soviet ships that had come to join them. Both the heavy cruiser Voroshilov and the three Type 7 destroyers were vaguely reminiscent of the Turks own Italian ships. But this mattered little. The Soviet soldiers boarding all ships mattered not. The joint flotilla was obviously on its way on some mission and the government in Sivas had decided to lend the Soviets, whose own Black Sea fleet had been decimated, a hand on that mission...
Sofia, August 16th to 17th, 1944
Konstantin Muraviev, could see from his window the night skyline being lit from end to end by the fire of the Greek artillery and the thunder of the guns could be easily heard, earlier in the day the Greeks had taken Pernik a mere 30 km from Sofia and were pushing hard. Fires were burning in the city itself despite the best efforts of Sofia's fire brigade from the latest RAF raid. Filov on their latest meeting had clearly lost it and was grabbing at straws talking of the duty of Bulgaria to stand by the side of its German allies and of the army turning Sofia into the death ground of the Greek army. How Sofia would hold out without starving, with tens of thousands of refugees streaming into it in addition to its own population and the army was a different question. But then the regent was in the Germans pocket and had been spooked by the news of the German backed coup in Romania. Muraviev was made of sterner staff and he was not going to let Filov destroy what was left of the country, or the Germans overthrow him. Filov had brought a third national catastrophe, after these of 1913 and 1918. He had to end it while there was still time. He raised the telephone. As soon as he heard Kimon Georgiev on the other side of the line he said a single word. "Begin"
Over the next hour army units loyal to Bulgaria's Fatherland Front, a coalition of Muraviev's own
Agrarians,
Zveno, the
Social Democratic Workers Party and the Bulgarian Communist party, would arrest the regents and disarm men loyal to them and the few German units within the country. At dawn Muraviev would go over the radio announcing the formation of a government of national unity by the front, with him remaining as prime minister and general
Damyan Velchev as minister of war. Then he would announce Bulgaria's offer of an unconditional armistice to the United Nations...
[1] Ancient Greek name of Malta
