April 26th, 1943 (MONDAY)
GERMANY: Tonight the RAF bomb Duisburg with
561 aircraft.
POLAND: Warsaw: At the close of a busy day,
SS General Stroop reported by teletype to SS headquarters from the Warsaw
Ghetto: "A further 1,330 Jews pulled out of dug-outs and immediately
destroyed; 362 Jews killed in battle." The day before, reporting the
capture of 27,464 Jews, he told Himmler that he was ordering a train to take
them to Treblinka extermination camp.
Stroop says that he has lost only 16 men in the battles, though the Jews put the figure at several hundred. He claims that the ghetto has been cleared, but there are still Jews hiding in the sewers, while others have escaped to seek refuge in the Christian sector of the city.
U.S.S.R.: Russia breaks diplomatic relations with the Exiled Polish Government over allegations concerning the Katyn Massacre.
TUNISIA: Longstop Hill, the gateway to the Tunisian plain, falls to the British V Corps.
INDIAN OCEAN: Off Mauritius: Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the Indian National Army, is transferred from a U-boat to a Japanese submarine en route from Berlin to Penang.
AUSTRALIA: 79 Squadron RAAF is formed on Spitfire Vcs at Laverton under Sqn Ldr AC Rawlinson. (Daniel Ross)
PACIFIC OCEAN: Japanese submarine I-23 is sunk by the USS Tautog (SS-199) south of Hawaii. (Mike Yared)(144&145)
U.S.A.: Japanese held harbour at Attu in the Aleutian Islands is bombed by a US naval squadron under the command of Admiral McMorris.Operation Cartwheel is agreed to. This has US Admiral Halsey's forces move through New Georgia and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. US General Douglas MacArthur will move NW along the coast of New Guinea. Then they will both attack Rabaul, New Britain and Kavieng, New Ireland.