In a time when the media assault on our senses is relentless and undifferentiated - Tsunami equals Jennifer & Brad equals Iraq equals Terri Schiavo equals Michael Jackson equals Steroids equals The Apprentice equals ...? - it might be instructive to look back 60 years, which some of us can do and actually remember the days, to April 1945, a month that gave the world 30 days of remarkable headlines about truly big news as World War II entered its final months in Europe and in the Pacific.
April 1 - U.S. forces invade Okinawa: Some 60,000 American forces landed on Okinawa, a large island situated just 300 miles from the Japanese homeland. Waiting on the Americans were more than 100,000 Japanese, virtually all committed to fight to the death for their country and their god-man emperor: Hirohito. Some 80 days later the battle was over, at a cost of 110,000 Japanese killed, and 10,000 taken prisoner. The U.S. Army and Marines lost 7,613 men, with an additional 31,000 wounded, while 4,320 Navy sailors and pilots died, many victims of a new form of sudden death, the kamikaze pilot.
April 12 - Roosevelt is dead at 63; Truman sworn in: Not yet three months into his fourth term as president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dead. He was 63 and was fatally stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait in Warm Springs, Ga. The dominant partner in the Allies' World War II alliance and a domestic politician without peer, FDR (his headline name) is eulogized as a leader who "died a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people." Harry S. Truman of Missouri, Roosevelt's third vice president, takes the oath of office as the nation's 32nd chief executive. A virtual nonentity to most American citizens, Truman would make his own history over the next seven years.
Buchenwald liberated: Unsuspecting U.S. Army troops advance on Buchenwald and find bodies stacked 75 high in a desolate camp where, it was later determined, 50,000 had been murdered. Two weeks later, U.S. forces liberate Dachau and its satellite camps. Most of the 30,000 prisoners were too weak to react to being freed; another 30,000 had died by murderous means. More Holocaust discoveries followed.
April 14 - Allies cease air operations in Europe: The strategic air war that began with the German bombing of England in 1940 is over; the sovereign nation of Germany is, for all purposes, a mass of rubble.
April 23 - Russians enter Berlin: Stalin's Red Army reaches the outskirts of Berlin; some 3 ½ years have passed since Adolf Hitler's legions had come within a wintry day or two of capturing Moscow.
April 24 - Petain charged with treason: Marshal Philippe Petain, aged head of the Vichy government and a national hero in France during World War I, is arrested and charged with treason for his government's collaboration with the occupying Nazis.
April 25 - Allies, Russians hook up: Allies West (the U.S. First Army under Gen. Courtney Hodges) and East (the Red Army under Marshal Ivan Konev) link up with handshakes in the German heartland, at the Elbe River at Torgau.
United Nations convenes: President Truman addresses by telephone the first organizing session of the United Nations in San Francisco, urging the representatives of 47 countries to "rise above personal interests" to create a world body that can enforce justice and keep the peace.
April 28 - Mussolini shot, hanged: Il Duce is dead. Benito Mussolini, the theatrical Fascist who commanded Italians' loyalty for more than two decades and who was an Axis partner of Hitler and the Japanese warlord Hideki Tojo, is shot, then hanged upside down in Milan by Italian partisans. Next to him on the impromptu gallows are his mistress, Clara Petacci, and two associates.
April 30 - Hitler takes own life: Adolf Hitler commits suicide by cyanide in his Berlin hideaway, his "Thousand-Year Reich" buried deep in the ashes left across Europe by the war he had started less than six years before. The Nazi leader had assumed power in Germany in 1933, seven weeks before Roosevelt took office. Hitler's rabid lieutenant and the Nazis' venomous propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, takes his life the next day.
So ended 30 days in April 1945. Victory in Europe was a week away. Three months later, Hirohito would concede the Pacific War in an address to his subjects, the billowing clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki giving a dreadful punctuation to 72 months of worldwide conflict.
Thomas Mulvoy is faculty member in the communications department and former managing editor of The Boston Globe.
is a member of the 
Be the first to comment on this article!