LETTER #62 - 29 JAN 1945 from Private Raymond Kubick Jr.

My Little Notes: 
Not much to add to Ray's letter to my grandparents.  He is still a private and just arrived at Boca Raton, Florida for his continued training.  He sounds so polite and sincere in his letters.  Sorry to say we won't be hearing from Ray for the rest of 1945.  It won't be until 1946 that we will hear from Ray again.  However, Uncle's Louie's other Army buddy, Alvin Lloyd has some letters coming up soon.


Here are some current events that were going on in WWII around the same time as this letter:  

• January 17 – WWII:
  • The Soviet Union occupies Warsaw, Poland.
  • A Soviet patrol arrests Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary.
• January 18 – The Holocaust: The SS begins evacuation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Nearly 60,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, are forced to march to other locations in Germany; as many as 15,000 die. The 7,000 too sick to move are left without supplies being distributed.
• January 20 – Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated to a fourth term as President of the United States, the only President ever to exceed two terms.
• January 23 – WWII
  • Hungary agrees to an armistice with the Allies.
  • German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the start of Operation Hannibal, the mass evacuation by sea of German troops and civilians from the Courland Pocket, East Prussia and the Polish Corridor.
• January 24 – WWII: AP war correspondent Joseph Morton, nine OSS men, and four SOE agents are executed by the Germans atMauthausen concentration camp under Hitler's Commando Order of 1942 which stipulates the immediate execution of all captured Allied commandos or saboteurs without trial, even those in proper uniforms. Morton is the only Allied correspondent to be executed by the Axis during the war.
• January 26 – WWII: Infantry action at Holtzwihr, France, for which Audie Murphy is awarded the Medal of Honor.^[1]
• January 27 – The Holocaust: The Soviet Red Army liberates the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.
• January 28 – WWII: Supplies begin to reach China over the newly reopened Burma Road.
• January 30
  • MV Wilhelm Gustloff, with over 10,000 mainly civilian Germans from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) is sunk in Gdańsk Bay by threetorpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea; up to 9,400 are thought to have died – the greatest loss of life in a single ship sinking in war action in history.
  • WWII: Raid at Cabanatuan: 121 American soldiers and 800 Filipino guerrillas free 813 American prisoners of war from the Japanese-held camp in the city of Cabanatuan in the Philippines.
  • Adolf Hitler makes his last public speech to be delivered personally, on broadcast radio, expressing the belief that Germany will triumph.
• January 31 – WWII: Eddie Slovik is executed by firing squad near Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines for desertion, the only U.S. soldier since the American Civil War ever executed for this offense.