Thursday, September 11, 1941. Starts and Finishes.

 Ground was broken for the Pentagon on this day in 1941.

1942 Construction.

President Roosevelt gave a fireside speech on the Greer incident, you can listen to it HERE.

In it, he announced:

In the waters which we deem necessary for our defense, American naval vessels and American planes will no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking under the water, or Axis raiders on the surface of the sea, strike their deadly blow -- first.
Upon our naval and air patrol -- now operating in large number over a vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean -- falls the duty of maintaining the American policy of freedom of the seas -- now. That means, very simply, (and) very clearly, that our patrolling vessels and planes will protect all merchant ships -- not only American ships but ships of any flag -- engaged in commerce in our defensive waters. They will protect them from submarines; they will protect them from surface raiders.
This situation is not new. The second President of the United States, John Adams, ordered the United States Navy to clean out European privateers and European ships of war which were infesting the Caribbean and South American waters, destroying American commerce.
The third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, ordered the United States Navy to end the attacks being made upon American and other ships by the corsairs of the nations of North Africa.

Stalin fired Semyon Budyonny as Commander in Chief of the Soviet Southwest Direction.

Budyonny in 1943.

Budyonny was a former Imperial Russian cavalryman of peasant background.  He was one of Stalin's favorites and amazingly lived out his life until his final days, long outliving his patron.  In the course of his life he managed to survive World War One, the Russian Civil War, and more amazingly Stalin's bloody decimation of the Red Army in the late 1930s.  Married three times, his first wife died under odd circumstances by a gunshot wound, his second wife, half his age, was arrested in Stalin's mass arrests and charged with espionage, after which he divorced her and married her cousin, 33 years his junior.

He was a survivor, and also an expert on horses.