Monday, October 31, 2022

Saturday, October 31, 1942. False assumptions.

Hitler moved his headquarters from Werwolf in Ukraine back to the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia (now part of Poland) confident that Stalingrad would soon fall.

By I, Dennis Nilsson, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2916843

Hitler seemed oddly possessed of the notion that his physical presence close to the front served the Nazi war effort, whereas the Allied leaders generally governed from their capital cities, with certain exceptions from time to time.

Hitler's HQ's also demonstrated an odd fascination with wolves, which are native to Germany but which had been extirpated by the 1940s. They returned to Germany only in recent years.

The Luftwaffe hit Canterbury in their largest raid on England since the Blitz.  However, as Sara Sundin notes on her blog, their efforts were hampered by barrage balloons. During the raid, famous German fighter pilot Paul Galland, brother of the more famous Adolf Galland, was shot down while flying a FW190 by Spitfires.

White Christmas by Bing Crosby took the number one position on Billboard's singles chart.

In spite of the Christmas themed song on the charts, it was Halloween.  In the U.S. kids were out trick or treating, but on coastal cities, for the first time, that was during the day, due to blackouts at night.

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