Wednesday, March 3, 1943. Accidents.

173 people were crushed to death in London's Bethnal Green tube, where they were sheltering from an air raid.

The rush to the shelter was started when people fled into the tube due to a salvo of British anti-aircraft rockets being launched from Victoria Park.

British anti-aircraft rockets.

The German minelayer Doggerbank was sunk by the German U-43 in a case of mistaken identity.  Following its routine orders, the U-43 departed without attempting to pick up survivors, and 365 people drowned.  A single person survived, lasting 26 days at sea before being picked up by a Spanish ship.

The Doggerbank was a captured British vessel, so the mistake was perhaps excusable.  Converted into a minelayer, it laid mines off of South Africa in January 1942 and proceeded to Japan, twice being challenged as a British vessel on the way and successfully fooling the challenging ships.  In Japan, it took on the survivors of the auxiliary cruiser Thor, a German tanker, and the Altmark.  She sank within two minutes when attacked.

The U43 was sunk by an American torpedo bomber that following July.

Gandi ended his protest fast.

Twenty-three year veteran of the Red Army, Andrey Vlasov, published "Why I have taken up the struggle against Bolshevism" in the newspaper Zarya.

Vlasov had been captured by the Germans and then became a German collaborator, commanding the Russian Liberation Army, which saw little action during the war.  I know little about him, and don't really know what his reasons were.  He'd cause his troops to switch sides again, to a degree, late in the war, by which time his fate, and theirs, was effectively sealed.

Vlasov started off, like Stalin, as a divinity student at a Russian Orthodox seminary.  He quit that in 1919 and joined the Red Army.  He didn't become a Communist, however, until 1930.  He served successfully as an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek from 1938 to 1939 before going on to command the 99th Rifle Division.  Up until his capture, he generally was well regarded in the Red Army.

Vlasov would claim that he became an anti Communist while trying to evade German capture.  A post-war analysis of the 180 Red Army generals who joined Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army revealed that most of them had personally experienced NKVD atrocities prior to the war.