Monday, August 23, 1943. Kharkiv changes hands for the last time.

Today in World War II History—August 23, 1943: Soviets take Kharkiv, Ukraine, the fourth and final time it changes hands during World War II, and the Germans lose the Donets Basin industrial area.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=593872

And that was a big deal in the war, we might note.

We should also note that the Red Army took massive casualties in the Battle of Kursk and its independent subparts, and in the counteroffensive following it.  While putting it oddly, an achievement of the Red Army by this point of the war was being able to sustain huge manpower and material losses and not disintegrate.  On the other hand, while the Red Army has numerous fans, it was fighting in a style that simply tolerated losses at a level that anything other than a totalitarian state could not endure, something the Germans also would do, but with the Soviets taking much larger casualties.

Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, a Polish born senior Soviet commander, had his illustration appear on the cover of Time.  The painting, which we cannot put up here as it is copyright protected, featured the Soviet general looking forward with piercing blue eyes and the words "USSR" behind him.  He was painted seemingly thinner than he was in real life.  Rokossovsky had been arrested during the Purge but had amazing survived, and then was dragged back out of confinement when it ended and the Red Army was in need of experienced commanders, which he was, after the disaster of the Winter War.  He never blamed Stalin for his confinement, but rather the NKVD, taking a politic, if toady, approach to both the horror and his ongoing servitude to the monstrosity of the USSR.

Orphaned as a child, he'd joined the Imperial Russian Army during World War One, then went over to the Reds during the Revolution.  After the war, in 1949, he became the Polish Minister of Defense under Stalin's orders, showing the extent to which Communist Poland was a puppet. He was not popular with the Poles, which he knew, commenting;  "In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian".

Rokossovsky and his wife Julia had a daughter named Ariadna.  He cheated on his wife with Army doctor military doctor Galina Talanova during the war, with whom he had a second child named Nadezhda.  He was fond of hunting.

He died in 1968 of prostate cancer in Moscow at age 71.

Life magazine, in contrast, had a black and white portrait of a young couple dancing the Lindy Hop.

Uruguay transferred German sailors of the battleship Graf Spee and auxiliary ship Tacoma to an internment camp at Sarandi Del Li after they violated the conditions of their internment in Montevideo boarding houses.

The Pasadena Post reported on the cast of Poppa is All touring military bases, which included Casper born and Lander raised former Miss Wyoming Helen Mowery.

Fairly forgotten in our present age, she was born Helen Inkster to parents who parents who owned the Quality Grocery in Casper, back in an age when Casper, like most communities, had a large number of local grocery stores.  Her father worked at a local refiner as well, and died in an industrial accident there when she was five.  Her mother then moved to her parent's ranch in Fremont County, while also giving birth to her only sibling at that time, the boy being born after the father's death.  When of high school age, she was sent to Cheyenne to complete her public school education.  Her popularity was notable even at that early age.  She became Miss Wyoming in 1939 in a competition that didn't qualify for the national one, as it was essentially a rodeo queen competition, with riding part of it.

She attended the University of Wyoming for two years after graduating from high school in 1940, but became an actress after that.  Never a big screen name, she acted as late as 1961, and died in 2008 in Pasadena at age 86.