Wednesday, September 1, 1943. Tiny islands. Amon Göth.

U.S. forces landed on Baker Island.  An airstrip was built within a week.

Baker is a minuscule uninhabited Pacific Island, but was situated to support the campaign in the Gilberts.  Despite its tiny size, it had been briefly inhabited in the 1930s, when Baker and Howland saw American settlers brought there under the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project.

Baker in the 1930s.

The remaining three-person population was evacuated in 1942 after the Japanese attacked the island.

U.S. forces took Orete Cove on Vella Lavella.

Minami-Tori-shima, 1,000 miles from Tokyo and the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago. was attacked by the Fast Carrier Task Force consisting of the Essex, the Yorktown and the Independence.

Minami-Tori-shima.  The nearest island is 1,000 miles distant.

The I-182 was sunk in the Coral Sea by the USS Wadsworth.

From Sarah Sundin's blog, the Navy took over coastal submarine patrols, relieving the Army Air Force from that duty.  Sundin also noted that the Civil Air Patrol, the Air Force Auxiliary, had during its run spotted 173 subs, 91 vessels in distress, and lifeboats carrying 363 survivors, quite a record.

The Red Army took Dorogobuzh.

Vogue hit the stands with a cover that had a stylish woman on the cover, and the words "Take A Job. Release a man to fight".  One of the articles was "Why Aren't You Working?"  Another was "Does War Drive People Crazy?"

Amon Göth, a central figure portrayed in the movie Schindler's List, decreed that Jewish workers could no longer work in factories in neighboring Płaszów, but excluded non-Jewish Poles in his confinement.

A brutal camp commandant, Göth was an Austrian.  He's turned to extreme right wing poliics by age 17, and was an early member of the Nazi Party.  His frst marriage to Olga Janauschek, a woman with a notably Slavic name, was brief and ended in 1934.  He married again to Anny Geiger, but that marriage, which overlapped with his crimes, ended when Geiger discovered his affair with Schindler secretary, Ruth Irene Kalder.  He had several children, including one with Kalder.

He was relieved of his command in September 1944 under suspicion of theft and other crimes, one being failing to adequately feed his prisoners.  SS doctors subsequently diagnosed Göth with a mental illness, and he was committed to a mental institution in Bad Tölz in Bavaria.  He was arrested by U.S. authorities at the end of the war, and turned over to Poland, which executed him after a trial.