The USS Wyoming in Chesapeake Bay, April 18, 1944. The Wyoming was a training ship during World War Two and was so frequently in Chesapeake Bay she was nicknamed "The Chesapeake Raider".
The combined Allied Air Forces achieved a new daily record, and dropped over 4,000 tons of bombs on Germany and occupied France.
On the same day, the Luftwaffe sent 125 aircraft on a raid over London, the last of the "Little Blitz" air raids. Fourteen German aircraft were brought down. Fifty-three tons of bombs were dropped on the city, and a hospital was amongst the buildings hit.
The Red Army took Balaclava.
German and Hungarian forces counterattacked at Buchach.
The British government banned coded radio and telegraph transmissions from the UK. Diplomats are forbidden to leave, and diplomatic bags are censored, with excepts for the US, USSR and the Polish government in exile. Incitement to strike is made a punishable offense.
The British 5th Brigade linked up with the Kohima garrison, braking the encirclement of the city.
The USS Gudgeon was sunk off of Iwo Jima by a Mitsubishi G3M.
The Vatican established the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza to provide rapid, non-bureaucratic and direct aid to needy populations, refugees, and prisoners in Europe.
Men of the 5th Cavalry Rgt. were landed on Los Negros to back up the previous landings. Momote Airfield was taken.
Lend Lease aid to Turkey was cut off. That it was ever extended is interesting, in that Turkey had not joined the war and in fact was still being courted by both sides.
Maj. Graham Batchelor, Milledgeville, Ga., U.S. Army Infantry Liaison Officer, eating with Chinese officers, March 2, 1944.
The 16th Academy Awards were held at Grauman's Chinese Theater, the first time the awards were held in a large public venue.
Casablanca won Best Picture and Best Director. Other films that were nominated were, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, The Human Comedy, In Which We Serve, The More the Merrier, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette and Watch on the Rhine. Of those, I've only seenCasablanca, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Song of Bernadette all of which are truly excellent.
Paul Lukas won best actor for Watch on the Rhine. Jennifer Jones won best actress for The Song of Bernadette.
Sounding like a story line out of an Alanis Morissette song, Eleftherios Venizelos, a Greek hero, was elected as the Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament by his colleagues only to go on and have a heart attack that day during the parliamentary session. He'd serve in the position for only six days, but would live until 1936.
Walter P. Chrysler introduced his first car, the Chrysler Six Model B-70.
Celia Cooney, age 19, commenced her criminal career with the robbery of the Thomas Ralston Grocery store in Brooklyn. Her husband, Ed Cooney, drove the getaway car.
Their criminal career ended in April when they were caught. Ed Cooney lost an arm due to an injury while in prison and recovered $12,000 against the State of New York in 1931 as a result. The same year they were released. He died in 1936 of tuberculosis, and she remarried in 1943. She passed away in 1992.
No ball was dropped in Times Square for the second year in a row.
With a strange mixture of abandon and restraint, San Francisco accorded 1943 a reasonable facsimile of the traditional year-end sendoff last night, and then settled back for a more or less sober inspection of A. D. 1944.
San Francisco Examiner.
Friday, given the nature of the celebrations of New Years, is a particularly good day for the end of the year to fall on.
Not everyone was celebrating:
Photo of a U.S air raid on a ball bearing plant near Paris, December 31, 1943.
The Marines secured an airfield on Cape Gloucester; and
The commissioning of the USS Cassin Young, which is a museum ship today (photo on blog included). Ms. Sundin, it should be noted, has an article on museum destroyers. I'd like to visit one. I've been on battleships and submarines, but not destroyers.
Hitler delivered a New Year's message to the Germans admitting that the Third Reich had suffered heavy reverses in and that the upcoming year would require more, and in fact would approach the crisis level. He also noted that the Allies would land on the Atlantic Coast.
It's often noted, and apparently correctly, that the German people didn't really appreciate the dire circumstances they were in until January 1945. While that seems to be true, it's hard to understand, given that they were certainly getting lots of bad news, in this case even from the very top.
It should be noted that the concluding year, 1943, was the one in which not only did German battlefield fortunes begin to massively decline, but that an accompanying massive expansion of the Holocaust began.
In preparation for those landings, Field Marshall Rommel was inspecting fortifications on the coast of Northern France.
Douglas MacArthur visited troops under his command, including this group of Native American soldiers.
From left: Staff Sergeant Virgil Brown (Pima), First Sergeant Virgil F. Howell (Pawnee), Staff Sergeant Alvin J. Vilcan (Chitimacha), General MacArthur, Sergeant Byron L. Tsingine (Diné [Navajo]), Sergeant Larry Dekin (Diné [Navajo]).
Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee broadcast a New Years Eve message to the British people promising that the "hour of reckoning" had come for Germany, but also warning that 1944 would involve heavy sacrifice.
The Red Army captured Zhytomyr.
Argentina's President, Gen. Pedro Ramirez, dissolved political parties and restored the requirement of Roman Catholic education in all Argentine public schools.
Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. (John Denver) was born in Rosewell, New Mexico.
Sub Lt. G.C. Morris flying Spitfire P8537 of 761 Squadron attempting land on HMS Ravager without a tail wheel - New Year's Eve 1943.
F.F. Calkin, of Cadillac, Michigan, and J. Ferber, of Camden, New Jersey, using British bicycles for transportation in England, 1943.
Today In Wyoming's History: December 29: 1943 Wartime quotas of new adult bicycles for January cut in half, with 40 being allotted to Wyoming.Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
Bicycles at high school in Texas, 1943.
This was no small matter. Bicycles had increased enormously in importance due to the war. The National Park Service notes:
Sailors who had bicycled to Arlington Farms, a residence for women who worked in the U.S. government for the duration of the war, from Washington in search of a date, 1943.
Leo Pasvolsky of the State Department finished the draft for the United Nations Charter.
Gen. Eisenhower ordered Allied Commanders to avoid attacking historic Italian monuments to the extent that this was possible; stating:
We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs.
The Royal Air Force resumed bombing Berlin, its Christmas hiatus having ended.
The Red Army took Korosten in Ukraine.
The Italian submarine Axum was scuttled after running aground off of Morea, Greece. The boat had a very successful war record.
The Battle of the Bay of Biscay was fought between the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine. Numerically outmatched, two British light cruisers fought a destroyer and a torpedo boat flotilla of the German Kriegsmarine, the British sank the T26, T25 and the destroyer Z27. The German contingent included a combined eleven destroyers and torpedo boats and had been intended to escort the blockade runner Alsterufer, which had been sunk the day prior.
Mickey Rooney visited the USS Intrepid.
Mickey Rooney on board USS Intrepid (CV 11), December 28, 1943.
The Australian Army prevailed in the Battle of the Pimple in New Guinea.
The Soviet Union began the forcible relocation of 100,000 Kalmyk's to Siberia, having abolished the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic the prior day, as punishment for a Soviet conception that they had supported the Germans. Survivors were allowed to return in 1957 and the region granted autonomy again in 1958.
The Kalmyk's are the only traditionally Buddhist ethnic group in Europe, having relocated originally from Northern China.
The Battle of Ortuna ended in a Canadian victory.
U.S. Army Air Force pilot Lt. Douglas McDow and aviation cadet Clarence A. Thompson disappeared on a training mission after taking off from Douglas, Arizona. The wreckage of their plane, and their remains, were not located until 1974.
People like to imagine that World War Two was a period in which the whole country simply pulled together for the war effort, and we put our differences behind us.
Well, to some extent, but not as much as imagined.
On this day in 1943 President Roosevelt seized the nation's railroads by executive order in advance of a strike scheduled for December 30. The Army took control of the rail lines.
This had last happened on December 26, 1917, for the same reason.
The Battle of the Pimple commenced on New Guinea between the Japanese and the advancing Australians.
The USS Brownson was attacked by Japanese aircraft during the landings, and sunk.
The Moro River Campaign in Italy ended in a stalemate. The Germans were holding their own against, in this case the British 8th Army, but also against the U.S. 5th Army, which did take Monte Sammucro on this day.
The German battleship Scharnhorst was torpedoed and sunk by the HMS Duke of York. All but 36 of her 1,943-man crew perished. The action was termed the Battle of North Cape.
The NFL Championship Game was played, with this coming after Christmas for the first time in the NFL's history. The Bears beat the Redskins 41-21.
1st Marine convoy en route for invasion of Cape Gloucester, New Britain.
Raids on Berlin by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force were temporarily halted. The Luftwaffe likewise conducted no raids on the United Kingdom.
Sixty-four prisoners tunneled out of the Ninth Fort in Lithuania. The facility housed mostly Lithuanian Jews. About half would be recaptured by mid-January.
U.S. Task Force 50.2 raided Kavieng, New Guinea, with aircraft, sinking a Japanese transport ship.
The Scharnhorst departed northern Norway to attack Convoy JW-55B.
The epic The Song of Bernadette was released.
The film tells the story of St. Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant woman who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
Attending movies at Christmas, and even on Christmas Day, is a tradition with a lot of people, although I've never done it.
Christmas service on USS Card, December 25, 1943.
USS Brooklyn (CL 40), galley, Christmas morning, 1943. Malta.
The Red Army commenced the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive.
Operations on the Eastern Front during the relevant time frame, including the offensive in the south.
The operation was very large scale, as everything in the East was by this time, involving around 2,400,000 Soviet personnel against around 900,000 Germans, 300,000 Hungarians and 150,000 Romanians.
In a Christmas Eve radio address, President Roosevelt delivered the news that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower would be in command of the Allied invasion of continental Europe, discounting of course that the Allies had already landed on continental Europe in Italy. The overall "chat" stated:
Beatrix Potter, author of the Peter Rabbit books, died at age 77.
Potter was from a family that held extensive agricultural lands and was, in addition to being an author, a sheep farmer. She married in 1914 over the disapproval of her family, as her husband, a country solicitor, was regarded as being beneath her status. Never having had any children, she left most of her large landholdings to the National Trust. Her husband, who died in 1945, left the balance of them to the National Trust.
Good people.
Some not so good people, including one Adolf Hitler issued a Führerbefehl creating the Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere who were charged with getting German soldiers to believe in final victory, even if they were clueless on how that would come about.
Hmmm. . . .
On the same day the German government ordered that males down to 16 years of age register for conscription.
Hmmm. . . .
The Red Army completed its victory in the Second Battle of Kiev.
The German light cruiser Niobe was sunk off of Siba Yugoslavia by British torpedo boats.
Pierre-Étienne Flandin, a former Prime Minister of France, and briefly Premier of Vichy France, was arrested in Algiers along with former Vichy Interior Minister Marcel Peyrouton, former Vichy Information Secretary Pierre Tixler-Vignacourt, member of parliament André Albert, and Pierre François Boisson, the Vichy Governor-General of French West Africa.
Flandin had been a French pilot during World War One.
Albert had been serving with the Free French forces since June 1943, after he had fled from Vichy.
They would all survive their arrests and falls from grace.
The U-284 was scuttled by the Germans after it received storm damage southeast of Greenland.
Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Franz Stigler, a combat veteran with 22 kills o his record, , escorted the heavily damaged Ameircan B-17 Ye Old Pub out of German airspace rather than shoot it down.
Franz Stigler.
Stigler had shot down two B-17s prior to this incident, but in lining up to shoot down the heavily damaged plane he noticed that its tail gunner took no effort to shoot at him and in flying closer he could see through holes in the fuselage that the aircrew were attempting to save the lives of wounded crewmates. His commanding officer, Gustav Rödel, had earlier told his squadron that "If I hear of one of you shooting a man in a parachute, I'll shoot you myself!" and Stigler determined that this would have amounted to the same thing. He motioned to the pilot, Charles Brown, to fly towards Sweden, but Brown didn't comprehend and instead kept on to the United Kingdom, and Stigler in turn escorted it out of German airspace.
Pilot Charles "Charlie" Brown.
Stigler kept the act to himself, as he would have been court martialed for it. Brown did report the incident to his superiors, who kept it secret. Brown's superiors had threatened his men if they landed in a neutral country.
Brown and Stigler met after the war many years later and became friends. They both died in 2008. Stigler, who didn't tell anyone of the incident until Brown revealed it many years later, immigrated to Canada and entered the lumber industry in Vancouver. Brown retired from the Air Force in 1965.
The SS reported on requirements for invading Switzerland, which demonstrates how the tyrannical become delusional as their fortunes decline.
Canadian armor in Ortuna.
The Battle of Ortona commenced in Italy with the 1st Canadian Division attacking positions held by the German 1st Parachute Division. The battle would be hard fought, and compared to Stalingrad due to the urban conditions. Less certain is the importance of the town, which has been debated and even at the time commented upon by the Germans.
Bolivian President Enrique Peñaranda was overthrown in a military coup led by Major Gualberto Villarroel just over two weeks after the country had entered World War Two, although the coup had nothing to do with that. Villarroel himself fall by the sword in a 1946 revolution.
The U-850 was sunk by aircraft from the U.S. escort carrier Boque.
Corsair damaged over Bougainville, December 19, 1943.
On Panay Island, in the Philippines, ten American Baptist missionaries, along with a handful of other Americans, were captured by the Japanese Army after having been in hiding for two years.
They offered to be executed in exchange for the release of Filipino's captured with them and were in fact killed by the Japanese, adults by beheading and children by bayoneting.
American forces captured the Japanese airstrip at Arawe, New Guinea.
Liberty Ship SS James Withycombe which went aground off Fort Randolph, Canal Zone, December 19, 1943.
T/5 Cletus H. Moert, Louisville, Ky., holds pigeon and while reading message taken from its leg. Pozzilli Sector, Italy. 18 December, 1943.
Heinrich Himmler revoked most exemptions for Jews married to Gentiles in Germany. Jewish spouses, for the most part, ordered deported to Theresienstadt in January, with exceptions for couples that had very young children or who had lost a child in combat.
The SS murdered 118 men at Drakela, Greece, in a reprisal for partisan activities.
The US 5th Army captured Monte Lungo. San Pietro is taken by the 36th Infantry Division.
Three officials of the Kharkov Gestapo were tried before a Soviet military Court, found guilty and sentenced to death. All three, Hans Rietz, Wilhelm Langfeld, and Reinhard Retzlaff would be executed the following day.
The U.S. Army formed a Counter Intelligence Corps unit for the Manhattan Project.
The Japanese destroyer Numakaze was sunk by the US submarine Grayback.
Famous British rocker Keith Richards was born in Kent.
Cpl. Albert Allen of Chicago, Ill., and Cpl. Byron Davis of Lansing, Mich., (15th Weather Squadron), sit down to a meal of "J" rations, December 18, 1943 on New Britain. Cpl. Davis appears to be wearing jump boots.
F4U Corsair at the Natrona County International Airport, 1985. The Black Sheep flew Corsairs.
Marine Attack Squadron 214, the "Black Sheep", made use of the fighter sweep technique for the first time, sending 76 fighters over Rabaul.
The Battle of San Pietro Infine ended in an Allied victory.
The Magnuson Act, which repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, was signed into law.
Statement on Signing the Bill to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Laws.
December 17, 1943
It is with particular pride and pleasure that I have today signed the bill repealing the Chinese Exclusion Laws. The Chinese people, I am sure, will take pleasure in knowing that this represents a manifestation on the part of the American people of their affection and regard.
An unfortunate barrier between allies has been removed. The war effort in the Far East can now be carried on with a greater vigor and a larger understanding of our common purpose.
Franklin Roosevelt.
President Roosevelt announced Wright Flyer would be returned from the United Kingdom and displayed at the Smithsonian. The Wrights had allowed the flyer to go to the UK after the Smithsonian and originally refused to recognize their flight at Kitty Hawk as the first powered flight.
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