The British Ministry of Food, with the approval of the House of Commons, put bread rationing in effect in the United Kingdom. It was the first time that had occured in the country's history.
Britain continued to deal with food shortages for quite some time after the Second World War. Bread rationing, which had not occurred during the war, would last until July 1948. Other types of wartime rationing would continue on and be phased out, with the last rationing ending in 1954.
An oddity of this is that British health was noted to have improved due to rationing. We don't often think of this occurring, but it did. Likewise, it was noted that German soldiers in Allied hospitals, who had been getting by on thin rations, recovered from their wounds more quickly than well fed American ones.
Lieutenant Commander James J. Davidson landed a FH-1 Phantom on the deck of the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, becoming the first American to land a jet aircraft on a carrier.
President Gualberto Villarroel of Bolivia was murdered by a mob that stormed the presidential palace.
The Bureau of Land Management was created within the U.S. Department of the Interior, by merging the Grazing Service and the United States General Land Office..
The BLM, which does good work, has been one of the most abused and derided agencies in the American West.
The Social Security Administration replaced the three member Social Security Board.
A US Army tribunal at Dachau sentenced 46 former members of the Waffen SS, including Joachim Peiper, to death for the Malmedy Massacre
On March 20, 1948, 31 of the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In 1951 all the remaining death sentences were commuted, including Peiper's.
US occupation authorities instituted a strict ban on civilian passage across the 38th parallel.
Korean civilians attacked U.S. soldiers in Seoul in protests of a U.S. decision two days prior to wait five years before granting the country independence.
It would in fact come quicker than that, with South Korea becoming independent in 1948. Originally, the entire peninsula was to have been part of the new republic, but the post war separation into two occupied halves kept that from coming about. U.S. occupation of South Korea would end at that time.
The period from 1945 to 1950 in South Korean history is not looked at much, but it was marked by strife, including what would become a hard fought guerilla war between the newly formed Republic of Korea and Communist guerillas.
Hitler's will and marriage certificate were found.
And the Coast Guard was going back to the Treasury, which is where it should be.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji lead an assault on French security installations in the city of Hama, Syria.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji had started his military career as an Ottoman officer, and then under King Faisal. He thereafter served in the Syrian Legion for the French, before deserting in the Great Syrian Revolt. He served the Saudis after that, and then the Palestinian Cause against the British in the 1930s. He was wounded in the Palestinian uprising and ultimately took refuge in Germany, where he joined the German Army, ending up a prisoner of war of the Soviets. Released in 1947, he made his way back to the Middle East and was appointed the Arab League field commander of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) in the 1948 Palestine War. His forces ultimately lost control of territory that was to have been Palestinian. He retired to Syria thereafter and died in 1977.
Al-Qawuqui is one of those rare military refigures who had a track record of serving in uniformly losing causes and who not only survived them, but inexplicably continued to receive further commands.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji in May, 1948.
The Soviet Union gave up on restricting the alcohol content of beverages.
Ty Cobb, who was normally a centerfielder, pitched against the St. Louis Browns for one inning. The Browns had George Sisler first baseman pitch for two innings against the Tigers. Non pitchers in the pitching role would not happen again for another 92 years.
The Finnish torpedo boat S2 sank in a storm with the loss of all 53 hands.
The Eastern Orthodox Church granted autocephaly to the Polish Orthodox Church. The church has approximately 500,000 members today, of which 156,000 live in Poland.
Metropolitan Dionysius, head of the Polish Orthodox Church in 1925. He'd be removed due to Communist pressure in 1948.
The Escadrille Cherifienne, a French Foreign Legion unit composed of Americans, bombarded the city of Chefchaouen, considered a holy shrine of the Jebala people.
Syrian rebels attack Al-Musayfirah. The attack was at first successful but deployment of the French Air Force caused the rebels to withdraw.
Contact is made between the Allies and the Japanese forces in the Sittang Valley, Burma. The Japanese enter into an armed truce in New Britain while in the Solomons Japanese forces fight on, unaware the war has ended.
Truman urges Congress to extend conscription by two years, which it did. Conscription in fact continued until March, 1947.
Draft notice.
This would mean that my father's high school graduation class, 1947, was the first class since 1940 which did not graduate into conscription. The respite would be brief, as conscription would be reinstated in 1948 due to the Cold War.
The Battle of Yinji ended in a Chinese Communist victory.
The 1945 Texas Hurricane made landfall near Seadrift, killing three.
Syngman Rhee or Lee Seungman (이승만) was born in Whanghai Province to Rhee Kyong-sun, a member of the aristocratic Yangban family.
Elected by the South Korean parliament in 1948, he'd assume dictatorial powers and govern the country until forced out of the country following student unrest in 1960. He lived in Hawaii thereafter until his death in 1965.
In certain ways, Rhee symbolized a strategy that both Democratic and Republican administrations employed during the Cold War of supporting right wing autocrats in the belief that their countries would evolve into democracies. In the case of South Korea, they were right.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
On this day in 1921, crop dusting, spraying pesticides by air, was performed for the first time in an experiment involving the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
First crop dusting being conducted.
The first flight featured Army Air Corps pilot John A. Macready and aircraft engineer Etienne Dormoy who performed the test with a Curtiss JN4 over a field outside of Troy, Ohio. Lead arsenate was sprayed to attack caterpillars.
Dormay left, Macready right.
Macready would complete an Army career prior to World War Two, leaving the service in 1926, but was recalled to serve in the Second World War. He retired from the Army Air Force in 1948. He was a legendary pilot at the time and had many firsts while in the service, including being the first Air Corps pilot to parachute from a stricken aircraft at night.
made his aforementioned night jump.
He landed in a tree, which saved his life.
Which, in an odd way, brings up this item:
Mosquito Control Notification: Aerial Granular Larvicide Scheduled for June 13
Laramie, Wyoming – City of Laramie Mosquito Control has scheduled the application of granular larvicide to control larval mosquitoes in rural areas adjacent to the city. The application is scheduled for Thursday, June 13th beginning at daylight. The product is a granular form of Bacillus thuringensis israelensis (Bti) that is designed to penetrate heavy grasses and brushy foliage to reach water sources, especially in maturing hay fields, where larvae are present. The application is targeting both nuisance and vector mosquito larva. The product is environmentally friendly and will not harm fish, amphibians, livestock, or other aquatic invertebrates. If weather conditions are not favorable for the application, it will be postponed until weather conditions allow for the application.
Treatment areas include irrigated acreages along the Big Laramie River southwest of the city, flooded riparian zones in the Big Laramie flood plain southwest and north of the city, and acreages north and west of the city that are irrigated by the North Canal and the Pioneer Canal.
Schedules regarding Mosquito Control, Parks, and Cemetery chemical applications for control of weeds and insect pests are available daily through the Mosquito Control and Integrated Pest Management Hotline at 721-5056. The schedule is updated at approximately 4pm daily. Spraying information is also available on the city website. Look for the daily mosquito and chemical application hotline tab on the home page at www.cityoflaramie.org. For further information contact Hunter Deerman, Mosquito/IPM Supervisor at 721-5258; hdeerman@cityoflaramie.org or Scott Hunter, Parks Manager at 721-5257 SHunter@cityoflaramie.org.
Silent Cal had a brief statement for the Press:
Gaston Doumerque was sworn in as the President of France.
Hermann Suter's Le Laudi was preformed for the first time.
Bene Berak, Palestine, founded, named for a Biblical place name. It was then a Jewish settlement. Ibn Ibraq's Arab villagers subsequently renamed it al-Khayriyya. It was depopulated during a military assault as part of Operation Hametz during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
A large waste transfer station, known as Hiriya, was built at the ancient/modern site, now converted into the Ariel Sharon Park.
