Operation Osoaviakhim was carried about by Soviet authorities in Germany. The Soviets rounded up over 2,500 German scientists, engineers and technicians, who had worked on German advanced technological matters, some of whom were attending a Soviet party in their honor, to be shipped to the USSR. The last of them would be returned to Germany in 1953.
HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck mines in the Straits of Corfu where they were demonstrating in opposition to Albanian intentions.
Answering a question I had earlier on this topic, there were in fact a lot more hunters in the field in 1946 due to the ongoing meat shortage.
The same front page recalls how cattle were once shipped by rail, instead of truck as they are today.
The United States released the last of 375,000 German POWs it had held in the United States, embarking 1,385 of them on the General Yates after transporting them from Camp Shanks, New York.
About ten POWs who had escaped during the war remained at large and were never accounted for.
The Zaibatsu, the Japanese corporations that had financed Japan's war effort, were abolished.
Many of them would be reconstituted starting in 1953, including Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo.
Frances Ramsden and her standard poodles were on the cover of Look.
Ramsden was a model who had a very brief acting career, appearing in only three films. She later married Egyptian millionaire Adel Sabit, a cousin of King Farouk, but had to abandon Cairo due to that association. She divorced in 1975 and returned to California, where she spent the remainder of her life, passing away in 2000 at the age of 80.
The prior day's bombing of the King David Hotel made the front page of American newspapers.
It's interesting that the press referred to the Irgun as "terrorists". The label is appropriate in varying degrees, but the attack on the King David Hotel might have been a legitimate attack, in the context of a legitimate war, if this war is regarded as that. Terrorism itself is never justified.
The original goal of the mission was to destroy materials that identified those who had participated in the destruction of bridges a bit earlier in the uprising.
Of course, the ultimate question is whether the uprising itself was justified. I don't feel that it was. It's certainly the case that the failure to accommodate both the Arab and Jewish populations has resulted in 80 years of strife, although such an accommodation may not have been possible.
United Airlines addressed its customers.
United is in the news again today, looking for a solution for its customers who do not wish to fly into Insurrectionist Seditionist Narcissist International Airport in Palm Beach.
The longest British Parliament since the Cavalier Parliament of 1661–1679 was dissolved ahead of the July 5 elections. Parliament had been in session since 1935, as elections during the war had been suspended.
The Battle of Bessang Pass in the Philippines came to an end in an Allied victory.
It was the first flight of the XP-82, the Twin Mustang.
Coming too late for its intended role as an escort for B-29s in World War Two, it would see action during the Korean War before it was retired in 1953.
The tank in the photograph above is a M47 "Patton" tank, the successor to the M26 Pershing. The tank had a limited production run, entering service in 1951 during the Korean War, and being declared a limited standard in 1955. Production ceased in 1953, and the tank was deployed to Korea in small numbers for testing.
The tank was the third tank to be based on the M26, including the M26. The second was the M46 "Patton", which was an upgraded M26 which was used during the Korean War.
The Korean War has always had a special fascination for me, as my father was a Korean War veteran.
The T-34/85 is the tank we normally think of when we think of the T-34. One of the greatest tanks of all time, it was the best tank of the Second World War.
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.
The Germans had withdrawn, leaving only 30 men too wounded to be moved. The Poles were the first Allied troops in the monastery.
It would be rebuilt.
Stalin ordered the Crimean Tartars deported from their homeland. The action was carried out on the excuse that some Tartars had collaborated with the Germans, which was actually true of every Soviet ethnicity, including, in large numbers, the Russians. Repression of the Tartars would carry on for decades after the war, and the disaster has never been sufficiently redressed.
The Admiralty Islands Campaign and the Battle of Wakde ended in Allied victories.
Gerd von Runstedt as Commander in Chief of German forces in the west.
Von Runstedt was an old soldier by this point, having been born in 1875 and having entered the Prussian Army in 1892. Like MacArthur in the U.S. Army, he'd retired before the war, having left service in 1938, although he was five years older than MacArthur, who was old for a U.S. Army commander. An erasable character, he was not personally fond of Hitler, knew of plots to kill him which he kept to himself, but would not participate in them as he felt the concept disloyal.
After the war he was imprisoned for four years and upon his release found himself separated from his wife due to the division of Germany. She was in the American Zone of occupation, but he could not secure permission to visit her, as the US was upset by the British decision to release him. He died in 1953 at age 77.
It can be argued that his decision not to support the July 20 plotters was instrumental in the coup's failure.
Weather prevented over 700 Chechen villagers from Khaibakh from being convoyed in the Soviet mass deportation of Chechens, meaning they could not meet the absurdly short deadline set by Lavrentiy Beria so they were shot. The order was given by Mikhail Gvishiani, an officer in the NKVD.
Beria, a loyal Stalin henchman, was a first class weirdo who was also a mass rapist, something his position allowed him to get away with. He fell after Stalin's death, was tried, and executed for treason.
Gvishiani survived the fall of Stalin, but probably only because his son, Dzhermen Gvishiani, was married to the daughter of Communist Party Central Committee member Alexei Kosygin.
It was the start of National Negro Press Week.
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services commenced Operation Ginny I with the objective of blowing up Italian railway tunnels in Italy to cut German lines of communication.
The OSS team landed in the wrong location and had to abandon the mission.
Hitler ordered the Panzerfeldhaubitze 18M auf Geschützwagen III/IV (Sf) Hummel, Sd.Kfz. 165, "Hummel" renamed as he did not find the name Hummel, i.e. bumblebee to be an appropriate name.
You would think that Hitler would have had other things to worry about at this point.
Southern Rhodesia became a British colony when the British government took it over from the British South Africa Company due to a 1922 referendum. Prior to that time, it had been informally been known as Zambesia, based on the Zambezi River. It would form a government on October 1 and would retain its status, sort of, as a British colony until 1964.
Flag of Southern Rhodesia.
Southern Rhodesia, massively British in terms of its colonial character, saw itself in that fashion, and its white residents had been highly supportive of World War One. They would be again of World War Two.
Flag of Northern Rhodesia.
In 1953, it was confederated by the British with Northern Rhodesia, which had a larger landmass. In the 1950s, it began to fall apart with the rise of African nationalism. Northern Rhodesia became independent and changed its name to Zambia in 1964, interestingly changing its name during the course of the Olympics, and therefore entering the games with one name and exiting it with another.
Flag of Zambia.
When Northern Rhodesia became independent, with the cooperation of the British government, it struck fear into Southern Rhodesian whites, and the country, which was controlled by them, issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence as Rhodesia in 1965. The winds of change already well set in, Rhodesia, while it had cooperation from various countries, was unrecognized by any. It fought an increasingly losing battle against African nationalist forces in the 60s and 70s, and returned to British colonial status brief in 1979, before becoming the current state of Zimbabwe.
Rhodesian flag.
Unfortunately, since independence its history has not been a happy one, as it fell to one party rule under Robert Mugabe, something it only recently overcame. Zambia, spared a post-colonial war, has fared better, and indeed uniquely for a post colonia African nation, had an Acting President in recent memory who was of European (Scottish) descent.
Finnair, the Finnish national airline, was incorporated as Aero O/Y.
The Convention for the Suppression of the Circulation of and Traffic in Obscene Publications was signed in Geneva by members of the League of Nations. The anti pornography treaty is still in effect, accepted and amended by the United Nations, although a person would hardly know it.
Bulgaria arrested 2,500 Communist suspected of plotting an uprising.
The remaining eight hostages taken by train bandits in what became known as the Linceng Outrage were freed. The payment of ransom by Shanghai mobster Du Yuesheng to Sun Meiyao of the Shandong Outlaws resulted in the final freedom of what originally had been 300 such hostages.
Du Yuesheng, who controlled the Shanghai opium trade, would become a significant supporter of Chiang Kai Shek, and has been honored with a memorial in Taiwan, where he died.
Sun Meiyao would be executed by the Chinese Army in December.
On the same day, Chinese general Feng Yuxiang issued an ultimatum to Chinese President Li Yuanhong to resign. He himself would go on to briefly lead the country, and then support the Nationalist as well, before becoming, in later years, a critic of it. While a Christian, he was comfortable with the Communist regime and was honored by it when he died in 1953.
Hunt's death, it should be noted, remains an enduring tragedy of the McCarthy Era, and one which, at least in some Wyoming circles, came to define McCarthyism and certain right wing elements of the press.
Robinson, on the other hand, gives us a rare example of a nearly completely forgotten Wyoming politician. In some ways, that's a shame, as his life story was one that was somewhat typical of the era in that he was an early, post Frontier Era, immigrant to the state when a person could still enter ranching, which he did, in spite of having an engineering background. Following his defeat for reelection he ultimately retired to Pendleton Oregon in 1958, where he died in 1963.
The Marines and Army begin an offensive on Guadalcanal at Koli Point.
Marine Corps pack artillery in action at Koli Point
Today in World War II History—October 21, 1942: Maj. Gen. Mark Clark lands by submarine at Cherchel, Algeria, for a clandestine meeting with the Vichy French in preparation for the upcoming Allied invasion.
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
The photogenic Clark was a favorite of the Press during the early part of World War Two. This event, resulting in the beginning of the formal separation of the French military from Vichy, may have been the high point, in real terms, of his career. His later command in Italy, where he was in command until the war's end, has been subject to less impressive analysis by historians, and he was held in bitter contempt by veterans of the 36th Infantry Division who had taken huge casualties trying to cross the Rapido. The sought, and received, a post-war Congressional investigation of that incident, for which Clark was cleared.
During the Korean War he was commander of the United Nations forces following the command of Matthew Ridgeway. He occupied that role from May 12, 1952 until the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. He retired that following October, after which he became president of The Citadel. He died in 1988, at age 84.
That last item is worth considering. It means, for example, that when Clark was dispatched to negotiate with the French, he was 41, and when World War Two ended he was 44, younger than we often imagine World War Two generals to be. In reality, in the U.S. Army, they tended to be relatively young.
Sundin also reports that a B-17D provided by the Army to Eddie Rickenbacker went down in the Pacific. Rickenbacker was on a tour of Pacific air bases to review operations and living conditions. Faulty navigational equipment caused the plane to go widely off course and run out of fuel over the open ocean. The crew was adrift thereafter for twenty-four days before being picked, with one of the men dying from dehydration. Ultimately, the men split up in lift rafts at sea, but they were found.
The experience caused the Navy to alter life raft equipment to incorporate fishing equipment in them.
She also notes that the Revenue Act of 1942 went into effect in the US, which increased individual income tax rates and corporate tax rates, with top tax rates going from 31% to 40%. The act also reduced personal exemptions. An excess profits tax of 90% was also put in effect. Medical expenses became a deduction for the first time.
The war ushered in an era of generally high upper tax rates that remained in effect for the next couple of decades, meaning that they remained high during the boom years of the 1950s. The concept that American tax rates were unfairly high really didn't come about until Ronald Reagan's presidency.
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