Wednesday, August 18, 1943. Air Space.

President Roosevelt, via Executive Order, revoked deferments for striking defense plant workers.

The RAF hit Peenemünde with three waves of bombers in Operation Hydra.  Damage was so extensive that Luftwaffe General Jeschonnek, charged with defense of the Reich's airspace and well ware of his failings in that regard, and further having an inwardly timid personalty masked by a harden affectation, killed himself the following day, leaving a note that stated; „Mit dem Reichsmarschall kann ich nicht mehr zusammenarbeiten. Es lebe der Führer!“ ("I can no longer work together with the Reichsmarschall. Long live the Führer!").  He left a further note excluding Ulrich Dieseing and Bernd von Brauchitsche from his funeral.  A memorandum he left called upon Hitler to change leadership in the Luftwaffe, but was confiscated by Göring.

Ultimately, in some way, Jeschonnek was a victim of his personality, knowing internally that the air war was lost, but lacking the will to do something about it.

Sarah Sundin noted Jeschonnek's fate on her blog, and also noted the following:

Today in World War II History—August 18, 1943: Army Air Force barrage balloon battalions are inactivated in the US. Betty Smith’s bestselling novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is published.

The U.S. Navy bombarded Palmi and Gioai Taura in Italy.

The Allies prevailed in the Battle of Mount Tambu.

46,000 mostly Jewish Greeks arrived at Auschwitz.

Friday, July 16, 1943. Morire per Mussolini e Hitler, o vivere per l'Italia e per la civiltà.

Italy's Fascist Grand Council, concerned by the arrival of Allied troops on Italian soil, convened for the first time since 1939.  On the same day, Allied aircraft dropped leaflets over the Italian mainland that read "Morire per Mussolini e Hitler, o vivere per l'Italia e per la civiltà" (Die for Mussolini and Hitler, or live for Italy and for civilization).  

Radio broadcast a joint message to the Italian people from Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

Italy, as a fascist state, was coming undone.

The British Air Ministry approved the use of "Window", aluminum strips, as a radar countermeasure.

Effect of Window on radar signature.

The Germans ordered the deportation of 13,000 Jews living in Paris to the Drancy detention center, a way stop for them on the way to Auschwitz.

Yitzhak Wittenberg, a Jewish Lithuanian resistance leader, surrendered to the Gestapo in Vilnius in exchange for an agreement that the Vilnius ghetto would not be liquidated.  He did shortly there after in an undetermined fashion.

The ghetto was liquidated by the Germans in September 1943.

In an event which tends to be misreported, Père Marie-Benoît (Padre Maria Benedetto), a Capuchin Franciscan friar who successfully rescued 4,000 Jews during the war, met with Pope Pius XII in an effort to advance his plan to try to transfer approximately 30,000 French Jews to North Africa, in order to remove them from danger.  The Italian portion of the plan ultimately fell apart when the Germans occupied northern Italy following the collapse of Mussolini's government, but the Spanish portion, which did result in the rescue of 2,600 French Jews on the somewhat ironic pretext that they were Jews of Spanish ancestry, which is the cover that Franco's government operated under. 

He died in 1990 at age 95.

The Battle of Mount Tambu began on New Guinea between the Imperial Japanese Army and American and Australian forces.

The Batman character appeared in film for the first time, this being in a fifteen-minute serial episode before major features.  In the original series, he was called "The Batman", with the first episode being "The Electrical Brain".