Sunday, January 31, 1943. Paulus surrenders the German 6th Army at Stalingrad and the war enters its third phase in Europe.

One day after having been promoted to the rank of Field Marshal, and also having been ordered to go down fighting with his command, Friedrich von Paulus surrendered that command to the Red Army.  90,000 men of the original 250,000 of the German 6th Army remained alive, a surprisingly large number in context.  Only 5,000 would return to Germany, many having died due to the Soviet's inability to take care of such a large number of prisoners.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-F0316-0204-005 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5362815

Most were German, but not all, at the end.  One of the last Axis anti tank guns to stop firing in the battle was one manned by a Russian crew.

By most measures, the Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in human history, although that title could be contested.  By the same token, by most measures, it was the largest battle in modern history, and of World War Two.  Often missed in the story of the epic contest, and German defeat, the Soviets had taken higher casualties than the Axis forces had, with an overall 1,129,619 compared to a potential Axis high of 868,374.  478,741 Soviet combatants were killed, more than the entire number of Germans in the 6th Army.  Axis casualties were rounded out, however, by 114,520 Italian losses, 158,854 Romanian losses, 143,000 Hungarian losses and 52,000 Soviet citizens supporting the Axis forces losses.  The battle was one whose character was defined by it being fought by two totalitarian combatants who had no regard for human life.  The Soviets had the ability to lose more men than the Axis did, and had no real option in regard to retreating further.

The battle had been taken on and fought stupidly by the Germans.  Taking the city was unnecessary and engaging in ongoing house to house fighting pointless. Defending the city, from the Soviet prospective, made a great deal more sense as it served to sap up German resources and arrest German progress.

With the fall of Stalingrad, the war entered a new and more bizarre, indeed sickening, phase.

The first phase of the war had seen the United Kingdom become Germany's principal enemy, and the German war aims had been to consolidate "German" lands in the Reich, subjugate and begin to destroy the Polish people, humble France, and to defeat the UK such that parts of the British Empire could be transferred to Germany.  The first two goals had been achieved, but the UK proved impossible to defeat and in fact was giving nearly as good as it was getting, if not more so, after the withdrawal from the Continent.  The British Empire could not defeat the Germans, but they clearly also could not be defeated by the Germans.

Faced with this, the Germans had toyed with Soviet assistance, and in fact the Soviet Union had been a German ally in this phase, which ran from 1938, with the Austrian Anschluß, to June 22, 1941.  During this phase of the war, the USSR had joined with Germany in the dismemberment of Poland and the murder of Polish elites.  It had also attacked the Baltic States and Finland, with only Finland proving impossible to defeat.  Like the Germans, the Soviets engaged in widespread murder wherever they went, with in this phase of the war the real difference being that the German atrocities, visited upon mass populations for the first time, unlike the Soviet ones which had been going on for two decades, were racial in nature to a much larger degree than the Soviet ones.

Nazi Germany, it is often noted, always had an expressed goal for Lebenstraum in the East, but often missed in that as well is that the Germans were able to put that aside, and on the shelf, as long as it appeared that there was a realistic chance of acquiring British possessions.  Ultimately, it is hard not to imagine the Germans and the Soviets going to war, but up until late 1940, it was not imminent.  After that, it became so as the Germans became increasingly desperate for raw materials for the war against the British Empire, the Soviet Union being the principal source of them.  The Soviets overplayed their hands in this after being invited by the Germans to join in the war against Britain by demanding more of British possessions than the Germans were willing to give.  Confident in their abilities in a land war, the Germans set their sites on the Soviet Union.

June 22, 1941, brought about the second phase of the war, the German Soviet phase.  The Germans expected to rapidly advance, and in fact did at first.  With this they brought murder on a wide scale to Ukraine, the rest of Poland, and Belorussia.  Their murderous intent towards the Jews rapidly evidenced itself wherever they went, and they began their planned colonization of Eastern lands almost immediately.  At the same time, their goals remained, in that phase, the defeat of the Soviet Union.

In the fall of 1942 the German advance stalled out, and the Germans became grossly overextended. Even with the support of Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian allies, they could no longer cover all of the front. The Red Army could.  Early in 1943 the German battlefield fortunes began to rapidly decline.  

With the fall of Stalingrad, a new phase of the war began.  The Germans did not concede defeat, either intellectually or militarily, but internally the central Nazi leadership seems to have grasped it.Thereafter, the goal of the war turned in an unexpressed way towards murder of the Jewish nation as its principal goal, and the mass murder of Jews accelerated and took first place in their war effort.

Franklin Roosevelt returned to the White House after attending the Casablanca Conference.   The conference had arrived upon a declaration, yet to be released, providing that the Germans and the Japanese would have to unconditionally surrender, a phrase borrowed from Ulysses S. Grant.

The wisdom of that declaration has been debated, principally in regard to Japan.  As a practical matter, there was no other way to approach the war against Germany at this time, and the declaration served to address Soviet fears that the Western Allies would arrive on a separate peace with Germany.  In reality, while it may not have been obvious to the Germans or the general public, the Western Allies regarded an Axis defeat at this point inevitable.   The real fear was that Stalin would arrange a separate peace with the Germans, which while it has been discounted by many historians, was in fact much more likely and not even unlikely.  Soviet military performance had been poor in 41 and most of 42, and the Soviet Union, as the then Bolshevik Russia, had in fact done just that in 1917.

Interestingly, its rarely noted that the US, and then everyone else, violated the unconditional surrender provision of the Casablanca agreements as to Japan.  The Japanese surrender, if not conditional, saw the Western Allies, for their own reasons, agree to keep the Japanese monarchy on the throne.  And it was also violated in regards to Italy, which negotiated its way out of the Axis and into the Allied powers, while dumping Mussolini, as a condition to the end of the Allied war against it.

The Allies prevailed in the Battle of Wau.

Tuesday, January 26, 1943. Soviet advances and murders, German retreats and murders, News of Casablanca breaks.

Joseph Stalin publically announced that the Red Army's winter offensive had destroyed 102 German divisions and captured 200,000 POWs.

On the same day the Germans rounded up 1,200 Jews in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands and deported them to concentration camps. As German fortunes faded, it's already murderous treatment of the Jews hardened into a campaign of absolute extermination.

Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, age 55, died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp, his crime being that of so many other Russians of simply falling out of favor with Stalin, but dressed as espionage.

He was a late Stalin victim, having only been arrested in August 1940.

News broke on the just held Casablanca Conference.

Sunday, January 24, 1943. The Casablanca Declaration arrived upon.

Two big events came out of Casablanca on this day, as reported by Sarah Sundin:

Today in World War II History—January 24, 1943: In the Casablanca Declaration, the Allies demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis. At the Casablanca Conference, Allies commit to the invasion of Sicily.

The agreement was made, but as Roosevelt and Churchill's presence in Morocco was still a secret, news of it was not yet released.

The German Völkischer Beobachter and the Börsen Zeitung reported commentary from journalist and propagandist Karl Megerle that "For the first time in this war, Germany faces reverses of a certain importance" and German radio started to play mourning music between news broadcasts.  The fact that this occurred meant that the Germans regarded the news from the Eastern Front as not only disastrous, but plainly so.  No doubt, the impending collapse at Stalingrad played at least a partial role in the decision to prepare the German public for the news of German reversals.

The USS Radford became the first ship to shoot down an aircraft while not seeing it.  The spotting was solely by radar.

Saturday, January 23, 1943. Casablanca released.

Casablanca was given its general release.  Our review of it is here:

Movies In History: Casablanca

First of all, let me note that I made an error in my review of The Maltese Falcon.  The 41 variant of that film was released first, not Casablanca.  I don't know why I reversed the order, but I did.

Casablanca was released for general circulation on January 23, 1943.

At that time, Morocco was just recently brought into the Allied orbit.  Allied troops had landed there in November, 1942 with the landings being part of Operation Torch.  The Moroccan landings, much less discussed than the Algerian ones, actually took place at Casablanca.  French forces resisted the Allies briefly in Algeria and Morocco, before formally switching sides as part of a negotiated turn about in early November, 1942.  Casablanca was the host that January to the Casablanca Conference between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, where the policy of unconditional surrender was announced and agreed upon.

So how's the film hold up?

Well, the movie doesn't take place in 1943, it takes place in December, 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US isn't yet in the war.  Morocco is in the hands of the Vichy French, although at the end of the movie we learn about a Free French garrison in Brazzaville, a city in French Equatorial Africa.  Casablanca is, as the movie depicts it, as sweaty den of vice, filled with refugees seeking desperately to get out of Morocco and on to freedom somewhere else.  In the center of it is Rick's Cafe American, where everyone goes.  Working into this, we have Victor Laszlo, a Central European resistance leader and his beautiful wife Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman.  Lund, we learn, was the girlfriend of Rick of Rick's Cafe, who proposed to her just as Paris was set to fall, not knowing that she was already married to Laszlo.  Laszlo and Lund need "letters of transit" to leave Morocco, and Vichy French control, and the cynical world-weary Rick is believed to have obtained them from the oily Signor Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre.  Through it all a charmingly corrupt Inspector Renault, played by Claude Rains, weaves his way.

If you haven't seen it, see it.  This is another film which, by some people's measure, is the "greatest" movie ever made, although it isn't as great as the film commonly taking that prize, in my view, that being Citizen Kane.  It's a great movie, however.  And it's all the more amazingly great when you realize how much the making of the film was beset by all sorts of difficulties.

But what of its place in history. Was Casablanca of 1941 like the way it was portrayed in this 1942/43 film?

Well, probably surprisingly close.

Places under European colonial administration were bizarrely reservoirs of traditional cultures, advancement of European ideas, and massive corruption.  All three are shown to exist in the film and, if in exaggerated fashion, probably not too exaggerated really.  Morocco was controlled by Vichy at the time.  Brazzaville actually was beyond Vichy control and French Equatorial Africa was held by France Libre, a Free French movement.  Portugal was a neutral and a destination for people trying to get to the United Kingdom and beyond, or for that matter into Spain and then Nazi Germany through France.

Letters of Transit?  Nope, no such thing.  It is, after all, fiction.

In terms of material details, well the film was a contemporary picture, and it has the pluses and the minuses noted in our review of the Maltese Falcon.  Male costumes, more or less correct, with Bogar again wearing a Borsolino fedora, maybe the same one. Women's fashion?  Well, women refugees probably almost never traveled with a radiant wardrobe.

Well worth seeing, however.

The movie had a limited release on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, in New York City.

It was not known to the general public that Franklin Roosevelt was in Casablanca, Morocco, at the time.

The 8th Army captured Tripoli. We erroneously had this date reported a couple of days ago.

US forces successfully concluded all major ground operations on Guadalcanal, effectively bringing the campaign to a conclusion, the second such conclusion in the Pacific in two days.

British commandos, with Norwegian support, raided Stord, a Norwegian island, in Operation Cartoon and put a pyrite mine out of commission for a year.

Thursday, January 14, 1943. The Casablanca Conference opens.

Prime Minister Winston Church and President Franklin Roosevelt met in Casablanca for the opening of a multiday conference at the Anfa Hotel.

The Anfa.

The Japanese commenced Operation Ke, the withdrawal of their forces from Guadalcanal.  Somewhat counterintuitively, it commenced with eh landing of additional troops to act as a rear guard.

Tuesday, January 12, 1943. Landings at Amchitka, Operation Iskra.

The U.S. landed troops on Amchitka.  It was an unopposed landing, as the Japanese had chosen not to occupy it.  Weather was bad and unpredictable and the USS Wordon was swept into rocks and ultimately broke up.  Fourteen of the crew died and the commanding officer was swept off the ship, but survived, while it was being abandoned.  The Japanese learned of the landing several days later when weather cleared sufficiently for a scout plane to overfly the island.

USS Worden sinking.

The island was used as an airbase by the U.S. in spite of the horrible weather it experiences, and set the stage for the US assault on Kiska.

The island is large by Aleutian standards, consisting of 116 square miles.  Not too surprisingly, given its size, it was historically occupied by the Aleuts but there has been no population on the island since 1832.  It's tectonically unstable.

Because of its uninhabited status, it was chosen by the US for underground detonation of nuclear weapons in order to test seismic detection, with nuclear weapons being inserted in bore holes in 1965, 1969 and 1971.

The parents of the Sullivan Brothers were informed for the first time that their sons, who had gone down in action in November, were missing in action.

In our last entry we noted the ship named in honor of the Sullivan brothers, the USS Sullivans.  Oddly enough, it was in the news yesterday after taking a huge haul of Iranian AKMs that were being shipped to Yemen.

Winston Churchill departed for Morocco to meet with Franklin Roosevelt, who had left the day prior.  Their departures were obviously kept secret.

The Soviets launched Operation Iskra aimed at breaking the German's siege on Leningrad.

Pierre Laval concluded a deal with Nazi Germany, allowing the Germans to administer the Departments du Nord and Pas de Calais.  France, under the arrangement, also pledged to provide 400,000 skilled workers to Germany and to essentially provide the remaining elements of its navy to Germany.  France retained the policing role in the German administered territories.

President Roosevelt addressed farmers for Farm Mobilization Day.

January 12, 1943

All over the world, food from our country's farms is helping the United Nations to win this war. From the South Pacific to the winter front in Russia, from North Africa to India, American food is giving strength to the men on the battle lines, and sometimes also to the men and women working behind the lines. Somewhere on every continent the food ships from this country are the life line of the forces that fight for freedom. This afternoon we have heard from some of the military and civilian righters who look to us for food. No words of mine can add to what they have said.

But on this Farm Mobilization Day I want to round out the picture and tell you a little more about the vital place that American farmers hold in the entire war strategy of the United Nations.

Food is a weapon in total war- fully as important in its way as guns or planes or tanks. So are other products of the farm. The long-staple cotton that goes into parachutes, for example, the oils that go into paints for the ships and planes and guns, the grains that go into alcohol to make explosives also are weapons.

Our enemies know the use of food in war. They employ it cold-bloodedly to strengthen their own fighters and workers and to weaken or exterminate the peoples of the conquered countries. We of the United Nations also are using food as a weapon to keep our fighting men fit and to maintain the health of all our civilian families. We are using food to earn the friendship of people in liberated areas and to serve as a promise and an encouragement to peoples who are not yet free. Already, in North Africa, the food we are sending the inhabitants is saving the energies and the lives of our troops there. In short we are using food, both in this country and in Allied countries, with the single aim of helping to win this war.

Already it is taking a lot of food to fight the war. It is going to take a lot more to win the final victory and win the peace that will follow. In terms of total food supply the United Nations are far stronger than our enemies. But our great food resources are scattered to the ends of the earth—from Australia and New Zealand to South Africa and the Americas- and we no longer have food to waste. Food is precious, just as oil and steel are precious. As part of our global strategy, we must produce all we can of every essential farm product; we must divide our supplies wisely and use them carefully. We cannot afford to waste any of them.

Therefore the United Nations are pooling their food resources and using them where they will do the most good. Canada is sending large shipments of cheese, meats, and other foods on the short North Atlantic run to Britain. Australia and New Zealand are providing a great deal of the food for American soldiers stationed in that part of the world. Food from Latin America is going to Britain.

Every food-producing country among the United Nations is doing its share. Our own share in food strategy, especially at this stage of the war, is large, because we have such great resources for production; and we are on direct ocean lanes to North Africa, to Britain, and to the northern ports of Russia.

American farmers must feed our own growing Army and Navy. They must feed the civilian families of this country and feed them well. They must help feed the fighting men and some of the war workers of Britain and Russia and, to a lesser degree, those of other Allied countries.

So this year, as never before, the entire Nation is looking to its farmers. Many quarters of the free world are looking to them too. American farmers are a small group with a great task. Although 60 percent of the world's population are farm people, only 2 percent of that population are American farmers. But that 2 percent have the skill and the energy to make this country the United Nations' greatest arsenal for food and fiber.

In spite of the handicaps under which American farmers worked last year, the production victory they won was among the major victories of the United Nations in 1942. Free people everywhere can be grateful to the farm families who made that victory possible.

This year the American farmer's task is greater, and the obstacles more formidable. But I know that once more our farmers will rise to their responsibility.

This farm mobilization is the first day ever dedicated by a President to the farm people of the Nation. I know that the whole country joins with me in a tribute to the work farmers already have done, in a pledge of full support in the difficult task which lies ahead for farmers, and in a prayer for good weather to make farmers' efforts more fruitful.

Our fighting men and allies, and our families here at home can rely on farmers for the food and other farm products that will help to bring victory.

Movies In History: Casablanca

First of all, let me note that I made an error in my review of The Maltese Falcon.  The 41 variant of that film was released first, not Casablanca.  I don't know why I reversed the order, but I did.

Casablanca was released for general circulation on January 23, 1943.

At that time, Morocco was just recently brought into the Allied orbit.  Allied troops had landed there in November, 1942 with the landings being part of Operation Torch.  The Moroccan landings, much less discussed than the Algerian ones, actually took place at Casablanca.  French forces resisted the Allies briefly in Algeria and Morocco, before formally switching sides as part of a negotiated turn about in early November, 1942.  Casablanca was the host that January to the Casablanca Conference between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, where the policy of unconditional surrender was announced and agreed upon.

So how's the film hold up?

Well, the movie doesn't take place in 1943, it takes place in December, 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US isn't yet in the war.  Morocco is in the hands of the Vichy French, although at the end of the movie we learn about a Free French garrison in Brazzaville, a city in French Equatorial Africa.  Casablanca is, as the movie depicts it, as sweaty den of vice, filled with refugees seeking desperately to get out of Morocco and on to freedom somewhere else.  In the center of it is Rick's Cafe American, where everyone goes.  Working into this, we have Victor Laszlo, a Central European resistance leader and his beautiful wife Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman.  Lund, we learn, was the girlfriend of Rick of Rick's Cafe, who proposed to her just as Paris was set to fall, not knowing that she was already married to Laszlo.  Laszlo and Lund need "letters of transit" to leave Morocco, and Vichy French control, and the cynical world-weary Rick is believed to have obtained them from the oily Signor Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre.  Through it all a charmingly corrupt Inspector Renault, played by Claude Rains, weaves his way.

If you haven't seen it, see it.  This is another film which, by some people's measure, is the "greatest" movie ever made, although it isn't as great as the film commonly taking that prize, in my view, that being Citizen Kane.  It's a great movie, however.  And it's all the more amazingly great when you realize how much the making of the film was beset by all sorts of difficulties.

But what of its place in history. Was Casablanca of 1941 like the way it was portrayed in this 1942/43 film?

Well, probably surprisingly close.

Places under European colonial administration were bizarrely reservoirs of traditional cultures, advancement of European ideas, and massive corruption.  All three are shown to exist in the film and, if in exaggerated fashion, probably not too exaggerated really.  Morocco was controlled by Vichy at the time.  Brazzaville actually was beyond Vichy control and French Equatorial Africa was held by France Libre, a Free French movement.  Portugal was a neutral and a destination for people trying to get to the United Kingdom and beyond, or for that matter into Spain and then Nazi Germany through France.

Letters of Transit?  Nope, no such thing.  It is, after all, fiction.

In terms of material details, well the film was a contemporary picture, and it has the pluses and the minuses noted in our review of the Maltese Falcon.  Male costumes, more or less correct, with Bogar again wearing a Borsolino fedora, maybe the same one. Women's fashion?  Well, women refugees probably almost never traveled with a radiant wardrobe.

Well worth seeing, however.