Saturday, November 6, 1943. The Red Army retakes Kiev

Today in World War II History—November 6, 1943: Hitler names Field Marshal Albert Kesselring commander of all German forces in Italy. Submarine USS Pampanito is commissioned at Portsmouth Navy Yard, NH.

Sarah Sundin.

The Pampanito is now in San Francisco and may be toured.  Well worth doing.

The Red Army took Kiev.  Most of the German forces successfully withdrew and avoided capture.

The Greater East Asia Conference, a conference of Japan and its puppet states, concluded and issues a final declaration, which stated:

It is the basic principle for the establishment of world peace that the nations of the world have each its proper place, and enjoy prosperity in common through mutual aid and assistance.

The United States of America and the British Empire have in seeking their own prosperity oppressed other nations and peoples. Especially in East Asia, they indulged in insatiable aggression and exploitation, and sought to satisfy their inordinate ambition of enslaving the entire region, and finally they came to menace seriously the stability of East Asia. Herein lies the cause of the recent war. The countries of Greater East Asia, with a view to contributing to the cause of world peace, undertake to cooperate toward prosecuting the War of Greater East Asia to a successful conclusion, liberating their region from the yoke of British-American domination, and ensuring their self-existence and self-defense, and in constructing a Greater East Asia in accordance with the following principles:

The countries of Greater East Asia through mutual cooperation will ensure the stability of their region and construct an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice.

The countries of Greater East Asia will ensure the fraternity of nations in their region, by respecting one another's sovereignty and independence and practicing mutual assistance and amity.

The countries of Greater East Asia by respecting one another's traditions and developing the creative faculties of each race, will enhance the culture and civilization of Greater East Asia.

The countries of Greater East Asia will endeavor to accelerate their economic development through close cooperation upon a basis of reciprocity and to promote thereby the general prosperity of their region.

The countries of Greater East Asia will cultivate friendly relations with all the countries of the world, and work for the abolition of racial discrimination, the promotion of cultural intercourse and the opening of resources throughout the world, and contribute thereby to the progress of mankind.

This entity issuing anything at this point is somewhat surreal, as Japanese fortunes had clearly turned in the war and they were obviously losing.

The participating entities were Japan, Manchukuo; The "Reorganized National Government of China" governed from Nanjing, the Kingdom of Thailand; the State of Burma; and the Second Philippine Republic.  Only Thailand was really independent.

The USS Beatty was torpedoed off of Algeria by Junkers Ju 88, resulting in its sinking.   The U-226 and U842 were sunk by the Royal Navy in the Atlantic.

Wednesday, October 21, 1943. Indian declaration.

The Provisional Government of Azad Hind ("Free India") was declared with Subhas Chandra as president.  Its territory, such as it was, were those portions of Indian occupied by Japan.

It immediately declared it was entering the war on the Japanese side, an example of really not grasping the direction things were headed in, and in fact already well advanced towards.

On the same day, Japan began drafting high school and university students.

The Germans began liquidating the Minsk Ghetto as they were retreating from Belarus.

The RAF made a highly destructive raid on Kassel.

Algerian Jews, 140,000 in number were restored French citizenship, which had been restricted, along with the same for Algerian Arabs, on March 17, 1942 by Gen. Henri Giraud.  Arabs had to apply for restoration of their French citizenship.

Thursday, October 14, 1943. Black Thursday.

The Eight Air Force raided Schweinfurt for the second time in a heavily opposed raid.

Seventy seven B-17s were shot down, along with four P-47s.  121 aircraft were ottherwise damaged.  590 Allied airmen were killed.

The target of the raid was ball bearing plants. The RAF refused to cooperate on the basis that ball bearings were a worthless object of a raid, something that post-war analysis proved correct.

An uprising commenced at Sobibor resulting in eleven SS and Ukrainian guards being killed.  SS-Untersturmführer Johann Niemann, thirty years of age and the commandant of Sobibor was the first one killed when he went to see a tailor, one of the prisoners, for a fitting.  The prisoner killed him with an axe, and his pistol was taken.

Three Hundred inmates escaped, although many were killed in nearby minefields or recaptured and immediately killed.  Fifty did survive and escape.  Those prisoners who had opted not to escape were also killed and the camp closed.

José P. Laurel, formerly a Philippines Supreme Court Justice, took the oath of office as President of the puppet Second Philippine Republic.  The Republic's then signed an alliance with Japan.

He also appealed to the Vatican at this time for recognition, which was refused on the stated basis that the Vatican did not wish to recognize any new states during the war.  Nonplussed, he sought the Filipinization of the Church in the Philippines.

We've already dealt with him in a previous post, and as noted there, he had a post-war political career in the country, demonstrating that the common view that East Asian collaborators were universally despised by their own people is not true.

Sunday, September 19, 1943. Wars within the war.

The Markham, Ramu and Finisterre campaigns on New Guinea began with an Allied offensive in the Ramu Valley.

The Ramu Valley campaign would continue on through November, with the overall campaign carrying on until April 1944.

The Battle of Turjak Castle in Slovenia ended in a Slovene partisan victory against the Anti Communist Volunteer Militia, formerly allied to the Italian Army.  Part of the wars within the war feature of World War Two.

German forces and Cham Albanians began the Paramythia executions of Greeks in Paramythia.

Lebanese Maronite Christian leader Bechara El Khoury met with Lebanese Sunni Muslim senior politician Riad Al Solh and worked out the National Pact.  Under it, an arrangement was arrived upon in which a free Lebanon would have a Christian President and a Muslim Prime Minister.

The St. Louis Cardinals took the National League pennat with a 2 to 1 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

Wednesday, March 3, 1943. Accidents.

173 people were crushed to death in London's Bethnal Green tube, where they were sheltering from an air raid.

The rush to the shelter was started when people fled into the tube due to a salvo of British anti-aircraft rockets being launched from Victoria Park.

British anti-aircraft rockets.

The German minelayer Doggerbank was sunk by the German U-43 in a case of mistaken identity.  Following its routine orders, the U-43 departed without attempting to pick up survivors, and 365 people drowned.  A single person survived, lasting 26 days at sea before being picked up by a Spanish ship.

The Doggerbank was a captured British vessel, so the mistake was perhaps excusable.  Converted into a minelayer, it laid mines off of South Africa in January 1942 and proceeded to Japan, twice being challenged as a British vessel on the way and successfully fooling the challenging ships.  In Japan, it took on the survivors of the auxiliary cruiser Thor, a German tanker, and the Altmark.  She sank within two minutes when attacked.

The U43 was sunk by an American torpedo bomber that following July.

Gandi ended his protest fast.

Twenty-three year veteran of the Red Army, Andrey Vlasov, published "Why I have taken up the struggle against Bolshevism" in the newspaper Zarya.

Vlasov had been captured by the Germans and then became a German collaborator, commanding the Russian Liberation Army, which saw little action during the war.  I know little about him, and don't really know what his reasons were.  He'd cause his troops to switch sides again, to a degree, late in the war, by which time his fate, and theirs, was effectively sealed.

Vlasov started off, like Stalin, as a divinity student at a Russian Orthodox seminary.  He quit that in 1919 and joined the Red Army.  He didn't become a Communist, however, until 1930.  He served successfully as an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek from 1938 to 1939 before going on to command the 99th Rifle Division.  Up until his capture, he generally was well regarded in the Red Army.

Vlasov would claim that he became an anti Communist while trying to evade German capture.  A post-war analysis of the 180 Red Army generals who joined Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army revealed that most of them had personally experienced NKVD atrocities prior to the war.

Monday, March 1, 1943. Canning and rationing & The Rosenstraße Protest.

Sarah Sundin notes a number of interesting things on her blog, including the Rosenstraße Protest in Berlin, in which gentile women married to Jewish men took to the streets to demand the return of their husbands.  Ultimately, 1,800 men were released.

She also notes the U.S. Office of Price Administration implemented rationing of canned goods.  Canned meats were wholly unavailable.

As Sundin explains on the rationing link on her blog, the rationing was designed to save tin, not food.  It did serve to emphasize growing your own food and preserving it at home, however.

When I was a kid, vegetables that we had that weren't home-grown, were usually canned, probably expressing the habits of my parents. Frozen vegetables were available, but we usually didn't get them.  When my father started a very large garden in the 70s, however, we froze peas ourselves, which only worked so so.

Commercially frozen vegetables weren't really a thing until the Birdseye company started its "flash freezing" process in 1929.  The popularity of frozen foods expanded during World War Two, but collapsed again after the war.  Interest started to recover in the 1950s, and then took off in the 1960s.  Personally, I didn't really wasn't exposed to them much until the 1980s, when a university girlfriend was shocked that I bought canned peas and canned corn, as frozen was so much better.

Frozen really is better.

The SS murdered 6,700 residents of Koriukivka, Ukraine, in the largest reprisal raid of World War Two.

The Belarusian Central Council, a putative collaborationist Belorussian government, which later morphed into a post-war Belorussian refugee organization, was formed. 

Sunday, February 28, 1943. Norwegians at Vermok.

Norwegian ski born Norwegian commandos raided the Norsk Hydro plant at Vermok, Norway, destroying the heavy water inventory that had been produced there by the Germans.

The plant in 1948.

28,000 Norwegians carried on beyond Norway during the war, joining Norwegian forces that had made it out of Norway when it was invaded in 1940.  15,000 Norwegians joined the German forces, principally in the SS, which mostly fought on the Eastern Front, although Germany attempted to recruit Norwegians for the German Navy as well.  About 40,000 Norwegians participated in the Milorg, the Norwegian resistance.

The Vermok event was memorialized in the 1965 British war movie, Heroes of Telemark.  It was also featured in a 1948 Norwegian movie, Operation Swallow.

This was the third attempted raid on the plan, this one being more successful than the prior two.  Another air attack would take place in November 1943 and a heavy water transporting boat would be attacked in 1944.

The USAAF and RAF made a 1,000 plane raid on Saint-Nazaire submarine base.

Monday, February 8, 1943. Bose leaves, Rutledge ascends.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1943 1943  A B-25 landed on a highway near Douglas due to low fuel. Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.

I've actually seen something similar occur. When I was a teenager, I was riding in his pickup truck when an A-26 landed in a field near the Interstate Highway, and then taxied up to the DOT fence.  The plane was on its way back to the Smithsonian and had lost oil pressure, requiring the pilot to make an emergency landing.

U.S. Economic Stabilization Director James F. Byrnes ordered a temporary ban on the sale of shoes until the following day, when shoe rationing officially commenced.

Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and Abid Hasan were given safe passage from Germany back to Asia on board the U-180.  Bose, an opponent of English Colonialism, sided with the Germans and Japanese during the war.  He had been in Nazi Germany since April 1941.

The journey would lead to a Japanese submarine, which would take him to Sumatra, where he attempted to revive the Indian National Army.

Schenkl and Bose.

Bose left in Germany Emilie Schenkl and their daughter Anita.  Bose may have been married to Schenkl, although the circumstances of their union are ambiguous, having been conducted as a secret Hindo ceremony without witnesses.  They had met in 1934 during a previous Bose stay in Austria, when she had worked for him as a secretary.  He would not publicly acknowledge their marriage or union. His departure left her without a livelihood.

Bose died in a crash of a Japanese aircraft in 1945.  Schenkl lived until 1966.  Anita is a professor at the University of Augsburg.

Bose retains a sort of hero status in India for his opposition to the English, but it's hard to get past siding with the Axis and abandoning his family without support.

Civil control of Hawaii was partially restored, absent the Japanese American pre-war members of the Territorial Legislature.

The Germans killed the remaining 4,000 Jewish residents of Slutsk, Byelorussia.  On the same day, the Germans launched Operation Hornung, a counter-attack against Belorussian partisans.

Byelorussia suffered enormously during the Second World War, and had suffered before that under Stalin's repression.  As with Poland, the Soviet government had murdered its intelligentsia in the period leading immediately up to 1941. Following that, the Nazis were nearly as repressive of its population as they were of the Poles.  The Germans nearly forcibly conscripted young Belorussian men into police service, with the only real alternative being Soviet partisan service, which also conscripted.  Often membership in one or the other was simply by chance.  It was occupied by the Germans well into 1944.

The Red Army retook Kursk.

Wiley B. Rutledge was confirmed as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  He'd only serve for six years, dying at age 55 in 1949 due to a stroke.

He had an unusual career, starting off with the goal of studying law at Maryville College, but then switching to the University of Wisconsin as a chemistry student.  He graduated in 1914 with a bachelor's in that field at age 20.  He thereafter returned to law, studying first at Indiana University and then, after various stints of teaching, the Colorado Law School in Boulder.  He married his former Greek teacher, five years his senior, in the interim.  He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws, then a common law degree, in 1922, at which time he would have been 26 years old.  He worked principally as a law professor thereafter, until being appointed to the DC Circuit in 1939, and then on to the Supreme Court in 1943.  Extremely studious and hardworking, in some ways, he worked himself to death.