Monday, March 8, 1943. The Czechs enter the fight.

The Battle of Sokolovo began on the Eastern Front, the same being an Allied delaying action near Kharkiv.

We may say "Allied" here, as it is regarded as the first instance of a "foreign" military unit serving alongside the Red Army, with that being the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion.  Of course, if we credit the fact that a lot of Red Army units were regional in nature, and those regions part of the Russian dominated USSR by force, it muddies the waters a bit, but perhaps not too much.

The unit's history is complicated in that the unit included Czech refugees from the Third Reich, but also Ukrainian Czechs who had been in Ukraine since the turn of the prior century. Relocating in western Ukraine, they were severely repressed by the Soviet Union.  Following World War Two, most of them relocated to Czechoslovakia under a Czech law of return.  Indeed, so many Ukrainian Czech joined the unit that they became the corps of the post-war Czech Army that existed in the newly formed Czechoslovakia.

Wednesday, May 27, 1942. Dorie Miller receives the Navy Cross. Reinhard Heydrich attacked.

Dores "Dorie" Miller became the first African American to receive the Navy Cross, which he received for manning 

For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.

Miller grew up on his parent's farm in Texas and had joined the Navy at age 20 in 1939. He would not survive the war, being killed when a ship he was later assigned to was hit by a torpedo in 1943, setting off the ship's munition's stores.

His curious legal name was the result of a midwife being convinced he'd be born a girl, although even at that the family decision to stick with the name is odd.  It didn't fit him at all, as Miller grew to be a giant of a man.  His nickname is a matter of dispute, and may not have actually come about at all until press reports misstated his name, although there are other explanations for the name.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the "Final Solution", was badly wounded in an assassination exercise by Czech operatives in an SOE planned operation.  He'd die on June 4.  Heydrich was drenched in evil, but the assassination did not in any way stop the Holocaust, and it resulted in massive German reprisals.

Heydrich vehicle following the attack.

Jews in Belgium were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David.

As with almost any day in this period, the Battle of the Atlantic raged, with submarines taking their toll.