March 16, 1943. Stalin asks for the Western Allies to open a "second" front, disregarding that the war in the East was the Second Front, and the Western Allies were fighting on three fronts.

Former ally of Adolph Hitler, and a man whose overreach in dealing with his Nazi Allies had resulted in his country entering the war, Joseph Stalin, wrote Franklin Roosevelt.

The letter from the Marxist mass murderer read:

MOST SECRET AND PERSONAL MESSAGE

FROM PREMIER J. V. STALIN TO PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT

Now that I have Mr Churchill's reply to my message of February 16, I consider it my duty to answer yours of February 22, which likewise was a reply to mine of February 16.

I learned from Mr Churchill's message that Anglo-American operations in North Africa, far from being accelerated, are being postponed till the end of April; indeed, even this date is given in rather vague terms. In other words, at the height of the fighting against the Hitler troops—in February and March— the Anglo-American offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off altogether, and the time fixed for it has been set back. Meanwhile Germany has succeeded in moving from the West 36 divisions, including six armoured, to be used against the Soviet troops. The difficulties that this has created for the Soviet Army and the extent to which it has eased the German position on the Soviet-German front will be readily appreciated.

Mr Churchill has also informed me that the Anglo-American operation against Sicily is planned for June. For all its importance that operation can by no means replace a second front in France. But I fully welcome, of course, your intention to expedite the carrying out of the operation.

At the same time I consider it my duty to state that the early opening of a second front in France is the most important thing. You will recall that you and Mr Churchill thought it possible to open a second front as early as 1942 or this spring at the latest. The grounds for doing so were weighty enough. Hence it should be obvious why I stressed in my message of February 16 the need for striking in the West not later than this spring or early summer.

The Soviet troops have fought strenuously all winter and are continuing to do so, while Hitler is taking important measures to rehabilitate and reinforce his Army for the spring and summer operations against the U.S.S.R.; it is therefore particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer.

I appreciate the considerable difficulties caused by a shortage of transport facilities, of which you advised me in your message. Nevertheless, I think I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught. That is why the vagueness of both your reply and Mr Churchill's as to the opening of a second front in France causes me concern, which I cannot help expressing.

March 16, 1943

The letter was either shortsighted or full of hypocritical crap, although perhaps he was blind to its hypocrisy.

In fact, the Western Allies had opened a third front with Operation Torch, or rather continued it as the British were fighting in North Africa prior to Stalin's blundering getting the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side.  This would count the Battle of the Atlantic, a titanic naval battle which apparently Stalin didn't regard as a front, as a front, but which in fact very much was.

This would of course discount the entire Pacific campaign, which was for the Western Allies already a "second" front, but which was keeping the Japanese off of the Soviet's back, or at least arguably so.

The Soviet peoples were suffering enormously, to be sure, a condition they had been in since Stalin's bloody bedfellows had subjected them to the purification of the "worker's state", assuming we do not backdate that to 1914 when Imperial Russia entered World War One, but mass bloodletting in the USSR was a thing long before World War Two. That it got much worse during World War Two cannot be discounted, to be sure, although part of the Soviet suffering was due to Stalin killing competent Soviet officers prior to the Second World War and terrorizing his own population.

What can you say? Keeping up the fable that Stalin needed a "second front", rather than acknowledging he had one, and then some, was in everyone's best interest.

On one of those fronts, on the Atlantic, the largest wolfpack attack of the war occurred as 22 Allied merchant ships were sunk.

"Second" front indeed.

This TBF had a close call on the Atlantic while landing on the USS Charger, an escort carrier.

Anthony Eden visited the Roosevelt's.

Friday, March 12, 1943. Patton in command.

3-12-43 (Friday) We left Rabat one week ago to day.  We have done a lot but much remains to be done.  Freedenhal just exited he did not command and with few exceptions his staff was worthless due to youth and lack of leadership.

Bradley got back last night.  Ike has three plans. One that I should keep on with II Corps and have Bradley replace me at Rabat.

I said no on that one as it is unfair to Kemp.  Though possibly safer for me.

Plan 2.  For Bradley to go to Rabat and plan with Kemp and when this show is over to have me go back to [?] Haskey and B. take II Corps. Note that as utterly crazy.

Plan 3. For B to stay on as Deputy Commander with me get him a staff to work in with mine and then when this battle is over  to have me go [?] with my staff to [?] Haskey and Bradley take over. Kemp to plan until I get [?]

I accepted this as best. I am not at all sure that this show will run  according to plan and feel that as long as it is interesting Alexander will keep me. If it [?] down I can get out.

If Rommel attacks first that will be something different -- [?] may.

Wrote Gen Orders to Troops. [?] came to lunch. After lunch I went with him and inspected 2[?]th Inf. Col Taylor & 18th Inf Col. [?].  The 2[?]th been  badly shot up but seemed fine.  18th has done well and  is quite [?]

Terribly cold took a drink to get warm.

Gen [?] called at 2100 to tell me he had heard on the radio that I was a LIEUTENANT GENERAL.  [?] [?] [?] a [?] I am sleeping under  the three stars.  When Iwas a little boy at home I used to wear a wooden sword and say to myself.  "George S. Patton for Lieut Gen" at that time I did not know there were [?] [?] Now I want and will get five  stars.

Diary of George S. Patton.

The Royal Navy lost the HMS Lightening off of Algeria. She was attacked by E-boats.  The Turbulent was sunk by a mine off of Sardinia.

The U-130 was sunk by the USS Champlin off of the Azores.

The Red Army took Vyazma.  The Italian Army destroyed the Greek village of Tsaritsani, lilling 40 civilians.

Thursday, March 11, 1943. The Holocaust and Yugoslavia, The French and Royal Navies and the Battle of the Atlantic, German failures in North Africa, Lend Lease renewed, Evading the Draft

The Jewish population of the Yugoslavian (Macedonian) cities of Skopje, Štip and Bitolawas deported to Treblinka by the German SS with the assistance of Bulgarian soldiers.

The day prior, Yugoslavian Communists had warned the Jewish residents of  Bitola of the impending German plans, although only a few managed to escape them.

The Harvester. which had been built for the Braizlian Navy just prior to World War Two, with the Royal Navy taking over the contract.

The U-433 sunk the HMS Harvester which was damaged and dead in the war.  The U-432 in turned rammed by the French corvette Aconit.  The Aconit turned to rescue the survivors of both sinkings.  The Harvester had sunk the U-444 the day prior, which went down with the loss 41 men, two men surviving.  26 went down on the U-432, with 20 being picked up by the Aconit.  145 went down on the Harvester.

The Aconit on March 14, 1943.  She'd been built by the British to be lent to the Free French.

The U-432 was on its eighth war patrol. The U444 on its second.

The SS Panzer Corps entered Kharkov and penetrated to the center of the city.  The Red Army, for its part, advanced to fifteen miles from Vyazma, near the Russian border with Byelorussia.

In North Africa, the Afrika Korps, now in clear decline and withdrawing toward the Mediterranean, made three unsuccessful attacks on the British west of Sejanane, Tunisia.

News of the disaster at Kasserine was beginning to filter home.

Lend Lease was extended for another year with an 82-0 vote by the Senate and a 407-6 vote in the House.

In the current U.S. House, if current events are any measure, it'd have significant opposition.  Tucker Carlson would no doubt call it into question.

Rodney Wooster, age 27, was arrested in Lewis County, Washington, for draft evasion.  He was hiding in the woods in a cabin at the time, having taken up residence in the cabin the prior year.

You don't hear much about draft evasion during World War Two, but it was a big story at the time.  12,000 U.S. residents were imprisoned for evading the draft, nearly a division's worth of men, but most arrested men were simply funneled into what they were seeking to avoid, military service.

Wooster, a Washington native, seems to have been a lumberjack before the war and have dropped out of school in 8th Grade, something not uncommon for the time.  Following World War Two, he married and lived in Washington the rest of his life, passing away in 2006.  Whether he was truly evading, or knew the full implications of it, are not known, but the subsequent history of spending the rest of his life in the same community would suggest that whatever was the case, he probably entered the military in 1943.

Wednesday, March 10, 1943. The Peak of the Battle of the Atlantic. First combat mission of the P-47.

By Crew of PB4Y-1 107-B-12 of VB-107, November 1943.

March 1943 was the peak of the Battle of the Atlantic, with the largest convoy battle of the war, the battle over Convoys HX 229/SC 122 about to commence.  Commencing on this day was the two-day battle over Convoy HX 228 in which nine U-boots would sink five Allied vessels, one of which was a warship.  The battle over Convoy SC 121 ended on this day, in which 27 U-boots sunk 12 merchant ships.  During March German submarines sank 120 merchant ships while losing only 15 submarines.  A Royal Navy figure later observed: "The Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March 1943."

After April, however, Germany naval fortunes were to decline rapidly.

On the same day, the U-633 was sunk by the British freighter Scorton, which rammed her.  In its career, it had been on a single patrol and sunk one vessel.  On the same day, Germany changed its Enigma Code, according to Sarah Sundin's blog, temporarily making the Allies blind in the Atlantic.

A couple of things to recall. At this stage of the war, the Germans were still doing very well in the Atlantic, and indeed their fortunes were increasing in that theater.  Crossing the Atlantic remained extraordinarily perilous.  Allied ships went down continually.  And it was exclusively a Western Allied affair, which they bore alone.

German commenced rationing nonessential goods, thereby prohibiting the manufacture of suits, costumes, bath salts, and firecrackers. It restricted telephone use and photography at the same time.

It's not surprising that they took this step, but rather it was taken this late.

Sarah Sundin reports.

Today in World War II History—March 10, 1943: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes fly first mission with US Eighth Air Force based in Britain. US II Corps retakes Sbeïtla, Tunisia.

P-47C taking off, 1943.

P-47s did not have long enough range to escort bombers all the way to Germany and back, but they were nonetheless a game changer for the USAAF.  A new generation of fighters surpassing the capabilities of most Axis fighters was beginning to come online.

Here again, the Western Allies were waging a titanic war on the sea and in the air.  This benefitted all the Allies, but it was not borne by all of them.

The USSR established Laboratory No. 2 to research atomic energy.

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.

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.

Wednesday, February 3, 1943. The Chaplains Fox, Poling, and Goode.

The transport ship SS Dorchester was sunk by the U233 off of Greenland.  605 of the 904 men on board died in the attack, including chaplains Methodist minister George L. Fox, Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling, Roman Catholic Priest John P. Washington, and Rabbi Alexander D. Goode.

They gave up their life jackets to others and went down with the ship, arms linked, praying, and singing hymns.

The chaplains are remembered in a stained-glass window in the Episcopal National Cathedral.

Survivors were rescued by the Coast Guard cutters Escanaba and Comanche, with the Escanaba using rescue swimmers for the first time.

The U-265 was sunk by a RAF B-17 in the Atlantic.

German radio informed the German people of the defeat at Stalingrad in a special radio announcement, causing widespread German public consternation.  A secret poll conducted thereafter revealed that the Germans wondered why troops had not been evacuated from the city, and why the war situation had been reported as secure only a few months prior.

Monday, December 15, 1941. The filmed murder of Lativan Jews at Liepāja

War photographer Robert Capa with a 16mm movie camera, something we don't associate him with. 8mm film was literally 16mm cut in half for economy.

Mass murder of over 2,731 Jews at Liepāja Lativa was commenced by Einsatzgruppen, assisted by Lativan militia.  It would run for two days.  

The event was filmed by Kriegsmarine Sergeant Reinhard Wiener with his privately owned 8mm film camera.

Twenty-three communist party members were also murdered.

Amateur photography was a huge deal with Germans, and had been since cameras had become portable.  But movie film was another deal.  Sgt Wiener's film is accordingly unique. There is film of German authorities murdering Jews, but his was extensive and showed their full humiliation and abuse before being murdered.

The location itself was being used by the German Navy and many German Army soldiers were there.  The mood was festive by the Germans.

Things like this make it plain that by the early stages of Operation Barbarossa Germans knew what was going on and, while the recent meeting of German high officials emphasized their desire to complete the destruction of European Judaism, the program of mass extermination was fully in swing.  It was, moreover, already quite efficient.  And the attitude taken by the Germans was the plain acceptance of it. Authorities made no effort to stop it from being filmed here, and in other locations.  As film had to be processed commercially at home, it also meant that this was being done and was not being restrained.

So, in an event like this, regular German soldiers and sailors witnessed it, some filmed it, and some took their stories back home with them.  Others effectively published it by having what they recorded in film processed.

Things like this also make it plain that in much of Eastern Europe at least some percentage of the local population was willing to participate in Germany atrocities aimed at the Jews.

The Red Army retook Klin.

The following, from Today In World War Two History:

The American Federal of Labor adopted a policy of abstaining strikes in war industries for the duration of the war.

Universities started to go to three year courses of study for Bachelor degrees by full year courses of study.  This must have kicked in during the Spring, as the Christmas break was commencing.

The Soviet government returned to Moscow.  Stalin had never left.

Today in World War II History—December 15, 1941

The British Army encamped at Bir Halegh el Elba.

The British allowed 600 Japanese nationals to leave Singapore on a ship chartered by the Japanese government.

The Japanese attempted to land a reconnaissance party across the Lye Mun Channel at Hong Kong but were completely repulsed.  Japanese artillery strikes commenced.

Showing that yesterday's Coast Guard depth charge run wasn't as absurd as it might have sounded, a Japanese submarine shelled Kahului, Maui.  Another shelled Johnston Island, striking fuel at a seaplane base there.

The decision was made to hold this year's Rose Bowl at Durham, North Carolina.

All four American radio networks broadcast We Hold These Truths.

The radio program was in celebration of the anniversary of the Bill of Rights and had been planned prior to December 7.  An inquiry to the government on whether it should go forward brougth a reply that Franklin Roosevelt thought the program more important than ever.

Admiral Kimmel's illustration appeared on the cover of Time.  He'd already been relieved of his command in the Pacific.  Newsweek had a cover photo of a battleship noting that the "U.S. fleet's guns blaze", which wasn't true at the time.

A "Junior Miss" appeared on the cover of Life, which had obviously been laid out prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A test air raid drill was held in New York City.