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Wembley Stadium hosted its first event.
Williams ran a wordless classic.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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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.
Paulus contacted Hitler by radio, who refused permission to surrender. Paulus was in an event skeptical fo the Soviet offer.
The Soviets continued to advance in the Caucasus, and the Free French continued to gain in southern Libya.
Sarah Sundin reports, on her blog:
Today in World War II History—January 8, 1943: British turn over control of Madagascar, except Diego Suarez area, to the Free French. Axis convoys between Naples, Italy, and Tripoli, Libya, are suspended.
The Office of Price Administration banned pleasure driving in seventeen Eastern U.S. states, with the ban to commence at noon the following Thursday.
It also limited the amount of fuel oil that could be used by schools, churches, stores, theaters and other non-residential establishments.
German Admiral Erich Raeder tendered his resignation after a difficult meeting with Hitler over the Battle of the Barents Sea, which Raeder had not informed Hitler about. Hitler actually learned about the battle in the foreign press.
Raeder was promoted on January 30 and put in a ceremonial post, but effectively his service was over. He was captured by the Red Army towards the end of the war, which is surprising given that he was not serving and theoretically could have attempted to evade them. He was sentenced to life in prison at Nuremberg, which surprised him, as he expected to be sentenced to death. He was released in 1955 due to ill health and died in 1960.
Nisei serving in the U.S. Army began to accompany U.S. and Australian troops in New Guinea.
The Red Army continued to advance in the Caucasus, U.S. Troops were pushed off of the summit of Jeb el Azzaq in Tunisia, and the Free French took Oum-el-Arnaeb.
Marian Anderson sang at the dedication of a mural for the Department of the Interior. Present were vocalists from the U.S. Navy, and JrROTC cadets who participated.
Hitler's Order of the Day, in part, stated: "The year 1943 will perhaps be hard but certainly not harder than the one just behind us."
In fact, for the Germans, it would be harder than 1942, and in short order.
Franklin and Elanor Roosevelt hosted dinner and a midnight movie at the White House.
The Battle of the Barents Sea occurred between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy, with the Royal Navy escorting Convoy JW 51 B to the Kola Inlet.
All the merchant vessels made it safety to their destinations. The British lost the HMS Achates while the Kreigsmarine lost the Z16 Freiderich Ecoldt.
Emperor Hirohito gave permission for Japanese forces to withdraw from Guadalcanal. The Japanese, accordingly, had officially suffered their first internally recognized defeat.
The U.S. Navy suffered a defeat in the Battle of Tassafaronga off of Tassafaronga Point, Guadalcanal.
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A night action, Japanese destroyers sank a U.S. cruiser and damaged three other American cruisers to the loss of one destroyer. American vessels opened fire first, but their flashes of their guns illuminated their positions.
The Navy had intercepted the Japanese vessels in their attempt to deliver food to Japanese forces on the island. Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, a Navy historian, regards this battle as one of the worst defeats in U.S. naval history. Having said that, in spite of the heavy losses, the Japanese destroyers did fail in their mission and the Japanese forces on the island were now cut off from food supplies.
German surface raider Thor went down in Yokohama Harbor, along with the supply ship Uckermark. Thor had been raiding in the Indian Ocean. A fire broke out on the Uckermark, and it took both of htem out.
Actor Charles "Buck" Jones, age 50, died from injuries he sustained in the Coconut Grove fire.
A United States Army Air Force B-24 attacked the U-156 while survivors of the Laconia were on the foredeck. The U-156 dove, leaving the survivors abandoned at sea, although later German U-boats surface and try to recover the survivors. Karl Donitz thereafter issued the following order:
On the same day, the Germans penetrated the northwest suburbs of Stalingrad.
The Communist Albanian National Liberation Movement was founded.
The Kamakura Maru and Tatuta Maru put in at Lourenco Marquest, Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) with Allied embassy staff and civilians to be exchanged with the same from Japan, which were arriving by ship from the United Kingdom and Australia.
The Navy blimp L-8, put out earlier that day in search of Japanese submarines, coasted into Daly California without its crew.
The blimp and its crew of two had taken off at 06:03 from Treasure Island off of San Francisco. At 07:38 its crew radioed that they had seen an oil slick off of Farallon Islands, Point Reyes. A Liberty ship and a fishing boat both later reported that the blimp descended to about 30 feet above the slick and then headed east, rather than its planned route, which would have taken it northwest. It was next spotted at 11:15 off of Ocean Beach, by which time it lacked a crew. The blimp contained its parachutes and life raft, so the crew had not bailed out.
They've never been found.
Official speculation is that they were trying to deploy a smoke signal when one slipped out and the other went to rescue him, with both going into the ocean, or some variant of that. This seems fairly likely, although other theories abound.
The 101st Airborne Division, provided with cadre from the 82nd Airborne Division, was activated. The 82nd had been converted organizationally from a conventional infantry division to an airborne division the day prior.
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Today in World War II History—August 15, 1942: Allied “Pedestal” convoy arrives in Malta—only 5 of 14 cargo ships have survived (including tanker Ohio lashed to destroyers HMS Penn and HMS Ledbury).
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
The Pedestal convoy was a major saga in 1942. Even now, historians debate whether the huge convoy losses made the matter an Axis victory or the fact that some ships did get through, including the Ohio, made it an Allied one. At the end of the day, the arrival of the Ohio was in fact materially important, and the supplies allowed Malta to carry on.
Malta was in truth very near to being starved out of the war at this point and therefore, from my prospective, this was in fact a British naval victory, albeit one at a high cost. The British could not afford to lose the island, however, and Pedestal prevented that and allowed it to go on to be used as an air and naval base to disrupt supplies going to the Afrika Korps.
Also on this day, the British submarine HMS Porpoise sank the Italian MV Lerici. The U-705 sank the SS Balladier off of Ireland. The Finnish patrol boat VMV 5 sank the Soviet submarine M-97 in the Gulf of Finland.
The Germans attacked Grozny.
The Marines, now suffering from short supplies, opened the captured Japanese airfield at Lunga Point, naming it Henderson Field. On the same day, four ships arrived with much-needed supplies.
The Pedestal convoy was hit again by German and Italian torpedo boats. They sank four freighters and damaged the HMS Manchester.
The oil tanker Ohio, manned for the trip by a British crew, was attacked by aircraft and finally immobilized and then abandoned, but with fuel tanks intact. She did not sink.
It's of note here that much of what we're told about World War Two naval action really isn't applicable to the war in the Mediterranean, and as we saw from the Battle of Savo Island earlier, it isn't to the early war in the Pacific either. It's often claimed that torpedo boats were worthless in World War Two, but as late as 1942 they certainly were not. Indeed, this is just once of several instances in the first half of the war of torpedo boats performing successfully just as they were meant to, making surface raids at high speed against larger war ship and coming out on top. Additionally, air cover clearly wasn't adequate or wasn't cutting it for convoy escort in the Mediterranean. This convoy had an aircraft carrier with it, but it was itself one of the first vessels to be sunk.
On this day, the Italian Navy, still a major force in the Mediterranean, had to recall, however, a major task force that was attempting to intercept Pedestal due to a lack of German air cover, and British submarine action.
The excellent, but unfortunately discontinued, blog World War II Day-By-Day also notes this naval action on this day:
Caribbean. U-600 and U-658 attack as 2 USA-South America convoys pass the strait between Cuba and Haiti. At 5.07 AM, U-658 sinks Dutch SS Medea in convoy WAT 13 (5 killed, 23 rescued by convoy escorts). At 9.48 AM, U-600 sinks Latvian SS Everelza (23 killed, 14 rescued by convoy escorts) and American passenger/cargo ship SS Delmundo (8 killed including 3 passengers, 50 survivors including 5 passengers picked up by British destroyer HMS Churchill) in convoy TAW 12.
At 7.50 AM in the Gulf of Mexico 25 miles off the coast of Louisiana, U-171 stops US tanker SS R.M. Parker Jr. with 2 torpedoes and finishes her off with the deck gun (all 37 crew and 7 gunners rescued 8 hours later by US Coast Guard auxiliary craft USS Pioneer).
South Atlantic. At 7.40 AM 400 miles Southwest of Freetown, Sierra Leone, U-752 sinks American SS Cripple Creek carrying 7500 tons of war supplies from USA to British 8th Army in Egypt (1 killed, 38 crew and 13 gunners in 3 lifeboats rescued after 4 days by British armed trawler HMS St. Winstan). 1400 miles West of Freetown, Italian submarine Reginaldo Giuliani sinks American SS California with the deck gun and torpedoes (1 killed, 35 survivors)
Bernard Law Montgomery took over the British 8th Army in the wake of the death of Gen. Gott.
Montgomery, one of the most controversial senior commanders of the Second World War, had been considered for the post prior to Gott being appointed, but had lost out to Gott. With Gott's death, he was the natural choice. He was of Scots ancestry and from what might be regarded as a sort of Scottish variant of the Anglo-Irish community. While born in England, his father was a Church of Ireland minister who would ultimately be sent to Tasmania, where Montgomery grew up. While his father Henry had inherited the family estate in Ulster, there was not sufficient money to support the family until his father took the position in Tasmania.
His father was a dutiful clergyman and spent much of his time on the road in the rural areas of what remained a British colony at the time. While he was gone, his mother, only in her twenties, constantly beat and then ignored the children. This treatment made Bernard something of a bully in his youth and caused lasting animosity between him and his mother, whose funeral he did not attend in 1949.
The family returned to England in 1897. Bernard joined the Army in 1908. By all accounts he had a difficult personality, but in spite of American claims to the contrary, he was a brilliant tactician with a great appreciation of how to use troops who were inadequately equipped with thin resources.
The Germans took Elista on the Eastern Front.
The Australians retreated at Deniki on New Guinea, and the Japanese landed troops at Buna.
The Japanese, acting with rich hypocrisy, passed the Enemy Airman's Act. It stated:
The hypocrisy was that Japan had used air assets extensively against Chinese civilian populations by this point in the war. Using air assets against civilians is in fact a crime, but in this case, the Japanese were familiar with that crime by having done it. Not only this, the murder, rape and enslavement of civilian populations was a common practice by Japanese ground forces.
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that 1) the British had arrested the German advances in North Africa but were nowhere near reversing them; 2) the Japanese were still advancing in the South Pacific and the recent U.S. offensive in the Solomons was now imperiled by a lack of progress on Guadalcanal and the Japanese Navy driving the U.S. Navy from that island's coast; 3) British efforts to contest for the Mediterranean were hardly an unqualified success; and 4) tens of ships were going down in the Atlantic every day, Joseph Stalin wrote a memo protesting the Allied decision not to land in France in 1942.
What Stalin seemingly was missing is that while he was losing the war inside of Russia at that moment, all the evidence was that the Allies were still losing it in the Pacific and barely hanging on in North Africa. A landing in France was simply impossible.
Bambi opened in the United States.
Hitler split his forces by ordering that Army Group South be so divided, with Group A to seize Rostov-on Don and continue into the Caucasus while Group B was to drive through Stalingrad and on to Astrakhan, a city on the Volga near the Caspian Sea.
Stalin authorized strategic withdrawals in the face of advancing Axis forces, the first time this had been done by the Soviet dictator.
To at least a certain extent, the German actions at this point reflected the original thinking behind Barbarossa. The Germans thought themselves on the verge of capturing the Caucasian oilfield which they needed, to their thinking, to defeat the British. They had also taken the Soviet grain belt as well. Beyond the Volga was largely tractless wilderness, in their view, and they didn't fully conceive of the war really extending beyond that point.
The Soviets, of course, didn't regard being driven east of the Volga as defeat.
Sarah Sundin notes the following on her blog:
Today in World War II History—July 9, 1942: US Navy assigns Lt. Cdr. Samuel Eliot Morison the task of writing the US naval history of WWII, which will run to 15 volumes.
Morison was a professional and academic historian, with a profession at Harvard, where he eccentrically became the last professor to arrive at the school on horseback. His position commenced before World War One, in 1915, but he temporarily left to enlist in the U.S. Army as a private during the war. Following the war, he served on the Baltic Commission of the Paris Peace talks. He then returned to Harvard.
He did not enter the Navy until 1942, in which he was asked to take on the role as Naval historian by Franklin Roosevelt. In his role, he was active in witnessing combat. His history of the Navy during the war would be fifteen volumes in length. He retired from the Navy in 1950, and was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral. He retired from Harvard in 1955 and died in 1976.
Of minor note, Samuel Eliot Morison (one "r") is sometimes confused with Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was a career combat officer in the Navy and who was the father of famed rock star, Jim Morrison.
Morison's history of the Navy is regarded as an authentically important and significant work of history.
German Ju88s damage PQ17's El Capitan and the SS Hoosier, but the first ships of the embattled convoy start pulling into Archangel. At the same time, Convoy WP 183 comes under heavy attack by German torpedo boats, which sink six ships of the convoy. German aircraft sink an additional ship.
It's often claimed that torpedo boats didn't live up to their promise during the Second World War, but this event certainly was a successful one for them.
In the Baltic, Soviet submarine S-7 sank Swedish coast freighters ten miles off the Swedish coast, sinking one. It was carrying coal from Germany to Sweden.
In a part of the war that had grown somewhat quiet, Finns counterattacked a Soviet beached on Someri in the Gulf of Finland and defeated the Soviet invasion force.
Heinrich Himmler authorized sterilization experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, increasing Nazi barbarity to new perverse levels.
It's hard to appreciate how deeply weird the Nazis truly were. As their reign expanded, and authority deepened, they not only turned to greater levels of killing, but also acts that were more and more perverse on every level.
The U-701 was sunk by a Lockheed Hudson off of Cape Hatteras. This was noted by Sara Sundin in her blog, in which she stated:
Today in World War II History—July 7, 1942: US Army Air Force opens Wideawake Field on Ascension Island. US Army Air Force sinks its first submarine off the US East Coast.
Seven men survived the sinking, including the captain, and were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard. Seventeen has escaped the submarine through the conning tower, of which ten died before being rescued. Another 29 went down with the ship.
While I haven't been noting it, while the Germans were losing submarines in this period, they were also commissioning new ones almost every day. An outside observer would have real reason at this point to ask who was winning the war. Having said that, the human toll of submarine losses, which would ultimately be over 50,000 for the Germans, was truly horrific.
On that topic, the U-457 sank the British fleet oiler FRA Alderdale which had been part of the embattled convoy PQ 17. It had been disabled and abandoned two days prior. The U-355 sank the SS Hartlebury. The U-255 sank the SS Alcoa Ranger. PQ 17 was becoming a major naval disaster.
The U-571 sank the SS Umtata off of Miami. It was under tow for repairs at the time.
Sundin also noted the item about Wideawake Field on Ascension Island and has a further website entry on that here:
Of Terns and Planes: While the armies of democracy battled the armies of totalitarianism, a smaller battle raged between US Army Engineers and a little bird called the sooty tern.
Ascension Island figured most recently in wartime in the Falklands War, when the British, whose possession it is, used it as a military staging area. The United Kingdom continues to maintain communications installations there. During World War Two the use of the island by the Air Force was able to extend the range of airborne protection to convoys on the southern route in the Atlantic.
Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, in a debate in the Canadian parliament on manpower, stated that the government's policy was "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary".
Life magazine, hitting the stands on this day, featured the Stars and Stripes on its cover.
Today in World War II History—July 6, 1942: Anne Frank’s family goes into hiding in Amsterdam. Japanese forces land on Guadalcanal to build an air base. British First Army is activated.
All significant in their own way, with the first of course being tragic.
The Royal Air Force sank the U-502 in the Bay of Biscay using a Wellington equipped with a high powered spotlight. While seemingly a simple device, the equipping of aircraft with the lights would cause the German Navy to have to recharge submarine batteries during the day.
Otherwise, the Germans had a good day in the Battle of the Atlantic. And in Case Blue as well, although the Soviets now concluded that the German effort was towards the Caucasian oilfields and not towards Moscow. The Germans took Voronezh
A Motion of Censure of Churchill's government was brought in the House of Commons, and then overwhelmingly failed.
The motion was brought due to recent reversals in North Africa, although the recent setbacks in the newly started war with Japan played a part as well. Churchill specifically noted that he expected fortunes to reverse as British forces started receiving American arms.
Churchill had stated in response to the motion:
The will of the whole House should be made manifest upon important occasions. It is important that not only those who speak, but those who watch and listen and judge, should also count as a factor in world affairs. After all, we are still fighting for our lives, and for causes dearer than life itself. We have no right to assume that victory is certain; it will be certain only if we do not fail in our duty. Sober and constructive criticism, or criticism in Secret Session, has its high virtue; but the duty of the House of Commons is to sustain the Government or to change the Government. If it cannot change it, it should sustain it. There is no working middle course in wartime
Interestingly enough, things were already turning around, or at least not getting any worse. The Afrika Korps failed to take El Alamein for the second day in a row, with Briitsh forces mounting a counterattack that took 2,000 prisoners and 30 field guns.
The Tirpitz and Hipper, with escorts, left Trondheim to attack Allied convoy PQ17. Seventeen He115s attacked the convoy unsuccessfully.
PQ17 was being shadowed by submarines and flying boats.
Anne Frank received a diary on this day for her 13th birthday.
The U.S. Army Air Force bombed Polesti, Romania in a mission which saw 13 B-24s fly from Fayid Egypt to an intended landing in Iraq. Four of the bombers made emergency landings in Iraq, and two in Syria. The ones in Turkey were interned.
The bombers were actually in transit to China. This was not part of Operation Tidal Wave, the famous low level raid that was also performed by B-24s.
On the same day, the Army Air Force raided Kiska for the second day in a row.
The Germans breakout in Libya and close to within fifteen miles of Tobruk.
The British launch Operation Harpoon in a desperate effort to resupply Malta by sea.
The Soviet Navy resupplied Sevastopol by sea, brining in 2,314 additional soldiers to the defense of the besieged city.
The Japanese submarine I-24 sank the SS Guatemala off of Sidney. The I-16 sank the Yugoslavian flagged Supetar, the I-20 the Panamanian flagged Hellenic Trader, and the British Clifton Hall, all cargo vessels, in hte Mozambique Channel.
The German U-77 sank the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Grove off of Baria, Libya. The U-124 sank the SS Dartford off of Newfoundland, the U-129 sank the SS Harwicke Grange off of Puerto Rico, the U-158sank the US SS Cities Service Toledo,an oil tanker, off of Louisiana.
The USS Swordfish sank the Japanese transport ship Burma Maru off of Cambodia.
George H. W. Bush graduated from Phillips Academy, turned 18 years old, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy on this day.
The recently completed Grand Coulee Dam was photographed.
On this day in 1942 the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula ended with an Axis victory as active campaigning very much resumed on the southern Eastern Front.
The effort had been going on for four months. Germany and Romania took 38,000 losses in the battle, the Soviets took 570,000.
Sarah Sundin reports the following for this Tuesday in May of 1942:
Today in World War II History—May 19, 1942: Lt. Col. James Doolittle receives the Medal of Honor, revealing who led the US air raid on Tokyo. New York City discontinues night baseball games.
The Italian submarine Cappellini sank the Swedish ship MV Tisnaren which was clearly marked as a Swedish vessel. It was carrying Scotch whiskey from Manchester England to South America.
The U-751 sank the US SS Isabela in the Caribbean. The U-103 sank the SS Orgontz off of Mexicao. The U-506 sank the SS Heredia off of Guatemala.
The HMS Thrasher sank the Italian merchant ship Penelope.
The RAF ineffectively raided Mannheim Germany in a night raid while the Luftwaffe attacked Hull.
The US Navy partially decoded a Japanese message concerning a large force preparing to invade "AF". Navy Cryptanalyst Joseph Rochefort suspected it was Midway Island, but as AF was not known with certainty, a message in the clear was subsequently broadcast from Midway that its desalination plant had broken down, which the Japanese picked up, and rebroadcast as an intelligence report in regard to "AF".
The Mexican oil tanker Petrero del Llano was sunk by a German submarine.
Today in World War II History—May 14, 1942: US Navy begins full convoys on East Coast as the first convoy departs from Hampton Roads, VA, for Key West, FL.
So notes Sarah Sundin's blog.
She also noted that Australia commenced rationing of food and clothing on this day, something I had never considered, in the Australian context, before reading about it on her site.
