As we learn here:
Germany's Admiral Raeder declared that ships of the U.S. Navy escorting vessels bound to Allied nations, which of course would just be the UK at this time, was an act of war.
The Admiral may have been correct on that. However, if he was, sinking unarmed merchant ships that were carrying civilian items was definitely an act of war, and the Germans had done that in regard to an American vessel just a few days prior.
On this day in 1941 the HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck in the opening day of the Battle of the Denmark Strait.
Only three of its crew of over 1400 survived.
On the same day, a British submarine sank the Italian troops ship SS Conte Rosso off the coast of Sicily which resulted in the loss of 1,300 lives.
The sinking resulted in some controversy, but the materials it was carrying could have been regarded as war materials even though the ship itself was not engaged in supplying the British forces.
The German government ordered the United States to remove its diplomats from Paris by June 10. The French government at the time was of course headquartered in Vichy.
On the same day the Royal Navy prevented seaborne German forces from landing on Crete, but the destroyer HMS Juno was sunk by the Italian air force.
The Soviet Union's Central Committee War Section met, resulting in an argument between Stalin and the head of Soviet intelligence, the latter who maintained the Germans were about to invade the USSR. The argument resulted in that latter figure being arrested and shot. Amazingly Stalin didn't suffer the same fate when it was soon learned how wrong he was.
A theater strike commenced in Norway over the revocation of working permits for six actors who refused to perform in German controlled radio. The strike was not a success and ultimately ended with the Germans taking full control of Norwegian theaters.
A dispute with Native American O'ooham leader Pia Machita ended in Arizona with his arrest for inciting his people to avoid conscription. He and his followers had been on the run since the prior October for resisting the draft, at which time they had been raided by Federal authorities.
The O'ooham band that Pia Machita was part of was very small but was uniquely active in its views on the authority of the United States. He did not recognize the Gadsen Purchase and his band refused to assimilate. While they were small in numbers, the US government feared that their resistance to conscription would spread to other tribes.
Also on this day the British took an Enigma from the U110.
This meant that in the space of just two days the British had taken an Enigma machine and the codes for July. They knew exactly what they had and indeed had been targeting German naval assets for this purpose.
On this day in 1941, as you can read in the item below, the British destroyer HMS Somali captured the German weather ship München off of Iceland.
With the ship the British also captured her July Enigma code book. In fact, she was targeted for that.
Benchley Park had figured out that the fatal flaw of Enigma was the universality of the code books and they guessed that weather ships would have them, even though they didn't transmit in code, and that they'd have the following month's in a safe. The plan was to fire over a weather ship and frighten the crew in the hopes they'd fail to dump the second book, which they in fact did.
Weather ships were a critical part of the German U-boat campaign but also a weakness in it. In the days before satellite weather forecasting, weather forecasting relied upon weather readings and observations. This meant that the Germans had no choice but to put weather ships in the North Atlantic and to also land men on Iceland and Greenland, and even Labrador. All of these efforts were vulnerable to Allied detection and they had to rely on the remoteness of their locations for protection.
On the same day, the Germans released the film Sieg Im Westen (Victory in the West). It proved to be premature.
Also on this day, the Royal Air Force took its first delivery of B-17s. The RAF would never use a large number of the American bomber, but they did employ some. They would not see combat until July, when they were used in a high altitude bombing raid which served to confirm in British minds that daylight bombing was too costly.
The Battle of South Shanxi began in China and would result in one of the worst defeats for the Nationalist Chinese in the Second World War. Critical to the result, Communist Chinese forces refused to come to the aid of encircled Nationalist Chinese forces due to embittered communist feelings over the New Fourth Army Incident of earlier that year.
That earlier incident had occurred in early 1941 and saw the Chinese communist sustain about 7,000 casualties at Nationalist Chinese hands. Accounts of the incident vary enormously and it is therefore almost impossible to figure out who broke the truce between the Nationalist and the Communist that was brokered in order to contest the Japanese, the bigger enemy. At any rate, the Nationalist sustained over 100,000 casualties in the South Shanxi battle, so the Communist more than evened the score.
On this day in 1941 Germany invaded Greece, in order to bail out its failing ally Italy, and also invaded Yugoslavia as part of that overall effort. As part of that latter event, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade.
More on that here.
Yugoslavia entered a treaty of friendship with the USSR, which was backdated to April 5 at the suggestion of the Soviets thus giving the appearance that the Soviet Union was not entering an alliance with a nation at war.
The U.S. Secretary of State, on Yugoslavia, issued this statement:
The barbaric invasion of Yugoslavia and the attempt to annihilate that country by brute force is but another chapter in the present planned movement of attempted world conquest and domination.
Another small nation has been assaulted by the forces of aggression and is further proof that there are no geographical limitations or bounds of any kind to their movement for world conquest.
The American people have the greatest sympathy for the nation which has been thus so outrageously attacked and we follow closely the valiant. struggle the Yugoslav people are making to protect their homes and preserve their liberty.
This Government with its policy of helping those who are defending themselves against would be conquerors is now proceeding as speedily as possible to send military and other supplies to Yugoslavia.
The German advances, here and in North Africa, reinforced the image that German ground forces were unbeatable. It also gave rise to the the second example of a pattern in the early and mid war of German forces advancing during the Spring. But by taking Yugoslavia, as Germany was about to do, it was about to take the first nation in which the civilian population would never accept their presence and therefore Germany would find itself for the first time in a guerilla war against resistance forces.
The British took Addis Ababa, the capitol of Ethiopia, as the Italian effort there collapsed, which is also noted in the above. British Commonwealth forces had advanced 120 miles in two days to take the city, which was unoccupied.
Northwest of there, however, by quite some margin, Commonwealth forces were retreating in panic towards Tobruk.
The Gneisenau was damaged by British aircraft while undergoing repairs in France, which you can read about here:
The German Afrika Corps and Italian forces took Benghazi, a major reversal of British fortunes in North Africa.
The Germans could begin to hope once again, with their now successful early stages of their intervention, that their arms were invincible. They had not suffered a ground defeat. That would ignore, of course, that they only had so much ground power to spread around.
On the same day Hitler ordered his plans for the invasion of Greece, having intervened seemingly successfully to aid the Italians in North Africa he was set to do the same in Europe.
Also on this day in 1941 the German commerce raider and auxiliary cruiser Thor engaged and sank the British auxiliary cruiser HMS Voltaire after a prolonged fight. The German ship was much more heavily armed than the British converted merchantman, both of which were unfortunately named. The British sustained a heavy loss of life of the ship's crew.
The United States granted permission to the Royal Navy to have its ships repaired in US ports taking the US one step closer to full belligerency against the Germans and Italians.
More on events of the day in the Second World War can be read here.
Things continued, on this day in 1941, to go downhill for the Italians as the British overran them in Ethiopia at the Babille Pass. By this point it was pretty obvious that the Italian army wasn't up to. . .well about much of anything. Italian fortunes were flagging.
Having said that, the Italians did put up a fight at Keren in Eritrea where they launched a massive counterattack at Ft. Dologorodoc. It failed, but it was fiercely fought.
In spite of the Italian misfortunes, Vichy France signed a bill to construct a trans Saharan railway, which admittedly didn't directly involve Italy, but given that Italy was losing badly to the British, should at least have signaled that North African construction projects were rather unlikely to be successful constructed. To make matters worse, the French government conceived of the project being built by POWs, which made them a quasi belligerent, and Jewish slave labor, which additionally made them racist criminals. So already, by this point in 1941, Vichy France was complicit in one of the greatest crimes of all time.
By some accounts the 99th Pursuit Squadron was activated on this day and Jimmy Stewart, who would go on to long service in the Air Corps and Air Force, was inducted, which demonstrates how even relatively recent dates can become confused. We've covered both of these events, attributed to earlier dates, within the last week.
More on the 99th Pursuit Squadron on this entry here, which also discusses the Grand Coulee Dam.
In the early morning hours, the German near battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were met by German Kreigsmarine destroyers operating out of Brest and were escorted into port. Their 60 day sortie had resulted in 22 merchant ships being destroyed. The Royal Navy attempted to intercept them, but was too late to do so. On the same day, the German armed merchant ship Kormoran stopped the British tanker Agnita and sank it.
The British Army landed troops in Greece in support of the Greek war against the Italians in what was termed Operation Lustre.
It might be understated to state that the operation would prove to be ill fated.
As we've looked at recently, the Axis powers really weren't doing that well in the war, contrary to the way it tends to be recalled, at this point in it. Nonetheless, the British didn't have the sort of resources available to take the Germans on, on an additional front. Due to their intervention in North Africa on behalf of the Italians they were already contending with the Germans there. The Wehrmacht was massing on the Bulgarian border with Greece in anticipating invading it, after offering to attempt to mediate the dispute between Greece and Italy, and there was no realistic way that the British would have ample forces to contend an oncoming German invasion of Greece.
Actor Jimmy Stewart joined the U.S. Army in which he would serve as a pilot.
Stewart would serve in combat in Europe and go on to a long Air Force Reserve career, retiring as a General.
A pile of British shipping was sunk by U-boots on this day, including the Terje Viken, a ship was at the time the largest whaling vessel in the world. The Germans lost the U70 and the U47. The U47 had been one of its most successful raiders. It's commander, Gunter Prien, remains a legend in the U-boot community even though he was a strict disciplinarian and his enlisted crews disliked him. At one point the modern West German Navy considered naming a ship after him, but ultimately declined to do so. A street, however, does bear his name in a Schoenberg Ploen.
You can read about the U70 here:
The Battle for the Atlantic had been going on since 1939, when Germany commenced submarine warfare against the Allies, and principally against the United Kingdom. This period of the war, however, eighty years ago, was the German U-boot "Happy Time". During this period the British were struggling against massive U-boot losses.
On this day, therefore, Winston Churchill issued his Battle of the Atlantic Directive. You can read it here:
The British were actually getting ahead of the problem by this period and the Happy Time was about to end.
The Luftwaffe was expanding its operations against Allied shipping on this day, conducting aerial mining against the Suez Canal, which you can read about here:
As the item above notes, famed sculptor Gutzon Borglum, best remembered for Mount Rushmore, died at age 73 on this day.
This recent movie by Tom Hanks was intended for a theater release this past year but that was disrupted by the COVID 19 pandemic. It was therefore instead released on Apple TV. It can't be claimed that the movie hasn't suffered in some fashion for this, but all in all the film is sort of freakishly suited for the medium in which it has been released.
Greyhound is based upon a novel by C. S. Forester entitled The Good Shepherd. I haven't read the novel, but according to those who have the movie is close to it. Forester was famous for his Admiral Hornblower series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, none of which I've read, but which have had a substantial following. According to those who have read them, this foray into World War Two, written by Forester in 1955, was a considerable departure in numerous ways, all of which seem to have found reflection in the film.
The plot line follows the convoy command of a U.S. Navy officer, Captain Krause, early after the official start of World War Two in the Atlantic. The officer, we learn early on, is older for his command, and this film, like Saving Private Ryan, cast Hanks, age 65, in a role for which he'd be very much too old in real life. However, like that film, and the recently reviewed The Big Red One, this film isn't hindered by that fact for the reason that generally individuals during the Second World War often appeared significantly older than their contemporaries of the same vintage would today.
The age is a significant factor in the story and apparently in the book as well, as it suggests that the ship's captain has had a stalled career. Indeed, early on it is hinted at that he's had a stalled life as the scene, which is nearly only a cameo, that introduces the film is before his departure for his new assignment in which he meets a love interest, Evelyn, played by Elisabeth Shue (age 57).
Shue is a long standing actress who makes only a brief appearance in this film. Associated most strongly with films from early in career, in which she played upper middle class girls next door, she's well cast in her role as well. At age 57, Shue can easily pass for a woman in the 1940s in her 40s, just as Hanks can pass for a man in his 40s at age 64.
That really leads us to another topic, which is relative age in eras. As we've earlier noted in other threads, the common suggestion that people "live longer" now than they previously did is erroneous, but an argument can be made that people aged more quickly in prior eras. People in their 50s common looked much older in the mid 20th Century than they do now, and women in particular, even though they have always lived longer than men, often looked quite old by the time they were in their late 50s.
All that's a topic for some other thread, but what we'd note here is that the relative appearance of the subjects isn't incorrect.
Before moving on with the film, on a final note with age, we should note that lots of military career officers were at much lower ranks, indeed, nearly all of them were, prior the start of World War Two. Stalled careers is a common subject for movies set in World War Two, with The Caine Mutiny and The Thin Red Line providing examples of the same. Indeed, the inevitable temptation to compare the captain and crew of the ship in The Caine Mutiny with the same in this film is pretty strong, although it doesn't go too far given the much different portrayals. Anyhow, there were in fact a lot of older officers in the service at fairly junior ranks when the war started. Eisenhower, for example, was a Lieutenant Colonel at the start of the war. The problem, however is that the military made a pretty pronounced effort to weed officers over 50 years of age out of the service, although it was an informal process and not universally applied. And also, I know much less about this in the Navy than I do in the Army. Still, its interesting to note that Chester Nimitz was 55 years old when World War Two started (and by contemporary standards, he looked much older).
Anyhow, having dealt with that topic, that comes up in discussions on this film, we can take Hanks role here as a Naval officer receiving his first ship command in his 40s as not unrealistic.
That long introduction sets the stage. The U.S. is early in the war and Hanks is a long serving Navy officer whom its hinted has had a disappointing career. He receives, however, command of a Fletcher class destroyer and, moreover, command of a convoy that's set to cross the Atlantic in the thick of the U Boot war. How does the film do historically, and otherwise.
Well, fairly good, but not without quite a bit of dramatic license.
Starting off, the film does an excellent job of portraying the absolute nightmare of crossing the Atlantic before the U Boot wolf packs were broken up and small aircraft carriers became part of convoys. The movie accurately portrays the convoy becoming vulnerable as soon as the convoy passes out of air cover. The film also accurately portrays the horrific attrition that convoys were subject to in that part of the war. Indeed, for much of the war being a merchant seaman in the Atlantic was the most dangerous occupation in the war. The film is also accurate in showing the convoy being multinational, with British and Canadian escorts as part of it.
Naval weaponry is accurate in the film as well, including the fact that defense weaponry such as depth charges were limited in number. Technology that was a feature of ships of the period, including the period sonar, is also correct and shown being correctly used, including showing its limitations.
Historically, however the movie becomes less accurate when depicts U Boot vs surface ship combat. Stealth was the only real advantage that U boots had and they rarely made daylight surface attacks for that reason. U boot speed was enormously hampered when they operated submerged but attacking on the surface made them incredibly vulnerable to destruction. Even small arms fire was sufficient to sink a submarine of the era. Therefore, while surface runs would make sense for a nighttime attack, and indeed were often done, or were done in bad weather when U boots could take advantage of that and their surface speed, they generally attacked submerged during daylight hours. The film takes, therefore, an enormous liberty in showing them in daylight surface attacks.
It also shows them to be much more immune to damage than they really were. As noted, a surfaced U boot was quite easy to sink.
German submarines also didn't make use of their radios to taunt surface ships, as shown in this film. In reality they observed strict radio silence as using their radios made them vulnerable to radio detection, which they feared.
On another note, before moving on to material details, it should be noted that the film does a really good job of showing the relationships between officer and men on a period Navy vessel. Hanks is obviously respected, even though he is green, but he's highly formal, but paternal, to his men. The cooks on board the ship are shows as being all black sailors, which is completely correct. The relationship between the older commander and the older, senior, member of the mess staff is one of the most interesting aspect of the film and very well done. The very small nature of the ship, with the interior scenes being filmed on board the USS Kidd, an actual Fletcher class destroyer, is very well portrayed. The spartan nature of the conditions on board the ship are also well portrayed, which for some reason they only rarely are. Most of the interior spaces of this ship look like a janitors closet compared to the same depictions in earlier films such as The Caine Mutiny or Mister Roberts.
Some of this of course fits into the topic of material details, but there's more to consider. As noted, ship details are excellently portrayed, including destroyer weaponry. Uniforms are correct and the movie does a good job of showing how formal officers uniforms remained even in combat at the time. U boots are less well done including the wolf portrayal on the conning tower of the U boot. Paintings on conning towers were normal for German U boots but this one simply does not look right. As earlier noted, a German wolf pack commander would not have taunted Allied ships at any point.
As a final note, one of the really interesting things about this film is the outward religiosity of it. It's frankly striking. Hank's ship commander prays throughout the film, both by himself at private moments and at meals, something he shares in common with the senior mess enlisted man. The title of the book from which the movie was made has a distinct religious reference from the New Testament, taken from the parable in which the Good Shepherd does everything so as to not lose a single sheep.
Indeed, even the Shue character and her relationship with Captain Krause is remarkable. Krause wishes to marry her, as its made plain. We don't know why she's single in her 40s, or why he is, and its not going to be explained. It is plain, however, that their relationship is one of deep affection, but its not portrayed as physical.
Hanks has delivered a series of great depictions of World War Two. This is one of them.
LinkLessons Learned From WWI German U-Boat Attacks
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency chief historian Gary Weir discussed lessons the U.S. Navy learned after World War I German U-boat attacks on the Atlantic Coast. Mr. Weir argued that the experience led to improved American submarines and weapons for the World War II fleet. This hour-long event was part of a day-long symposium marking the 100th anniversary of the World War I German U-Boat campaign on the Atlantic coast.
1901 Mildred Harris, movie actress, born in Cheyenne. She was a significant actress in the silent film era, having gone from being a child actor to a major adult actress, but had difficulty making the transition to talking pictures.
Harris is also evidence that, in spite of my notation of changes in moral standards elsewhere, the lives of movie stars has often been as torrid as they are presently. Harris married Charlie Chaplin in 1918, at which time she was 17 years old and the couple thought, incorrectly, that she was pregnant. She did later give birth during their brief marriage to a boy who was severely disabled, and who died only three days after being born. The marriage was not a happy one. They divorced after two years of marriage, and she would marry twice more and was married to former professional football player William P. Fleckenstein at the time of her death, a union that had lasted ten years. Ironically, she appeared in three films in 1920, the year of her divorce, as Mildred Harris Chaplin, the only films in which she was billed under that name. While an actress probably mostly known to silent film buffs today, she lived in some ways a life that touched upon many remembered personalities of the era, and which was also somewhat stereotypically Hollywood. She introduced Edward to Wallis Simpson.
She died in 1944 at age 42 of pneumonia following surgery. She has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A significant number of her 134 films are lost or destroyed due to film deterioration. Her appearances in the last eight years of her life were minor, and unaccredited, showing the decline of her star power in the talking era.
Stories like hers, however, demonstrate that the often held concept of great isolation of Wyomingites was never true. Harris was one of at least three actors and actresses who were born in Wyoming and who had roles in the early silent screen era. Of those, she was arguably the most famous having risen to the height of being a major actress by age 16.
When his battalion, of which he had just taken command, was halted by machinegun fire from the front and left flank, he picked up the rifle of a dead soldier and, calling on his men to follow led the advance across a stream, waist deep, in the face of the machinegun fire. Upon reaching the opposite bank this gallant officer was seriously wounded in the abdomen by a sniper, but before permitting himself to be evacuated he made complete arrangements for turning over his command to the next senior officer, and under the inspiration of his fearless leadership his battalion reached its objective. Capt. Chiles died shortly after reaching the hospital.Chiles entered the service from Denver Colorado.
