Saturday, March 11, 1944. Rittmeister Eberhard von Breitenbuch attempts to assassinate Hitler.

Rittmeister Eberhard von Breitenbuch, an aid to Generalfeldmarschall Ernst Busch, accompanied the latter who had been summoned to brief Adolf Hitler to a briefing.  Part of what would become the July 20 Plot, he carried a Browning pocket pistol with him in order to assassinate the German Führer, something he had worked out with senior plotter Henning von Tresckow as he was opposed to what others preferred, a suicide bomb.  He as allowed into the Berghof but wasn't allowed into the conference rooms by the SS, which had determined not to allow in aides.

Unlike many involved in the various German military efforts to assassinate Hitler, Von Breitenbuch was not a career officer.  A forester before the war, and again after, he was part of the cavalry branch, a typical branch for those involved in forestry.

A member of the Order of St. John, the Protestant branch of the Knights Hospitallers, he survived the war and died in 1980 at age 70. 

Polish mortar men, March 11, 1944.  Italy.

British forces took Buthidaung in Burma.  

Reconnaissance forces land on Manus Island and Butjo Luo in the Admiralty Islands and meet Japanese resistance.

The U-380 and U-410 were sunk in their pens at Toulon in an American air raid.  Former Italian submarine UIT-22, now in the service of the German's, was sunk off of the Cape of Good Hope by a Royal Air Force PBY.

A conscientious objector from Laramie was sent to a detention center.  Attribution:  Wyoming History Calendar.

People have a widespread idea that conscientious objectors simply didn't serve during World War Two.  In reality, their fate was much more difficult, quite frequently.  70,000 American men applied for conscientious objector status during World War Two, and about half of them received it, with most of them receiving some sort of alternative service.

Last Prior:

Friday, March 10, 1944. Soviets say no to Finns.

Saturday, February 12, 1944. Canaris fired.

Wilhelm Canaris was dismissed as head of the Abwehr.  Technically the Abwehr, the German military intelligence ministry, was abolished on the same day and its functions were taken over by the Ausland-SD, but this doesn't seem to have been really the case to some degree, and most sources show the Abwehr continuing on until the end of the Third Reich.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-013-43 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5419101

Canaris was opposed to the execution of Jews and registered complaints regarding it.  He also passed information on to the Allies and was involved in efforts to overthrow Hitler.  He was one of the most highly placed sources of intelligence for the Allies inside the Nazi regime.  An Abwehr deputy, Hans Oster, was also a figure in the German resistance.

His role would ultimately cost him his life, as he'd be arrested and executed later in 1944.  His wife, Erika, would relocate to Spain, where she would live until 1970.  Halina Szymańska, a Switzerland based Polish spy working for the British, whom Canaris used to pass on information, and who was also Canaris' paramour, and who was a widow of a Polish officer, would move to the UK after the war, marry an exiled Polish officer, and lived until 1989.

Canaris has always been a very difficult personality to grasp. Some regard him as being very heroic, as he was in fact carrying out resistance efforts from the very heart of Nazi Germany.  Others find him less so, wondering why he didn't go further given his central position.  He had briefly supported the Nazis, given their anticommunism, but had parted from them very early.  He had used his position to shield Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he seems to have been motivated in his opposition to the Nazis partially by faith. Regarding that, he was a Lutheran in keeping with a conversion from Catholicism that his grandfather had made, but he had referred to himself as a "Catholic Mystic" and was fascinated with Spanish castles.  Neither faith would condone carrying on an extramarital affair.  He believed himself to be of Greek descent, but in fact he was of Italian descent.

The German III Panzerkorps took Vinograd and Lysianka in its effort to relieve the Korsun pocket.

 F6F’s on the flight deck of USS Gambier Bay (CVE 73) en-route to the South Pacific, February 12, 1944.

Marines captured Gorissi on New Britain.  Allied forces landed on Rooke Island in the Bismark Archipelago as well.  In the Marshalls the US landed on the Arno Atoll.

The German ship Oria sank in a storm in the Mediterranean, taking over 4,000 Italian prisoners of war down with it.

The New Zealand Corps replaced the US 2nd Corps at Cassino.  

Defenses at Anzio were reconfigured given recent German successes, but no major fighting occured on this day.

The British troopship Khedive Ismail was sunk by the I-27 in the Indian Ocean, taking 1,297 troops down with it.  One of them was Kenneth Gandar-Dower, age 35, who was an English sportsman, explorer and author.  He was on board as a war correspondent.

Wendell Willlkie announced his candidate for President, back in an era when the Presidential election cycle didn't begin insanely early.  No Democratic candidate had yet been announced, although his name had been put forward for some primaries.

A lawyer by profession and the child of two lawyers, Willkie had been in the Democratic Party until 1939, and indeed Roosevelt had considered him, even after that, as a Vice Presidential candidate.  By 1944 his health was rapidly declining, something accelerated by heavy drinking and smoking, and he would, in fact, not be alive by the November election.

Margaret Woodrow Wilson, age 57, the daughter of Woodrow Wilson, died on this day of uremia.  She was living in India, where she had become a devotee of a Hindu sect.

Wednesday, January 12, 1944. Churchill and De Gaulle meet.

Bombing of Japanese merchant ships at Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands by VB-108, January 12, 1944. 

De Gaulle and Churchill met in Marrakesh.

The US Army's 34th Infantry Division took Cervaro.

The Red Army's 13th Army took Sarny, then properly a part of Poland.

Seventy-four members of the Solf Circle, a group of anti-Nazi intellectuals, were arrested.

Thursday, December 16, 1943. The murder of Elfriede Scholz.

Elfriede Scholz, sister of novelist Erich Maria Remarque, was beheaded for "undermining the war effort" by refusing to renounce her brother.

Her brother was a refugee in the United States due to his anti-war and anti-Nazi views.  She was an outspoken anti-Nazi in her own right.

The Stars and Stripes, December 16, 1943:

Note that the Sergeant is carrying, in Mauldin's depiction, a M1903 Springfield.

The cartoon was a comedic depiction of conditions in Italy.

In Italy, Sarah Sundin's blog notes:

Today in World War II History—December 16, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 16, 1943: US Fifth Army takes Monte Lungo in Italy, almost encircling San Pietro, but the third attack on San Pietro fails.

She also notes that the RAF lost 29 returning Lancaster bombers in landings in fog on this day, the worst RAF accident loss of the war.

The U-73 was sunk by the U.S. Navy off of Oran, Algeria.

Crash of FM1, Bu# 46789, on flight deck of USS Manila Bay, December 16, 1943.

Friday, September 17, 1943. Breaking out.

The 5th Army, after having struggled to retain a beachhead at Salerno, began to advance out of it.

Some members of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) rebelled in Villefranche-de-Rouergue. The rebellion failed as most of its members did not join the uprising and it was subsequently put down, resulting in the deaths of 150 rebels and the capture and eventual execution of the revolt's leaders.

In Yugoslavia, A British liaison team arrived to meet with Tito.

German Army General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, a prisoner of the Soviets, and head of the Bund Deutscher Offiziere, the League of German Officers, that was formed from German officer POWsproposed a German unit within the Red Army to include over 30,000 men.  The proposal was never taken seriously, and in fact was wildly optimistic.  The Soviets mostly used the offer for propaganda purposes.

Changing sides after his capture at Stalingrad, Seydlitz-Kurzbach was nonetheless tried by the Soviets for war crimes in 1950, having already naturally been tried in abstentia by the Germans during the war.  He was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, but in 1955 he was released to West Germany, where he was a pariah to his former colleagues.  The Bundeswehr refused to restore his rank for retirement and also refused to grant him a pension.  He died in 1976 at age 87.

Friday, September 10, 1943. Betrayal.

Prime Minister Badoglio and King Victor Emanuell III made their way through German lines to escape to Allied held Italy.

Twenty-two Italian ships arrived at Malta.

The Vatican closed the doors of St. Peter's Basilica and blocked the Sant'Anna Gate at noon to give sanctuary to Italians who had fled there.

The Berliner resistance movement the Solf Circle was betrayed by an uncover Gestapo agent, Dr. Paul Reckzeh, following a tea party attended by the group.  Reckzeh was a Swiss physician.  The groups downfall would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Abwehr as the group had connections with it.

Most of the members of the group, although not all of it, would later be executed.  Reckzeh was arrested by he Soviets and held after the war until tried by them in 1950.  He was released in 1952 and lived in East Germany, where he betrayed his daughter Barbara to the East German authorities when she tried to flee to the West. He died in 1996 in Hamburg, having spent most of his adult life in Germany and having had a role in two hideous acts for two hideous regimes.

P-39 Airacobra  at Berry Field, Tennessee, September 10, 1943.

Monday, August 9, 1943. Blessed Franz Jägerstätter

 

Franz Jägerstätter, 36, Austrian farmer and conscientious objector, was executed by the Germans.

Born into poverty and illegitimacy, he was the son of a farmer and chambermaid who could not afford to marry.  He was initially raised by his grandmother, the pious Elisabeth Huber.  His father was killed in World War One and his mother latter married Heinrich Jägerstätter, who adopted him and who gave him his farm upon his marriage.

Irreligious in his youth, he underwent a sudden religious conversion after fathering an illegitimate child and spending a period of time in community exile, during which he worked for several years in iron mines.  Upon returning he became profoundly religions and in turn married a deeply religious spouse.  Upon the German invasion of Austria he openly opposed the Nazis and while he did serve in the German Army in 1940 he refused to take the Hitler oath.  Called back into service in 1943 he refused combat duty, although he did offer to serve as a medic, which was ignored.  He was ultimately died and executed on this day.

He was beatified in 2007.

From Sarah Sundin's blog:

Today in World War II History—August 9, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Aug. 9, 1943: On New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, US northern and southern landing forces link.

The US signed a military assistance treaty with Ethiopia.

Life Magazine hit the stands with an article on female steelworkers.

Thursday, August 5, 1943. WASPs.

While by this point, this story is now confusing because of predecessor organizations, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were officially formed.

WASP wings.

The Red Army recaptured Orel.

The British took. Catania, Sicily.

The crew of the PT-109, including future President John F. Kennedy, were found by two Solomon Island coastwatchers, namely Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana.

Eva-Maria Buch and Rose Schlösinger of the Red Orchestra were executed in Berlin.

Most of the members of the Red Orchestra were Communists, but 22 year old Buch was not.  Indeed, she was Catholic.

Saturday, April 24, 1943. Departures.

Today In Wyoming's History: April 24: 1943  John Osborne, Wyoming's governor from 1893 to 1895, died.

Osborne, a physician by trade, had been Governor from 1893 to 1895, in the wake of the Johnson County War.  He became Wyoming's Congressman in 1897, and occupied that position until 1899.  He later was an Assistant Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.

While Governor, he eccentrically chose a state seal for the state which did not comport with the one that the legislature thought it had, and in fact it caused consternation for featuring a topless allegorical female figure, something not uncommon on seals at the time.

The New York Fire Department saved the port from blowing up after the munitions ship El Estero caught fire, by towing the vessel out some distance and pouring so much water on it that it sank.  Had it exploded, the chain reaction explosions would have been devastating.

Gen. Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord died of cancer.  The former commander of the Reichswehr and briefly a commander during World War Two was an outright undisguised opponent of Hitler's who had resigned early during Hitler's administration, but who was recalled to service upon the invasion of Poland.  He invited Hitler to his base on the Polish border with the intent of assisting him, but Hitler never took up the invitation.  He was retired a second time on September 21, 1939, and was active in the German resistance.

Admiral Kenneth Whiting, former submariner and the American "father of the aircraft carrier", died of a heart attack while suffering from pneumonia.  He was 61.

Franklin Roosevelt issued the following Executive Order:

Executive Order 9337—AUTHORIZING THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR TO WITHDRAW AND RESERVE LANDS OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND OTHER LANDS OWNED OR CONTROLLED BY THE UNITED STATES

April 24, 1943

EXECUTIVE ORDER 9337

AUTHORIZING THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR TO WITHDRAW AND RESERVE LANDS OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND OTHER LANDS OWNED OR CONTROLLED BY THE UNITED STATES

April 24, 1943

By virtue of the authority vested in me by the act of June 25, 1910, ch. 421, 36 Stat. 847, and as President of the United States, it is ordered as follows:

Section 1. The Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized to withdraw or reserve lands of the public domain and other lands owned or controlled by the United States to the same extent that such lands might be withdrawn or reserved by the President, and also, to the same extent, to modify or revoke withdrawals or reservations of such lands: Provided, That all orders of the Secretary of the Interior issued under the authority of this order shall have the prior approval of the Director of the Bureau of the Budget and the Attorney General, as now required with respect to proposed Executive orders by Executive Order No. 7298 of February 18, 1936, and shall be submitted to the Division of the Federal Register for filing and publication: Provided, further, That no such order which affects lands under the administrative jurisdiction of any executive department or agency of the Government, other than the Department of the Interior, shall be issued by the Secretary of the Interior without the prior concurrence of the head of the department or agency concerned.

Section 2. This order supersedes Executive Order No. 9146 of April 24, 1942, entitled 'Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to Withdraw and Reserve Public Lands'.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

THE WHITE HOUSE,

April 24, 1943.

Exec. Order No. 9337, 8 FR 5516, 1943 WL 4090 (Pres.)

This mortar crew was photographed at Camp Carson, Colorado.

These troops are equipped with M1 Carbines, the first carbine issued to American troops since the M1903 Springfield, a short rifle, was first introduced.  Even the appearance of these carbines show that they are brand new.

I don't know the first combat use date for the carbine.  They were already common by the invasion of Sicily, so logic would presume that they saw action in North Africa as well.  Having said that, many artillerymen and mortar men in North Africa carried the M1917 Enfield rifle, so the carbine had not yet taken over its wide role that it later would.

Designed to equip troops other than infantrymen who might still require a firearm, the carbine would end up having enormous production, with more of them being produced than any other American small arm in World War Two.  For many years it was the most mass-produced American arm of all time, but with the long service life of the AR's, that's likely no longer true.  It saw service into the 1970s, in the M2 variant, in reserve units.

Monday, April 5, 1943. Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrested.

Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at the Abwehr.  Lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested at the same time.  Oddly, they were both members of the Abwehr even though they were dedicated opponents of Nazism.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-074-16 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483382

They'd be imprisoned and executed in the waning days of World War Two.

The Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, was a center of conspiracies against the Nazi regime as well as an instrument of its policy.  Headed by the enigmatic Wilhelm Canaris, it conspired where it could with Germany's enemies during the war, although obviously not effectively enough to achieve a definitive goal.

Sunday, March 21, 1943. A second assassination attempt.

Hard on the heels of a plot to kill Adolph Hitler by blowing his airplane out of the sky with explosives contained in a bottle of alcohol, Generalmajor Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff attempted to kill him by detonating a time fused bomb on his person while escorting Hitler through an exhibition of Soviet war materials as the Zeughaus in Berlin.  A detailed coup d'état was to follow the assassination.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-130-51 / Unknown author / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5482858

It was expected that the tour would take thirty minutes, and Gersdorff set the fuse ten minutes prior to Hitler's arrival.  Hitler rushed through the exhibit in two minutes, and Gersdorff defused the bomb in a restroom.

Gersdorff was, amazingly, never mentioned by the July 20 conspirators, even though he had participated in the plot.  He therefore survived the war.  His role becoming known post-war, he was denied admission to the Bundesherr and therefore devoted the remainder of his life to charitable causes, dying in 1980 at age 74.  He was a paraplegic the last twelve years of his life due to a riding accident.

Sarah Sundin reports, in her blog:

Today in World War II History—March 21, 1943: Cornelia Fort becomes first WAFS member (precursor of the WASPs) to be killed, in a midair collision while ferrying a BT-13 in Texas.

She also notes that on this day the Rangers took Gafsa and New Zealanders bypassed the  bypass the Mareth Line 

Saturday, March 13, 1943. Freedom from Fear.

Gen. Henning von Tresckow attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler in an aspect of "Operation Spark" in which he handed a bomb disguised as a gift of liquor to a staff officer boarding an airplane with the German dictator.  The bomb, which would have killed all on board had it exploded, failed to go off.  The fuse, a British time pencil, failed to detonate.

The plan was not a fully formed one, unlike the July 20, 1944, plot.  The thought was simply that with German losing the war, Hitler's death would spark a coup d'état.  This attempt is the only one depicted in the movie Valkyrie prior to the July 44 attempt.

The plot was one of several that this circle of German officers would attempt, but it was the first.

The Germans removed the final 10,000 Jewish residents of Kraków.

The Saturday Evening Post had the last of its four freedom illustrations appear in the magazine, the four taken from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt. This one was "freedom from fear".

The illustration featured a (middle-aged?) couple tucking their children into bed.  It's likely the least well liked of the four illustrations, but it is full of interesting details.

The two children are being tucked into the same bed, for one thing, something that the viewers would not have thought odd even in a middle class home of the era.  The young children are, moreover, a boy and a girl, which would also not have risen to odd comments at the time.  The father is still wearing a tie, even though we'd presume this is early evening.  The newspaper he's holding notes what the world had to fear, at the time.  Viewers today would probably put the male image in his 50s and the female adult in her 40s, but chances are pretty good that Rockwell was portraying a woman in her 30s and a male around 40.

The bedroom, given the angle of the background, is likely an attic bedroom.

It'd be worth asking how we've done with the four freedoms over the years.  Perhaps we can do that in another tread, but in regard to freedom from fear, fear is still with us, and indeed we live in an era of record angst.

The accompanying article was written by Stephen Vincent Benét.

The Canadian Pacific Ocean liner RMS Empress of Canada was sunk by the Italian submarine Leonardo da Vinci in the South Atlantic, 1,400 of 1,800 passengers survived, with 392 being lost, half of which, ironically, were Italian POWs.

On the same day, the Canadian corvette sank the U-163 in the Atlantic.

Finland signed a trade agreement with Nazi Germany.

Japanese troops ended their assault on Hill 700 on Bouganville.

 J. P. Morgan, Jr. died at age 75 in Boca Raton.

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. 

Monday, February 22, 1943 Execuitions of the White Rose.

Christoph Probst, 23; Hans Scholl, 24; and his sister Sophie Scholl, 21, were beheaded by guillotine by Nazi Germany for their role in the White Rose resistance movement, of which they were principal members.  

Their resistance was remarkable. Also remarkable, so few Germans resisted.

By Gryffindor - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=355013

Bulgaria agreed to deliver 20,000 Jews up for slave labor to the Germans.

On the same Alfred Nossig, Polish sculptor, was shot and killed by the ZOB, the Jewish Polish resistance organization.  Nossig had supplied reports to the German occupiers regarding Jewish residents of Warsaw.

Tuesday, February 16, 1943. Mildred Harnack executed. Theresienstadt temporairly spared. Domenikon not spared. Norwegian paratroopers drop. Stalin asks for a "second front".

Himmler ordered a cessation of deportations of elderly Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto, resulting in a complete sessaion of deportations of all Jews from there for six months.  Oddly, the ghetto had been designated as a location where elderly Jews could live out tehir lives, albeit not comfortably, resulting in the order, but a peson has to wonder to what extent the order simply wasn't practical, given the massive strain hte war had put on the German railways system, which was being compounded by German deportations.

Italian soldiers commenced reprisal murders of Greek civilians at Domenikon which would result in 175 Greek men being killed.

Norwegian paratroopers were dropped by the British at Skrykenvann in preparation for a raid on the hydro plant at Vemork, targeted at heavy water production.

East German stamp in honor of the Harnacs.

Mildred Harnack, née Fish, a 41-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, was executed by guillotine at Germany's Plötzensee Prison on orders of Adolph Hitler.  

Harnack was an academic who married Arvid Harnack, a German academic. The couple moved to Arvid's native land, and in the 1930s the couple, if not outright Communists, were at least serious fellow travelers, something not that unusual for academics at the time.  While this was the case, they nonetheless were members of the American Church in Berlin, a Protestant church which Americans attended prior to the war.

The Harnacks were members of the Red Orchestra, which lead to her arrest and execution.  

The story of her death is largely unknown in the US and was in fact suppressed by the US government due to their Communist sympathies.   The U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) concluded her execution "justified", which legally it likely was, given that the sentence for treason was death everywhere at the time. That doesn't make her effort any less noble, of course.

Josepah Stalin, who was fighting a one front, if gigantic, war wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, reiterating the need for a "second front".  The United States was, of course already engaged in a second front in North Africa, a third front in the Pacific, and a basically a fourth front on the Atlantic, none of which involved the Soviets.

The Western Allies, throughout the war, loyally plade this sharade with Stalin, who was, of course, a former German ally, none of which is to belittle the giant Soviet war effort, but which is also not to ignore that the effort was being heavily supplied by the Western Allies.  Soviet propoganda, particularly in the USSR itslef, was so effective on thsi score, hoewver, that unfortunately modern Russians still believe it.

Former slave George Washington Buckner, and later U.S. Minister to Liberia (1913 to 1915) died in Indiana at age 87.  He was also a physician.

Tuesday, October 27, 1942. The execution of Helmuth Hübener.

Helmuth Günther Guddat Hübener, age 17, was executed by Germany for his role in a youthful German resistance group.

Hübener is unusual not only for his age, but for his religion.  He was a Mormon, a religion that was not common in Germany.  Moreover, the German LDS themselves had not come to a position on the repression of the Jews.  By and large it seems the majority of them were not supportive of the Nazi's repression of the Jews, but Hübener had the bad luck of his local branch having a handful who were, and he was even apparently expelled from the religion by a local figure prior to his execution.  In contrast, all the members of his small anti-Nazi group were also Mormons, and also youths.

The Battle of Santa Cruz Islands concluded with the Japanese winning a tactical victory while the US won the strategic victory, the latter being the more important of the two.  Japanese losses were high, and the result was that the Japanese lost the ability to obtain victory in the Pacific before superior US production would come to bear.

The Australians took Goodenough Island off of New Guinea.

The island would be developed into an air base.

The defense of Outpost Snipe came to a successful British conclusion.

Monday, August 31, 1942. The arrest of the Schulze-Boyen's.

Today in World War II History—August 31, 1942: Australians launch offensive against the Japanese at Milne Bay, New Guinea. Canada requires unemployed men and women to take war work.

An interesting entry on Sarah Sundin's blog.

I wonder how many unemployed Canadian men there really were by this point in 1942?

The aptly named Libertas Schulze-Boyen, a German aristocrat, and her husband Harro, a Luftwaffe officer, were arrested by the authorities.

The couple had in fact gone from being Nazis or radical right winters, Harro even had a swastika carved into his leg, to being the focal point of the Red Orchestra, a resistance group that was centered on providing information to the Soviet Union.

Libertas was a French protestant by birth, but fit into that oddly European class of aristocratic families that were nearly stateless.  She attended school in Switzerland and moved to Germany in 1933 where she joined the Nazi Party and was, at first, an ardent Nazi. She married Harro in 1936, after having lived with him a year, something very unusual at the time.  Herman Goering gave her away at the wedding, showing how close they were to senior Nazi figures.

Harro, in contrast, had opposed the Nazis since 1933, being therefore a really early resistance figure.  He had been part of the "Radical Nazi" organization Black Front, which was a Nazi splinter group formed by Otto Strasser which kept the original socialistic Nazi economic policy which the party abandoned under Adolph Hitler.  He was also from an aristocratic family, and one that had ties to publishing. Both Harro and Liberas were writers.  He became a pilot in 1933, and in spite of being an anti-Nazi joined the Luftwaffe.

In spite of their common opposition to the Nazis, their marriage was not a united one. Harro was a self-confessed libertine, and she had caught him in bed with an actress, which nearly led to their divorce.  Only the fact that they were both involved in their resistance movement kept this from occurring.

They were both executed in December. She was 29 and he was 33.

German tanks made it through the minefields at Alam el Halfa and turned north to attack what he supposed to be the Allied rear, only to be met with anti tank guns and tanks staged there by Montgomery.  Montgomery, moreover, did not deploy his tanks in the old cavalry melee style that the British had done previously, although German and British tank losses, 22 and 21 respectively, were about equal.  The Afrika Korps lost one of its senior commanders, Georg von Bismarck, due to a mine.

The British small scale raid Operation Anglo attacked Rhodes.

May 9, 1921 (and May 9, 1921). Resistance, murder and secret victories.

Fr. Józef Cebula

In Poland, by this point in the war, the Germans were engaged in full scale repression of the Catholic Church, having banned adherence to it, including the administration of the Sacraments.  Fr. Józef Cebula outright ignored the ban, as many other Polish priests did, and was arrested and incarcerated in a concentration camp as a result.  There he continued to minister to the sick.  On this day he was tortured and shot.  He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1999.

While certainly understood by historians, the level of repression meted out to the Poles during the war, by the occupying Germans, was at an almost unimaginable scale.  Unlike the occupied lands to the south and west of Germany, the Germans didn't recognize Polish sovereignty after the defeat of the Polish army and ran the territory in a fashion that was effectively genocidal.  Post war many Germans would make the claim that they were unaware of the Holocaust, a claim that is dubious at best given the scale upon which it was conducted, but when combined with German official killings within the Reich and the murderous occupation of Germany's neighbor Poland, what Nazi Germany stood for couldn't be ignored except by somebody wishing to ignore it.

Somebody not ignoring it was German Sophie Scholl, who at this point in her short life was in a nursing training program, having not yet entered the University of Munich.  On this day, Scholl turned 20 years old.

Scholl, of course, had only two years to live as she'd shortly enter the University there which would take her on to be one of the founding members of the White Rose movement.  The movement has been celebrated as one of the few (although there are others) German resistance movements that formed during the war. Scholl was a devout Lutheran but there's a connection to the item above in that the movement's origins were sparked by Hans Scholl, her brother, having changed the focus of his studies from medicine to philosophy and theology due to the influence of Catholic men of letters, Otl Aicher and Carl Muth, whom he encountered at the university.  This openly drew Hans Scholl towards Catholicism and it also caused him to be drawn towards Aicher and Muth's anti Nazi views, which were based on their religious convictions. Hans Scholl would be instrumental in forming the group. While the group was not all Catholic by any means, and included one member who was Russian Orthodox, the Catholic religious themes were prominent.  The group took its name from a sermon by Bishop Von Galen, which addressed the evils of euthanasia.

Aicher survived the war and in 1952 married Inge Scholl, a sister of Sophie and Hans.  He is remembered for designing the lead graphic designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Also on this day the British took an Enigma from the U110.

The captured U110.

Today in World War II History—May 9, 1941

Enigma machine captured

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 the same day, as can be read about above, the Franco Thai War ended in the Thai's favor, in a peace brokered by Imperial Japan, or perhaps effectively forced by it.

This too oddly has a 1921 connection as on this day in 1921 Crown Prince Hirohito, who of course would go on to become the Emperor, set foot in the United Kingdom, the first member of the Imperial Japanese family to do so.  He was touring Europe.