Mittwoch, October 24, 1923. Das Ende des Hamburger Aufstandes

Heinrich Vogeler: Hamburger Werftarbeiter

The Hamburg uprising came to an end in arrests of hundreds of Communists. Many more fled the city.  The end was precipitated by news that Hamburg, due to a courier error, was in a working class revolution all by itself.  The Communist Party, realizing what had occured, ordered its red troops to retreat.

Germany was in dire straights at the time, and a nationwide Communist revolution was not an impossibility, although the Moscow ordered uprising would likely have resulted in a civil war which the Red Army could not have joined due to Poland having defeated it earlier in the decade.

The collapse of the Communist uprising may have spared Germany from a thuggish totalitarian regime for almost a decade, as there's no reason to believe that the German Communists would have been any less bloody in victory than the Russian, Chinese, etc., ones were.

Tuesday, October 23, 1923. Turmoil.

The Hamburg Uprising, a Communist uprising in that city, began with seventeen police stations in the city and seven outside of it being attacked before dawn in an effort to arm the participants.

Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma suspended from office after that state's House of Representatives voted to impeach him.

Tuesday, July 27, 1943. Storms.

Major Joseph Duckworth, together with Lt. Ralph O'Hair, of the U.S. Army Air Force flew an AT-6 into the eye of a hurricane, becoming the first people to do so on purpose.

Duckworth was an advocate for training on instruments.  He had been an Army Air Corps flyer, originally starting in 1927, and recalled to service during World War Two.

The hurricane bore the name The Surprise Hurricane due to weather censoring during World War Two, which the storm would end due to killing 19 people and causing $17,000,000 in damage.

Croatia became a republic, for a time, after Prince Aimone, the Duke of Astsoria, who had been made king of Croatia by Mussolini, resigned, deciding that desertion was the better part of valor.

The Fascist Grand Council and the Fascist Party were abolished.

Sarah Sundin notes, on her blog:

Today in World War II History—July 27, 1943: Flight nurse Lt. Ruth Gardiner (805th MAETS) is killed in a plane crash in Naknek, Alaska; the first US Army nurse to die in WWII.

She also notes the horrific Hamburg firestorm of the night of July 27, 1943, which resulted from the RAF's Operation Gomorrah bombing raid that evening.

Unloading a P-47 at Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Saturday, July 24, 1943. The fall of Mussolini.

Lesser coat of arms of the Kingdom of Italy.

The Italian Fascist Grand Council voted 19 to 7 to remove Mussolini from power and restore full authority to the crown.

Dino Grandi, who had been a hard line fascist, but who also had opposed anti-Semitism and who had been critical of the war, organized beforehand Mussolini's downfall.  The Grand Council's statement following the decision read:

Grandi's Order of the Day

The Grand Council of Fascism,

meeting in these hours of utmost trial, turns all its thoughts to the heroic fighters in every corps who, side by side with the people of Sicily in whom shines the unequivocal faith of the Italian people, renewing the noble traditions of strenuous valor and the indomitable spirit of sacrifice of our glorious Armed Forces, having examined the internal and international situation and the war's political and military leadership,

proclaims

the sacred duty for all Italians to defend at all costs the homeland's unity, independence, and freedom, the fruits of sacrifice and the efforts of four generations from the Risorgimento to the present, the life and future of the Italian people;

affirms

the necessity of moral and material unity of all Italians in this serious and decisive hour for the nation's destiny;

declares

that to this end the immediate restoration of all state functions is necessary, assigning to the Crown, to the Grand Council, to the government, to the Parliament, and to the corporate groups the duties and responsibility established by our statutory and constitutional laws;

invites

the government to beseech His Majesty the king, to whom turns the loyal and trusting heart of the whole nation, to assume effective command of the Armed Forces of land, sea, and air for the honor and salvation of the homeland, under article 5 of the Constitution, the supreme initiative that our institutions assign to him, and which have always been throughout our nation's history the glorious heritage of our august House of Savoy.

Dino Grandi

While Mussolini seemed to accept the results at the time, he very quickly started acting as if they were not legally binding.

Mussolini had been in power for seventeen years, being the first of the fascist dictators to assume power.  While Italy's defeat in the field brought his end about, his removal did not automatically take the Italians out of the war.

Grandi would flea to Spain after the complete fascist collapse in August, not returning to Italy until 1960.  He died in 1988 at the age of 92.

Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force bombing campaign on Hamburg, began. Window was deployed for the first time.