The Mongolian "Department of Women's Development" was formed as Mongolia slipped into Communist repression.
Oil and the GOP was in the headlines.
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
The Mongolian "Department of Women's Development" was formed as Mongolia slipped into Communist repression.
Oil and the GOP was in the headlines.
U.S. Marines landed at Ampala, Honduras, during the Honduran Civil War.
U.S. Senator Frank L. Greene was wounded by a stray bullet when he was walking on Pennsylvanian Avenue in Washington, D. C. The shot had been fired in a shootout between bootleggers and Federal agents. He never fully recovered.
The jury in Joe Jackson's case against the White Sox awarded him $16,000 in back pay. The Judge, however, decreed that the award was based on perjured testimony and set the verdict aside. Jackson nonetheless felt himself vindicated.
German emergency powers, which had existed since December 8, lapsed, returning the government to its normal procedures.
The General Treaty of Peace and Amity was signed in Washington D.C. between Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
It provided:
Article I
The governments of the high contracting parties shall not recognize any other governments which may come into power in any of the five Republics as a consequence of a coup d'état, or of a revolution against the recognized government, so long as the freely elected representatives of the people thereof, have not constitutionally reorganized the country.[4]
Article II
Desiring to make secure in the Republics of Central America the benefits which are derived from the maintenance of free institutions and to contribute at the same time toward strengthening their stability and the prestige with which they should be surrounded, they declare that every act, disposition or measure which alters the constitutional organization in any of them is to be deemed a menace to the peace of said Republics, whether it proceeded from any public power of from the private citizens.
Consequently, the governments of the contracting parties will not recognize any other governments which may come into power in any of the five Republics through a coup d'état or a revolution against a recognized government, so long as the freely elected representatives of the people thereof, have not constitutionally reorganized the country. And even in such a case they obligate themselves not to acknowledge the recognition of any of the persons elected as President, Vice President or Chief of State designate should fall under any of the following heads:
(1) If he should be the leader or one of the leaders of a coup d'état or revolution, or through blood relationship or marriage, be an ascendent or descendant or brother of such leader or leaders.
(2) If he should have been a Secretary of State or should have held some high military command during the accomplishment of the coup d'état, the revolution, or while the election was being carried on, or if he should have held this office or command within the six months proceeding the coup d'état, revolution, or the election.
Furthermore, in no case shall recognition be accorded to a government which arises from election to power of a citizen expressly and unquestionably disqualified by the Constitution of his country as eligible to election as President, Vice President or State designate.
Honduras and El Salvador did not ratify it, and Costa Rica violated it in 1931 after it recognized the overthrow of the El Salvadoran government. In 1934 the Central American Court of Justice held it to be illegal.
In North Africa, the British 8th Army captured Tobruk, a major British victory and a major Afrika Korps defeat.
Off of the Solomon's, the Japanese sank the U.S. Navy light cruiser Juneau, which took 687 men with it, including five brothers of the Irish Catholic Sullivan family of Iowa.
It's commonly asserted that after this the U.S. military would not allow siblings to serve together, but in fact many siblings were already serving together in combat in North Africa as members of Federalized National Guard units. Entire towns would end up loosing huge numbers of their male citizens in the combat actions to come. There was a policy change, which relieved a sole survivor from military service, but it did not come until 1943, and was partially due to the deaths of the Borgstrom brothers of Utah as well. Indeed, the Navy already had a policy precluding siblings from serving on the same vessel, but they did not actively enforce it.
A sister of the Sullivan brothers remained in Navy service. Indeed, their enlistment in the Navy, or in once case a reenlistment, was to avenge the death of her boyfriend, who died at Peal Harbor.
The Sullivan family was not informed of the death of their sons until 1943, at which time their father was informed of all of their deaths at one time. The Navy would commission a ship in their honor during the war, and oddly enough, one of the sons of the one of the men lost would later serve as a post-war officer aboard it. That ship has been decommissioned, but a second The Sullivans was commissioned to take its place.
The tragic story was also made into a patriotic movie during the war itself, which was released in 1944.
The Sullivan story was the inspiration for the film Saving Private Ryan, although it's obviously in a much different setting.
It should be noted that at least over 100 men survived the sinking of the Juneau, and were spotted by an USAAC B-17, but radio silence precluded its rapid reporting.
On the same day the cruiser Atlanta and the destroyers Barton, Cushing, Laffey, Monssen and Preston went down while the Japanese suffered the loss of the cruiser Kinugasa and destroyers Akatsuki and Yūdachi.
Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama broke off diplomatic relations with Vichy France.
American Bobby Fischer became the International chess champion in Reykjavík, Iceland, following the withdrawal from match 21 by Soviet player Boris Spassky.
I can dimly recall this, as it was really followed at the time, even though I was only nine years old. Then, as now, it was hard for me to really grasp the interest in this event. I like the game, but as an international sporting event, if that's what we'd call it, it's a little hard to grasp.
The Cold War must principally explain it.
Fischer's prize was $154,677.50, a substantial haul nor or then.
Fischer was an odd character and hard to like. He was anti-Semitic and became a Holocaust denier, even though his mother was Jewish. After the 1972 victory, he didn't play a competitive game in public for another 20 years, although he did play against MIT's Greenblatt computer in 1977, beating it three times. In the early 1990s he replayed Spassky in Yugoslavia, where he won again but where he also didn't seem to have evolved in the game. Spassky remained friends with Fischer throughout his life and introduced him to a known serious love interest of Fischer's, with that latter relationship not lasting, not too surprisingly.
The Yugoslavia match violated economic sanctions in place and made Fischer a fugitive from justice from the United States. He lived in various places before going back to Reykjavík, where he died in 2005 at age 64. A member of the Worldwide Church of God for much of his life, just prior to his death he became intensely interested in Catholicism and requested a Catholic funeral.
The United States dropped its claims on the Swan Islands in favor of Honduras.
The Niihau Incident, in which a Japanese pilot on Niihau secured the assistance of Japanese residents of that island to secure his release from captivity, and which saw a conflict develop between native Hawaiians and resident Japanese, came to an end when the pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi (西開地 重徳) was killed and the man aiding him killed himself.
The incident became significant in bringing the US Government to internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans.
Niihau was inhabited primarily by native Hawaiians who spoke the language, and owned by a white family that generally precluded access to it to outsiders. It had three Japanese residents, however, and all three helped 西開地 重徳 in his efforts after he crashed landed on the island.
The incident had seen Hawila Kalehano, a native Hawaiian, disarm the Japanese pilot as he was concerned about the surprising event, but he otherwise treated him well. The Hawaiians sent for Ishimatsu Shintani who was marred to a Hawaiian so he could translate. Shintani didn't want to perform the task and only briefly spoke to the pilot. Thereafter, the Hawaiians sent for Yoshio Harada who had been born in Hawaii. Harada was informed by Nishikaichi of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Harada's, husband and wife, decided to aid the pilot in recovering his papers and escaping.
That night the Hawaiians learned of the attack on a battery power radio. They then confronted the pilot, and it was decided to hold the pilot and turn him over to the islands' owner, who was due to arrive the next day from Kaua'i. The owner, Aylmer Robinson, did not arrive, however, as the military had stopped boat traffic after the attack. The pilot was therefore put under guard in the Harada's house.
On December 12 Shintani attempted to buy the pilot's papers but failed. On the same day the Harada's and Nishikaichi attacked their guards and armed themselves, taking a hostage. They confronted Kaleohano who ran and was shot at. During the night, the escaped pilot and confederates torched the Japanese airplane.
During the night they took additional hostages but became aware that they were being deceived by the Hawaiians and that it was likely that they were going for help. Ultimately a struggle developed in which the pilot shot one of the Hawaiians three times, but was nonetheless overpowered and had his throat slit. Harada killed himself after the pilot was killed.
Shintani returned to the island after the war, after spending the rest of it in an Internment Camp, and lived there the rest of his life. Irene Harada was held as a prisoner until 1944. She moved to Kaua'i and lived the rest of the war there, stating in a 1992 interview that she felt sorry for the pilot and wanted to help him. In an interesting twist, the Japanese government thanked her in later years for her efforts on behalf of the pilot, in spite of her resistance to their doing so.
Authorities, already distrustful of those of Japanese ancestry in the US, were shocked by how quickly all of the Japanese residents of the small island went over to aid the Japanese pilot which had a role in helping to convince the authority to intern the Japanese and Japanese Americans on the continental United States. They were not interred on the Hawaiian islands where they made up 1/3d of the population, but it was felt that it was not economically possible to do so nor that they constituted a danger because of the islands isolation.
Indeed, the incident remains problematic to the social history of World War Two as it does demonstrate that in at least some instances some Japanese and Japanese Americans retained sufficiently strong loyalties to Japan that it could in fact override loyalty to the United States. That does not excuse internment, but it makes it less irrational that it is sometimes portrayed to be. The US and Canada had a long problematic relationship with their Japanese residents as it was in which they both unfairly constantly suspected them of being hostile aliens and had often thought of them as a potential fifth column. The incident gave a real world example of this actually occurring.
The desperate quality of the pilots actions remain curious. The Japanese Navy had designated the island as one to land on in an emergency, as they believed it to be uninhabited. But how anyone who landed there was to be rescued is a mystery. It would have required either a fellow pilot to land there at the time, which was a possibility, and take the others on, or it would have required rescue by a plane designated to that task, which would have been unlikely to have been dispatched. In this case, the pilot attempted to use the plan3's radio to radio for help, but was unsuccessful.
The Royal Navy sank three Italian cruisers off of Tunisia in the Battle of Cape Bon.
Hungary declared war on the United States.
The United Kingdom, New Zealand and South Africa declared war on Bulgaria.
Honduras declared war on Germany and Italy.
The Today In World War Two blog has some interesting items, including the destruction of American airpower in the Philippines.
A glacier collapse caused 4,000 to 6,000 deaths in Peru when it fell into a lake and caused a morraine landslide.
On this day in 1921, voting took place in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to elect a congress for the newly created, but not yet functioning, and in fact never to function, Federation of Central America. The Congress was to take office on January 15, 2022.
It nearly goes without saying that if this union of Central American states had succeeded, the region would be much better off today.