The 900-day siege of Leningrad was broken by the Red Army, but only thinly.
The 3d Panzer Army repulsed the Red Army at Vitebsk, Belarus.
The British 5th and 56th Divisions were firmly across the Garigliano. The Germans begin to move reinforcements in from Anzio.
British General Kenneth Anderson was relieved of command of the British Second Army. He had fallen out of favor some time ago with Alexander and Montgomery. Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey took over.
U.S. railroads return to their private owners' control.
From Sarah Sundin's blog:
Today in World War II History—January 18, 1944: 80 Years Ago—Jan. 18, 1944: US Fourth War Loan Drive begins, runs through February 15; sales made in pharmacies are designated for C-47 ambulance planes.
Billie Holiday performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in Esquire's first jazz festival.
The 112th Cavalry, which had been dismounted, landed at Arawe in the opening battle of the New Britain Campaign, Operation Cartwheel.
The 112th Cavalry was a cavalry regiment of the Texas National Guard. They had at first been retained along the boarder with Mexico until Mexican attitudes towards the war could be ascertained. They were deployed to the Pacific without horses and would never recover their mounts.
Australian forces took Lakona on New Guinea.
Three German officers and a collaborator were tried for war crimes by the Soviet Union. Abwehr Captain Wilhelm Langheld, SS Lieutenant Hans Ritz, Corporal Reinhard Retzlaff of the Secret Field Police, and Mikhail Bulanov of Kharkov were found guilty on December 18 and hanged the next day in what some inaccurately regard as the first war crimes trial.
The Soviets had, in fact, already conducted at least one. Unlike the prior ones, however, this one, whose results were basically foreordained, was photographed by the Soviets.
Famous musician Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller died of pneumonia at age 39 while traveling on the Los Angeles to Chicago Super Chief train.
Louis Armstrong was recorded for the first time, playing with King Oliver's Creole Band, on Chimes Blues.
Weather Bird Rag was on the flip side, on which Armstrong also played.
Officially, by this date in 1922, the Mexican Revolution was over.
On the ground in northern Mexico, and at the border, things didn't quite appear that way.
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, more famously recalled as Jelly Roll Morton, died on this day in 1941. He was 40 years old.
Morton was instrumental in the rise of jazz and sometimes claimed to have invented it. He had not, but he was the first jazz arranger, so his claim was not completely without merit. Fame came to him early with his famous Jelly Roll Blues.
Born in Louisiana of creole parents, he adopted the name Mouton when his mother married a man by that last name after his father, to whom his mother was not married, left the family when he was still young. He later changed that to the anglicized version of Morton.
Famous in the 1920s, his career carried on into the late 1930s. At that time, he was interviewed by Alan Lomax who encouraged Morton to record a series of songs for his collection from the early jazz era. Morton was highly disinclined to do so, as the songs contained a ribald selection and Morton himself was a devout Catholic. The song titles were not published until 2005 given their nature.
While paying at Washington D. C.'s Music Box bar he was violently stabbed. He was refused treatment at the nearest hospital on the basis that it was all white. While he did receive medical treatment at a hospital for African Americans, he never really recovered from the event and died on this day in 1941.
The Finns began a campaign to retake the Lake Ladoga region which they'd lost to the Soviets in the Winter War.
340 Polish Jews were murdered Jedwabne, a region that had just been taken by the Germans. The pogrom is remarkable, however, in that it was carried out by Poles.
Details of the atrocity only came to light in the 1990s, so there's some murkiness regarding them. What seems to have occurred is that animosity between the areas non Jewish population and Jewish population started when the town was turned over to the USSR following the joint German/Soviet invasion of 1939. Jewish residents of the town, which made up about half of its inhabitants, were understandably relieved to be under the Soviets rather than the Nazis, with some welcoming the Soviet arrival.
The Jewish residents were hardly Communist supporters but the actions by a few cast suspicion upon an already disliked group. On July 10 members of some German official unit arrived, probably the SS based on the discussion, and met with the town council. What occurred is murky but Poles from outside of the town, including at least one former NKVD operative, arrived and the pogrom commences. Most of the victims were burned to death in a barn. Residents of the town did participate.
As noted, many of the details were lost, probably more than a few intentionally. The Germans seem to have had an early role, but they did not carry out the atrocity. By some accounts, the Germans themselves were a bit surprised by the level of violence. They may have filmed it, by some accounts, which was a common German practice, but no films have come to light.
The revelation of the event after the collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately sparked a Polish law seeking to suppress stories which suggest that the Poles were more than victims during the war. Poland did suffer terribly, but throughout Eastern Europe events like this occurred with local civilians often independently murdering local Jews whom they had lived with for decades.
The Germans commenced their assault on Smolensk. They would take the city, but only after weeks of effort. While it was a Soviet defeat, it was notable that already by this point in Barbarossa the Soviets were proving difficult to dislodge from urban areas.
I really wondered how it was hanging on.
I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog. It wasn't very photogenetic anyway. But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right. It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.
COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.
Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.
Denver’s outgrown us.
So stated one of the owners.
I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation. Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection. The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day. It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.
But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there. A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.
But that's true of a lot of Denver now.
Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way. The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are. But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back. Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today. And the change hasn't overall been a good one.
Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living. It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver. In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown. It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.
