Showing posts with label Kursk Ukraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kursk Ukraine. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Monday, May 10, 1943. Not even bothering with the Reichstag.

Hitler extended the Enabling Act of 1933, the organic act of his dictatorship, indefinitely, not even bothering to cal the Reichstag into session to do it.

300 large U.S. libraries flew their flags at half-mast on the same day to mark the book burnings that had occurred in Nazi Germany.

On the same day, he approved the plans for Operation Citadel, a giant planned attack on the Kursk Citadel, while, at the same time, as Sarah Sundin notes, Axis efforts were collapsing in North Africa:

Today in World War II History—May 10, 1943: 80 Years Ago—May 10, 1943: In Tunisia, British First Army takes Hammamet, cutting off Cap Bon Peninsula.

Time magazine issued one of its classic covers of World War Two, depicting a stone faced German Admiral Doenitz as a periscope, accompanied by other periscopes depicted as snake heads.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Monday, February 8, 1943. Bose leaves, Rutledge ascends.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1943 1943  A B-25 landed on a highway near Douglas due to low fuel. Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.
I've actually seen something similar occur. When I was a teenager, I was riding in his pickup truck when an A-26 landed in a field near the Interstate Highway, and then taxied up to the DOT fence.  The plane was on its way back to the Smithsonian and had lost oil pressure, requiring the pilot to make an emergency landing.

U.S. Economic Stabilization Director James F. Byrnes ordered a temporary ban on the sale of shoes until the following day, when shoe rationing officially commenced.

Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and Abid Hasan were given safe passage from Germany back to Asia on board the U-180.  Bose, an opponent of English Colonialism, sided with the Germans and Japanese during the war.  He had been in Nazi Germany since April 1941.

The journey would lead to a Japanese submarine, which would take him to Sumatra, where he attempted to revive the Indian National Army.

Schenkl and Bose.


Bose left in Germany Emilie Schenkl and their daughter Anita.  Bose may have been married to Schenkl, although the circumstances of their union are ambiguous, having been conducted as a secret Hindo ceremony without witnesses.  They had met in 1934 during a previous Bose stay in Austria, when she had worked for him as a secretary.  He would not publicly acknowledge their marriage or union. His departure left her without a livelihood.

Bose died in a crash of a Japanese aircraft in 1945.  Schenkl lived until 1966.  Anita is a professor at the University of Augsburg.

Bose retains a sort of hero status in India for his opposition to the English, but it's hard to get past siding with the Axis and abandoning his family without support.

Civil control of Hawaii was partially restored, absent the Japanese American pre-war members of the Territorial Legislature.

The Germans killed the remaining 4,000 Jewish residents of Slutsk, Byelorussia.  On the same day, the Germans launched Operation Hornung, a counter-attack against Belorussian partisans.

Byelorussia suffered enormously during the Second World War, and had suffered before that under Stalin's repression.  As with Poland, the Soviet government had murdered its intelligentsia in the period leading immediately up to 1941. Following that, the Nazis were nearly as repressive of its population as they were of the Poles.  The Germans nearly forcibly conscripted young Belorussian men into police service, with the only real alternative being Soviet partisan service, which also conscripted.  Often membership in one or the other was simply by chance.  It was occupied by the Germans well into 1944.

The Red Army retook Kursk.



Wiley B. Rutledge was confirmed as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  He'd only serve for six years, dying at age 55 in 1949 due to a stroke.

He had an unusual career, starting off with the goal of studying law at Maryville College, but then switching to the University of Wisconsin as a chemistry student.  He graduated in 1914 with a bachelor's in that field at age 20.  He thereafter returned to law, studying first at Indiana University and then, after various stints of teaching, the Colorado Law School in Boulder.  He married his former Greek teacher, five years his senior, in the interim.  He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws, then a common law degree, in 1922, at which time he would have been 26 years old.  He worked principally as a law professor thereafter, until being appointed to the DC Circuit in 1939, and then on to the Supreme Court in 1943.  Extremely studious and hardworking, in some ways, he worked himself to death.