Tuesday, October 31, 1944. Rescued.

Pvt. Fred T. Huff, 698 Pulaski St., Athens, Ga., one of the soldiers in an American infantry battalion trapped behind German lines.for six days in the Belmont sector, France, eats while waiting for transportation to the rear area for a rest. 31 October, 1944.

U.S. Infantrymen who were cut off by the Germans for six days in the Belmont sector, France, file down the road after being relieved. 31 October, 1944. 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry, 36th Infantry Division.

Bearded Lt. Martin J. Higgins, 29 Garrison Ave., Jersey City, N.J., left, receives a warm handshake from Lt. Charles O. Barry, 120 West St., Williamstown, P.A., when he rejoins his unit in the Belmont sector after being cut off by the Germans for six days. Lt. Higgins was one of the officers with a battalion cut off by the Germans. France. 31 October, 1944.  Note the M1 Carbine has a grenade launching attachment.  1st Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division.

The Royal Air Force raided Gestapo headquarters at the Aarhus University in Denmark  The goal was to destroy Gestapo records to aid the Danish resistance.  The raid was conducted, as an earlier on in France had been, with Mosquitos.

The Germans evacuated Salonika.  Remaining Aegean German garrisons were trapped.

German Army Group North was trapped on the Courland Peninsula.

T/5 Miles J. Wermager, center, of Magnomen, Minn., a member of a cavalry unit near Monschau, Germany, receives his first piece of chicken since D-Day from T/4 Frank F. Leichtman, left, of Bresho, S.D. 31 October, 1944.

Complete to a flute, turban, and ersatz snake, TeC 5 Hernry Vin Roten, seated, of Brooklyn, N.Y., muses fellow GIs and pretty guests from the nearby French town of Toul at a Halloween party given by members of an air evacuation holding station. 3rd Army Air Evac. Holding Station. 31 October, 1944.

Last edition:

Monday, October 30, 1944. Pvt. Ross.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Army, Battle of Leyte, British Army, Dancing, Finnish Army, France, Greek Civil War, Greek Partisans, Heroes, Italy, Kamikaze, Lapland War, Personalities, Polish Army, World War Two

Monday, August 28, 1944. Hungarians reconsider.

The Kaunas Offensive in Lithuania ended in a Red Army victory.

The 1st Army crossed the Marne at Meaux.

German garrisons at Toulon and Marseilles surrendered.    The encircled 11th Panzer Division begins a breakout offensive towards the north.

Lakatos.  His government stopped the deportation of Hungarian Jews.  He'd be overthrown by fascists in October.  He lived in poverty after the war until immigrating to Australia, where he died in 1967 at age 77.

A new Hungarian government is seated lead by Gen. Lakatos.  It announces that it wishes to negotiated with the Soviet Union, which did not result in an end of the war for Hungary.

The BBC began Southeast Asian broadcasts in Dutch and French.

Last edition:

Sunday, August 27, 1944. Collateral damage.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Battle for Paris, boats and ships, Buchenwald, Château-Thierry France, Eastern Front, French Navy, Italy, Monarchy, Normandy Breakout, Romania, Royal Air Force, U.S. Air Force, Women, World War Two

Thursday, August 17, 1944. And on this day too, 30 years later, the Red Army entered East Prussia.

The Red Army crossed the River Scheshule and raised the Soviet flag on German soil. Sgt. Alexander Belov took the honors.  He survived the war and died in 1960.   

Interestingly, the Red Army entered East Prussia on the same day that the Imperial Russian Army had during World War One.

German forces in Lithuania launched counterattacks along their entire line.

Statue of St. Joan d'Arc in Orleans, August 17, 1944.

The Canadian Army took Falaise.  The city was in ruins.  A gap of a few miles exists thereafter between the British lines and the American ones.

The US Third Army took Saint-Malo.

In Southern France, almost no resistance to Allied advances is offered and the US captured St. Raphael, St. Tropez, Frejus, Le Luq and St. Maxime.

Third Infantry Division troops advancing on  August 17, 1944, in southern France.  Troops are wearing the new M1943 combat boots.

Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Kluge as commander of Army Group B and replaced him with Model.

The Battle of Biak, which had been going on since May 27, ended in an Allied victory.  American forces advanced near Aitape.  The length of these battles gives testament to how hard the Japanese were fighting.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 16, 1944. Closing the Falaise Pocket.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Argentina, Battle of Guilin–Liuzhou ( 桂柳會戰), Battle of Studzianki, Cheyenne Wyoming, Eastern Front, Falaise Pocket, Operation Dragoon, Operation Ichi-Go, World War Two, Wyoming (Cheyenne)

Thursday, July 13, 1944. Stuck in the Bocage.

Pvt. Roland Bonnell (left) of Cleveland, Ohio, and Sgt. James Devine (right) of Commack, New York, comfort a French girl with a puppy in Colleville, France.  July 13, 1944.  Bonnell, who had a brother serving in the Navy, is wearing the new M1943 combat boots.

The Red Army's Vilnius Offensive ended in a Red Army victory.  Polish Home Army troops that had staged a rebellion in Vilnius itself against the Germans were arrested by the Soviets.

The Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive began.

The Germans burned down the Kovno Ghetto's hospital.

U.S. forces become stalled in the bocage country.   The Western Allies in general were making dangerously slow progress in Normandy.

U.S. troops observe a destroyed Panzerkampfwagen V Panther, July 13, 1944.  Categorized as a medium tank, it was built to directly counter the Soviet T-34.  It was an excellent tank, but like all later German armor, it suffered from mechanical complication.

Sarah Sundin reports on a number of interesting items:

Today in World War II History—July 13, 1944

These include the recovering of US position on Aitape and the accidental landing of a Ju88 in the UK which featured equipment that homed in on US radar.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 12, 1944. The death of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Animals, Army, Dogs, Equine Transportation, Heroes, Italian Army, Italy, Mules, Operation Overlord, Red Army, Saipan, Theodore Roosevelt, World War Two

Thursday, July 6, 1944. Advances on Eastern Front, Halted on Western Front, Tragedy in Connecticut, Racism at Camp Hood.

Admiral Horthy ordered a halt to the deportation of Hungarian Jews, clearly seeing which way the war was going.  Hungary had not supported this policy initially, but upon being invaded by the Germans early in 1944 Jewish deportation commenced.

The Red Army took Kovel and Svir.

The Polish 3d Division took Osemo, Italy.

The U.S. Army took Namber airfield on Numfoor.

Allied progress was generally halted in Normandy.

De Gaulle arrived in Washington for talks on his administration and forces. Bretton Woods, of course, the boozy conference on post-war economics, was rolling on at the same time.

The tragic Hartford Circus Fire resulted in 167 deaths and 700 injuries in Hartford, Connecticut.  Up to 7,000 people when the tent caught fire, with the cause never being determined.

U. S. Army Lieutenant Jackie Robinson, stationed at Camp Hood, Texas, was instructed to move to a seat farther back in the back of an Army bus and refused, resulting in his court-martialed.  Army buses were not segregated.

Robinson had originally been an enlisted cavalryman who had been sent to OCS, and was now a cavalry officer serving in an armor unit.  His commander, Paul L. Bates, refused to authorize the prosecution whereupon he was transferred to another unit and then charged with multiple offenses, including public drunkenness even though Robinson did not drink.  He was tried in August 1944, and acquitted.

The delay caused by the trial prevented him from going overseas with his unit.  He was transferred to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, and served as an army athletics coach before being discharged in November 1944.

Council of war, Saipan, July 6, 1944.

Last edition:

Wednesday July 5, 1944. Third Army in Normandy.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Army, Battle of the Atlantic, boats and ships, Canadian Army, George S. Patton, German Kriegsmarine, Operation Overlord, Operation Windsor, U.S. Navy, World War Two

Friday, June 23, 1944. Bagration increases.

As part of Operation Bagration, the Soviets commenced the Bobruysk Offensive, Mogilev Offensive and Vitebsk–Orsha Offensive in Belarus.

It's worth remembering that the Soviet attack was done Soviet style, with a massive artillery barrage coming before anything else, and then the massive movement of men, which in this case involved over 1,250,000 soldiers.  Not all of the offensive actions part of the overall offensive started on day one, or two.

The Polish Home Army 5th Wilno Brigade murdered over 20 Lithuanian civilians in Dubingiai in retaliation for the Glinciszki (Glitiškės) massacre of Polish civilians on June 20th by the Nazi-subordinated 258th Lithuanian Police Battalion.

American WACs in France, June 23, 1944.  All three women are wearing M1943 field jackets, which were just coming into service at that time and which are not seen all that often at this point.

The Germans abandoned their first line of defense in Cherbourg.  The British took St. Honorina. Montgomery arrived in France.

The HMS Scylia was irreparably damaged by a mine in the English Channel.

A  Ju 52 aircraft carrying German generals Eduard Dietl, Thomas-Emil von Wickede, Karl Eglseer, and  Franz Rossi crashed in the vicinity of Rettenegg, Styria, killing them, and three others.

A monument remains on the location.

Dietl is associated with war crimes, and likely would have been tried had he lived through the war.

Hard fighting continued on Saipan.

Marines moving supplies to the front, Saipan, June 23, 1944.

On Bougainville, Sefanaia Sukanaivalu, a Fijian solder, gave his life attempting to rescue his comrades.

The KING has been graciously pleased to approve the posthumous award of the VICTORIA CROSS to:—

No. 4469 Corporal Sefanaia Sukanaivalu, Fiji Military Forces.

On 23rd June 1944, at Mawaraka, Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands, Corporal Sefanaia Sukanaivalu crawled forward to rescue some men who had been wounded when their platoon was ambushed and some of the leading elements had become casualties.

After two wounded men had been successfully recovered this N.C.O., who was in command of the rear section, volunteered to go on farther alone to try and rescue another one, in spite of machine gun and mortar fire, but on the way back he himself was seriously wounded in the groin and thighs and fell to the ground, unable to move any farther.

Several attempts were then made to rescue Corporal Sukanaivalu but without success owing to heavy fire being encountered on each occasion and further casualties caused.

This gallant N.C.O. then called to his men not to try to get to him as he was in a very exposed position, but they replied that they would never leave him to fall alive into the hands of the enemy.

Realising that his men would not withdraw as long as they could see that he was still alive and knowing that they were themselves all in danger of being killed or captured as long as they remained where they were, Corporal Sukanaivalu, well aware of the consequences, raised himself up in front of the Japanese machine gun and was riddled with bullets.

This brave Fiji soldier, after rescuing two wounded men with the greatest heroism and being gravely wounded himself, deliberately sacrificed his own life because he knew that it was the only way in which the remainder of his platoon could be induced to retire from a situation in which they must have been annihilated had they not withdrawn.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, June 22, 1944. The GI Bill signed into law.

Labels: Battle of Imphal, Battle of Kohima, Cherbourg France, Continuation War, GI Bill, It was because of World War Two, Operation Ichi-Go, Operation Overlord, Red Army, The Battle of Tienhaara, World War Two

Tuesday, June 20, 1944. End of the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

The Imperial Japanese aircraft carrier Hiyō sunk after fuel vapors ignited from previous damage caused by USS Belleau Wood's aircraft. 

Japanese losses stood at three aircraft carriers, two oilers and about 600 aircraft.

1st Lt. Donald E. Mittelstaedt of Missoula, Montana, is officer in charge of a combat assignment photo unit, of the 161st Signal Photo Co., on New Britain.

British Minister of Production Oliver Lyttelton created a controversy in his address to the American Chamber of Commerce in London when he went off script and stated:

Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history to ever say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on an all-out fighting basis.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull immediately condemned the speech.

The weather remained bad in the English

Pvt. William L. Hatcher, of Scranton, SC, amuses a little French orphan by letting him wear his garrison cap. 20 June, 1944.

Channel, creating havoc for Allied shipping.

American lines slowly advanced, with the Germans seemingly withdrawing to join the Cherbourg defensive lines.  The 7th American Corps entered the city.  US forces found a partially constructed V-2 launching site near Sottevast.

A V-2 rocket, in a test flight, entered outer space and then returned, being the first man made object to enter space.

The Pope addressed the British 8th Army.

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS PIUS XII

TO MEMBERS OF THE EIGHTH BRITISH ARMY

Tuesday, 20 June 1944

It is a real joy for Us to welcome you all here within the very home of the common Father of Christendom. God has willed that We should be the Vicar of Christ on earth at a period of human history, when the world is filled as never before with weeping and suffering and distress unmeasured; and you know very well how Our paternal heart has at times been almost overwhelmed by the sorrows of Our children. You are of those children, and We have prayed for you. Your presence naturally recalls to Our mind the very pleasant days We once had the privilege of passing in the great capital of the British Empire; but it also summons up other memories, memories of those heroes of the Faith, St. Edward and St. Thomas a Becket, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, who shed a supreme and unfading glory on your country. To their protection We commend you all. You know only too well the dangers and uncertainties of life in war. One thing make certain: keep always and everywhere close to God. This grace We beg for you through the intercession of those loyal, saintly sons of Mother Church and of your loved England, while with Our heart's affection We bless you and all your dear ones at home.

The Red Army captured Vilpuri.

The Lithuanian Security Police murdered 37 mostly Polish residents of Glitiškės.

TWA Flight 277 en route from Newfoundland to Washington, D.C. crashed in Maine, killing all seven on board.

Last prior edition:

June 19, 1944. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, day one. The Marianas Turkey Shoot.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Aircraft, Battle of the Philippine Sea, boats and ships, Imperial Japanese Navy, Operation Bagration, Operation Forager, Operation Overlord, Philippines, Saipan, Soviet Partisans, U.S. Navy

Christmas Day, 1943.

1st Marine convoy en route for invasion of Cape Gloucester, New Britain.

Raids on Berlin by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force were temporarily halted.  The Luftwaffe likewise conducted no raids on the United Kingdom.

Sixty-four prisoners tunneled out of the Ninth Fort in Lithuania.  The facility housed mostly Lithuanian Jews.  About half would be recaptured by mid-January.

U.S. Task Force 50.2 raided Kavieng, New Guinea, with aircraft, sinking a Japanese transport ship.

The Scharnhorst departed northern Norway to attack Convoy JW-55B.

The epic The Song of Bernadette was released.

The film tells the story of St. Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant woman who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Attending movies at Christmas, and even on Christmas Day, is a tradition with a lot of people, although I've never done it.  

Christmas service on USS Card, December 25, 1943.

USS Brooklyn (CL 40), galley, Christmas morning, 1943.  Malta.

Sunday, November 12, 1623. Josaphat Kuntsevych, Bishop of the Ruthenian Catholic Church (Ukrainian Catholic Church, was martyred in Vitebsk, Belarus.

On this day in 1623 Josaphat Kuntsevych, Bishop of the Ruthenian Catholic Church (Ukrainian Catholic Church, was martyred in Vitebsk, Belarus, which was the part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.

He had been ordained in as an Eastern Catholic priest in 1609.  Living in a region in which the Orthodox Church had been strong, he faced opposition in his clerical duties but movement towards union with Rome was building in the area and as there was building assent to the Union of Brest.  In 1620 this began to be opposed when Cossacks intervened in the region.  In 1623, Josaphat, by then a Bishop, ordered the arrest of the sole remaining priest who was offering Orthodox services in Vitebsk which resulted in his murder by some Orthodox townspeople.  Some have suggested that, however, Lithuanian Protestants were secretly the instigators of the action.

His body is in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, and he is recognized as a martyr by the Church.

This points out a lot of interesting aspects of history that in the United States, and indeed many places, are poorly understood.  For one thing, there have been repeated efforts to reunite the East and West in Apostolic Christianity, and on several occasions they've been highly successful.  The seeming final breach between the East and West did not really come until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and indeed at that time the East and West were largely reunited. Following the return of the schism, over the next 500+ years various churches in the East have returned to communion with Rome.  The Schism should have completely ended following the Council of Florence, in which the Eastern Bishops agreed to reunion, but resistance at the parishioner level precluded it, just as can be seen to be a factor here.  Resistance higher up, sometimes violent, has also had an impact, however, as at least in one occasion Russian Orthodox Bishops affecting a reunion were murdered.  At the present time, it seems clear that the Metropolitan of Constantinople, the senior Bishop of the Eastern Orthodox, would end the schism as to his church but for fear of parishioner and cleric level resistance.

Rodrigo de Arriaga professed vows to become a Jesuit Priest.  He was one of the leading Spanish Jesuits of his day.

September 23, 1943. The Italian Social Republic, the Holocaust reaches further.

On this date in 1943, the puppet fascist Italian Social Republic was founded. Venice was its capital, wih most of its government offices in the resort town of Salò.

And so Mussolini would consign Italy to a species of civil war over a doomed cause.

The Holocaust expanded with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt issuing an order for the deportation of Jews from Nazi-occupied nations (Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Romania) and to negotiate for the same in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland and Turkey, none of which would comply.

As if there was any doubt, 80 years later, as of its true focus, as the fortune of the Nazi regime faded, it grasped for complete murderous annihilation of Europe's Jews.

Kaltenbrunner was an Austrian SS official during the war who was a major figure in the murder.  He was tried and executed in 1946.

On the same day, the Germans began the removal of Jewish residents of Vilnius.

The Red Army took  Poltava.

The Free French took Bonifacio, Corsica.

The British 10th Corps, part of the US 5th Army, began clearing the passes to Naples.

Wednesday, August 11, 1943. Retreats.

The Germans commenced withdrawing from Sicily.

Sarah Sundin notes this on her blog, also noting that 100,000 Axis troops would be evacuated to the Italian peninsula, a significant failure in the Allied campaign in that they were not able, in spite of attempting, to trap them in Sicily.  There were efforts to do so, as she also noted:

Today in World War II History—August 11, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Aug. 11, 1943: US Seventh Army makes amphibious landings at Brolo on Sicily’s north shore, but fails to cut off German retreat.

Hitler ordered the creation of an "Eastern Wall" to defend conquered territory in the Baltics.

Friday, August 6, 1943. Naval ambush

The nighttime Battle of Vella Gulf was fought between destroyers of the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy, the latter of which was better at night fighting.

U.S. Navy Task Group 31.2, consisting of a group of six destroyers, waited in Vella Gulf for the Japanese who were planning to land troops and supplies at Vila, Kolombangara with four destroyers.    All four Japanese destroyers were surprised by U.S. torpedoes, sinking three.  1,500 Japanese sailors went down with their ships.

The action was the first one in the Pacific in which US destroyers were authorized to operate independently from a cruiser force 

The Germans commenced the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto.  It was resisted.

U.S. and Free French forces prevailed at Toina, Sicily.

Friday, July 16, 1943. Morire per Mussolini e Hitler, o vivere per l'Italia e per la civiltà.

Italy's Fascist Grand Council, concerned by the arrival of Allied troops on Italian soil, convened for the first time since 1939.  On the same day, Allied aircraft dropped leaflets over the Italian mainland that read "Morire per Mussolini e Hitler, o vivere per l'Italia e per la civiltà" (Die for Mussolini and Hitler, or live for Italy and for civilization).  

Radio broadcast a joint message to the Italian people from Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

Italy, as a fascist state, was coming undone.

The British Air Ministry approved the use of "Window", aluminum strips, as a radar countermeasure.

Effect of Window on radar signature.

The Germans ordered the deportation of 13,000 Jews living in Paris to the Drancy detention center, a way stop for them on the way to Auschwitz.

Yitzhak Wittenberg, a Jewish Lithuanian resistance leader, surrendered to the Gestapo in Vilnius in exchange for an agreement that the Vilnius ghetto would not be liquidated.  He did shortly there after in an undetermined fashion.

The ghetto was liquidated by the Germans in September 1943.

In an event which tends to be misreported, Père Marie-Benoît (Padre Maria Benedetto), a Capuchin Franciscan friar who successfully rescued 4,000 Jews during the war, met with Pope Pius XII in an effort to advance his plan to try to transfer approximately 30,000 French Jews to North Africa, in order to remove them from danger.  The Italian portion of the plan ultimately fell apart when the Germans occupied northern Italy following the collapse of Mussolini's government, but the Spanish portion, which did result in the rescue of 2,600 French Jews on the somewhat ironic pretext that they were Jews of Spanish ancestry, which is the cover that Franco's government operated under. 

He died in 1990 at age 95.

The Battle of Mount Tambu began on New Guinea between the Imperial Japanese Army and American and Australian forces.

The Batman character appeared in film for the first time, this being in a fifteen-minute serial episode before major features.  In the original series, he was called "The Batman", with the first episode being "The Electrical Brain".

Monday, June 21, 1943. Spreading the Holocaust in the Baltic

Douglas SBD "Dauntless" dive bomber balanced on nose after crash landing on carrier flight deck, June 21, 1943.

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that all remaining Jews in the Baltic States be transferred to slave labor camps.

Sarah Sundin notes, on her blog:

Today in World War II History—June 21, 1943: US Marines land unopposed at Segi Point, New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands. Detroit race riot begins between whites and Blacks.

The NFL approved the temporary Merger of the Eagles and the Steelers, something we reported on the other day.  The declined the proposal to merge the Bears and the Cardinals.

Occupied Greece saw action as the SOE destroyed a railway bridge over the Asopos and the Greek Liberation Army conducted an ambush in the Battle of Sarantaporos.

The US Supreme Court rules in Stack v. Boyle that a foreign born citizen could not have that citizenship revoked for joining the Communist Party.

Harvard rejected a proposal to admit women to its medical school.

Friday, February 16, 1923. Bessie Smith sings the blues.

Blues great Bessie Smith was in the studio.

Smith was a musical giant in her day, but was buried in an unmarked grave when she died due to injuries from an automobile accident in 1937.  In 1970s ,that was addressed and a new tombstone was erected.

The inner chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun was opened by Howard Carter's archeological party.

The Conference of Ambassadors of the Allied Powers, which did not include the US, as the US had gone into international hiding on the basis that ignoring the world makes you safe from it, approved the transfer of Memel to Lithuania.  We dealt with this previously and the nature of this oddly disputed small Baltic territory.

Italy ratified the Washington Naval Treaty and the Treaty of Santa Margherita, the latter of which settled a territorial dispute with Yugoslavia,

Ukrainian Troops Training with HK G36s

Thursday, February 4, 1943. The Afrika Korps retreats to Tunisia.

The Afrika Korps withdrew from Libya to Tunisia.

This event came within the week of the German's surrendering at Stalingrad and while it was not as momentous, it was certainly a sign to all who cared to read it that the German effort was now well past its high water mark.  The Germans were in a full, if controlled, retreat on the southern part of the Eastern Front, and were in a full, if controlled, retreat in North Africa as well.  Envisioning a scenario in which these could be reversed was difficult, and indeed it proved to be impossible.

That Rommel's forces were in retreat is noteworthy in and of itself, in that Rommel, given the separation from the continent, felt at liberty to ignore Hitler's no retreat orders and thereby avoid the same fate that had just fallen to Paulus.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz (née Błaszkiewicz) was born on this day in German occupied Plungė, Lithuania.  After the Second World War the Polish family was part of the massive Soviet forced resettlement of Poland, and movement of its borders, and they moved to Poland.  She was highly athletic and turned to mountain climbing by accident when a motorcyclist stopped to help her when her own motorcycle broke down, and she met another mountaineer he was transporting.

Highly accomplished as a mountain climber, she was a difficult personality on expeditions.  She disappeared while on a climbing expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1992.

She was a computer engineer by occupation.

Also a computer engineer, and also born on this day, is American Ken Thompson, who invented Unix.

Tuesday, January 16, 1923: Work on cattle ranch, Z/T Ranch, Pitchfork, Wyoming

A truly great photograph.

Also regarding Wyoming, Harry Ford Sinclair testified in front of a Congressional committee investigating the Teapot Dome lease his interest held.

The Klaipėda Revolt ended with an agreement to transfer Memelland to Lithuania.  It was under French administration at the time with its ultimate ownership up until that point uncertain.