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.

Thursday, December 21, 1922. Catholic Justices, and others, of the United States Supreme Court, Catholic Presidents of Lithuania. Women Vetrinarians.

Pierce Butler was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Justice of the Supreme Court, 61 to 8, after sixteen days of hearings.  

We discussed Justice Butler here:

President Harding nominated Democrat Pierce Butler to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace William R. Day.  Nominating a Democrat assured Harding that he could get his nomination past the then Democratic U.S. Senate.

Gee, it's almost like politics played a role in Supreme Court nominations back then. . . 

While he was a Democrat, he was also a staunch conservative, this being a day when conservatives still existed in the Democratic Party.  He was one of the justices that proved to be trouble for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Butler was also a devout Catholic. Today he's partially remembered for issuing the only dissenting opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case which permitted compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled and which is regarded now as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time.  Bell's dissent, was, interestingly, without a dissenting opinion, but it was a dissent.  Oliver Wendell Holmes attributed his dissent to his Catholicism.

Butler also dissented from Olmstead v. United States, which upheld Federal wiretapping.

He died at age 73 in 1939.

His religion was noted in our earlier entry, but this does make for an interesting topic.

Prejudice against Catholicism was intense for much of American history, and indeed it remained so at least up until the post World War Two era.  The Oval Office was effectively barred to Catholics for that reason, but interestingly the United States Supreme Court was not.

Just Roger B. Taney was the first Catholic appointed to the Supreme Court, with that appointment coming in 1836 via President Andrew Jackson's nomination.  Taney would serve all the way until 1864, when he passed away in office.  Taney is unfortunately remembered today for being the author of the Dred Scott decision, not a good way to be recalled, and he interestingly died during the Civil War.  Somewhat ironically, the next Catholic justice, Edward Douglass White, served in the Confederate forces during the war.   Since White's appointment, there's never been an occasion when there wasn't at least one Catholic on the bench.

Theoretically, there's been a total of fifteen Catholic justices, including the six currently serving on the bench.  Having said that, Justice Sotomayor is not an observant Catholic.  Justice Thomas is a Catholic "revert", having been an Episcopalian at the time of his appointment.

Catholicism is a large, but still a minority, religion in the United States.  The impact of Catholic jurists has been noted, but not always very accurately.  An interesting observation on this is that Catholics are heir to an intellectual tradition that suits legal inquiry.  The same observation has been made about members of the Jewish religion, and there have been eight United States Supreme Court justices who have been Jewish over the years, a fairly substantial recognition in light of their minority status.

It's often noted that the Court today has a Catholic majority, which is true, but it's less of a majority than it might seem given Sotomayor's ambiguous status.  Having said that, it'd be a bare majority even without Sotomayor.  This hasn't always meant predictability, however, in spite of what critics like to assert, as Catholic justices have taken positions that are at least facially contrary to Catholicism, such as Justice Kennedy's decision in Obergefell, and certainly Sotomayor was in Dobbs.

Thirty-three Supreme Court justices have been Episcopalians, reflecting that Protestant denomination's massive standing in the United States up until the 1970s.  Once the dominant Christian denomination, culturally, in North America, it's suffered a huge decline to which it's reacted by moving to the left on social issues, which has seemingly accelerated the decline.  Eighteen have been Presbyterians, which likewise was a Protestant faith of wide influence for many years.  Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism reflect the country's early settlement, with both being religions that hailed from Great Britain and which descend from the Church of England and the Church of Scotland respectively.

The Lutheran faith, which is widely represented in much of the United States, interestingly has contributed only two Supreme Court justices.  The Baptist faith has contributed only one more than that, even though it is currently the largest Protestant denomination.  Five justices have been Methodists, which make sense in that it descends also from the Church of England and once called itself the Episcopal Methodist Church.

Fifteen Justices have been non-denominational Christians whose religious affiliation is not really known, and who may have not all been dedicated in their faiths.  The religious background of one Justice, James Wilson, has been debated, but it seems likely that he was a Christian of the same type that some of the founders were, who seemingly favored various Christian denominations without being clearly of any particular one.

Nine justices have been Unitarians, which is somewhat surprising. 

Generally, the religious affiliation of Supreme Court justices has been nearly wholly uncontroversial, save for Catholics and Jews, both of whom continue to be subject to prejudices that date back to the country's founding and early colonial history.  Prejudice against Jewish justices tends not to be openly spoken, but prejudice against Catholic justices is.

Aleksandras Stulginskis was elected President of Lithuania.  He was already serving in the role.  He'd serve in that role until 1926.

Stulginskis had started off with the intent of being ordained a Catholic Priest, but abandoned that pursuit in favor of agriculture.  He retired from politics in 1927.  In 1941, he and his wife were arrested by the Soviets, and he was held as a Soviet prisoner until 1956 when he was released following Stalin's death.  He died in Kaunas in 1969 at age 84.

Aleen Cust became the first licensed female veterinary surgeon in the United Kingdom.  She'd been in practice for twenty years at the time.

Monday, September 10, 1922. UW "kidnapping"

The Soviet Union introduced universal male conscription, starting at age 20.

The Reserve Officers Association was formed in the US.  Originally an organization made up of reserve officers who had served in World War One, it's now an association that includes reservists of all ranks.

Lithuania introduced the Lita as its currency, replacing German currency it had been used.

1922 10 Lita banknote.

A now passed UW tradition was practiced.

Hubris and Strange Coincidence.

There is, I'd note, no proof that Donald J. Trump is a Russian agent.

Nonetheless, two days after the Russians (we suspect) blew a hole in their own gas pipeline to Germany for no rational reason, our former President, who is now in trouble for all the classified information he packed home to his golf resort dwellings, come out with this steaming pile of pooh.

What the crap?

And what hubris.

"I will head up group???"

You have to be joking.

What idiot would want the same man who betrayed Afghanistan into Taliban hands and made twenty years of American, and Allied, effort there meaningless to head up a delegation to try to sort out the war between Ukraine and Russia, a war we might note which Trump buddy Putin is losing badly.¹ 

What would his solution be?  Russia takes half of Ukraine, 3/4s of Poland, and a slice of Lithuania to go?

Only a diehard Trump loyalist seriously would believe that Russia would not have raped Ukraine if Trump were President, although you can surely believe that the United States would have done nothing whatsoever to stop it.  Nothing.  The war would be over, alright, with Ukraine in Russian hands and a followup guerilla war in Ukraine going on right now.  Biden's leadership on this topic at least has been monumental.

And why does this come out now?

That's the odd thing.

As noted, there's no evidence that Trump is a Russian agent.

There's reason to suspect he's a Russian asset, probably unknowingly.

But it's sure easy to have suspicions, if, for no other reasons, his own actions, which is in fact probably the only reason, which is why it probably also isn't true.

Anyway you look at it, this offer is beyond absurd.

Footnotes:

1. After posting this, I actually saw a recycled Twitter, or maybe Truth (sic) Social tweet in which somebody cheered "this is how a real President acts".

Not a really good President.

Also, according to the Washington Post, Tucker Carson suggested, which is different from actually stated, that the US may have sabotaged the pipeline.  I'm not going to link into the original Carson broadcast as I can't stand him, but if Carson suggested that, I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that he believes that's possible. At this point, anyone still listening to him, really ought to stop.

Friday, July 28, 1922. A triple recognition.

The United States established diplomatic relations with all three Baltic States and appointed Evan E. Young as the ambassador to all three countries.

A political cartoon from the July 28, 1922 Chicago Tribune.

Thursday, July 20, 1922. Echoes of wars.

A press photographer in Washington, D. C. took a photo of men on motorcycles.

Another took a photograph of the dedication to Lt. Samuel J. Harris, U.S. World War One veteran who had died during an insurrection in Lithuania, where he was serving as a volunteer.

Around 1,000 Americans had volunteered to serve the Baltic nation against the Reds in the same time period.

German colonies were transferred officially to European powers under League of Nations' mandates.

Limerick was taken from the IRA by the Irish Army.  The Irish Army also shelled IRA held Waterford.

Friday, January 20, 1922. Things automotive.

The New York Times published a cartoon regarding the rising phenomenon of auto fatalities.  Auto fatalities were particularly severe in the early history of automobiles as all the drivers were new drivers and the vehicles were not anywhere near being "safe" by modern standards, nostalgia about older cars notwithstanding.

Lithuania abolished titles of nobility, and the death penalty.

At first, it was widely assumed that the post World War One states would follow the historical European pattern and all become constitutional monarchies, which some in fact did.  Not all, however, followed this path, with Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland providing such examples.

Pope Benedict XV was reported to be gravely ill.

Harry Burt applied for a patent on the process for the Good Humor Bar, as well as on the item itself.

Good Humor sales truck.

Early on, the ice cream product was widely distributed directly through "sales cars".

Sunday, January 8, 1922. Éamon de Valera walks out, Irish Free State walks in, Col. Charles Young dies.

Éamon de Valera refused to recognize the events of the prior week and declared that the Republic of Ireland had not been disestablished.

Of course, it was debatable if the Irish had actually called the Republic into being in the first place, although that argument could be legally made on the basis that they voted, except for those in Ulster, for parliamentarians who chose to separately assemble, an interesting, and brilliant, approach by Irish Republicans.  Now, however, those same parliamentarians in the same body had voted to accept the treaty, something De Valera had regarded as legitimate right up until. . . this day.

His walking out didn't stop Dubliners from rejoicing at the approval of the treaty. That this would result in a civil war, while feared, was not yet fully appreciated.

Of local interest, the Casper Herald was reporting that the city's merchants were losing $1,000,000 a year in local sales to mail orders, showing how long that complaint has existed.

Col. Charlies Young, whom we've written about here before, died in Lagos, Nigeria as a result of a stroke while serving as the US military attaché in Liberia.

Young's death was somewhat ironic in that he was an outwardly vigorous man whose excellent military service should have placed him in position for a senior leadership in the Army during the Great War.   He was instead involuntarily retired on the pretext of ill health, with the service citing high blood pressure, which he then challenged by riding from his home in Ohio to Washington, D. C. by horseback.  

The fear had been that if Young was allowed to command during World War One, he would have white officers under him as he'd be eligible for promotion to Brigadier General.  In fact, he'd already commanded a mix race command in the field during the Punitive Expedition as a result of a battlefield event without incident.

His long ride had led to his reinstatement in the Army, but as a military attaché.  His death on an expedition to British Nigeria ended up ironically proving the point of his forced retirement, even though it had been a pretext.  He was 57 at the time of his death.

It would take a year for his body to be returned to the United States due to a British legal requirement that those dying in Nigeria be buried there.

An election was held in Polish puppet state Central Lithuania, in which a majority of voters cast ballots to remain part of Poland.  About half of the tiny entities' territory was occupied by Poles or had a population of Poles. The putative state included Vilnius.  

Mid Week At Work. November 3, 1921 The birth of Charles Bronson

I don't normally combine these two, but today offers an interesting example of early 20th Century conditions in the form of the centennial of the birth of Charles Bronson.

Bronson as the central figure in Man With A Camera, a television series of the 1950s.

I don't idealize actors the way some people do, and that would include Bronson.  But his early life really provides a glimpse of how things were in "the good old days".  Indeed, of his films, only the short speech in the film The Dirty Dozen about why his character speaks German mirrors his own origins. Bronson spoke, in addition to English, Lithuanian, Russian and Greek, unlike German and Polish like his character in the film.

Bronson was born  Charles Dennis Buchinsky, the eleventh of fifteen children of his parents.  His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who changed the family name to that from. Bučinskis.  His father was actually a Lithuanian Lipka Tatar, many of whom are Muslims.  His parents were however Roman Catholic.

Bronson's family was desperately poor.  His father died when he was ten and he began working in Pennsylvania coal mines at that age.  He nonetheless graduated from high school, being the first member of the family to do so.  He was a full-time miner until 1943, when he joined the Army and entered the Army Air Corps.  He ultimately became a B29 crewman and was wounded in action over Japan.  After the war he returned to Pennsylvanian and worked odd jobs until breaking into acting in the early 1950s.  Unlike many of his acting contemporaries, his wartime service had nothing to do with acting at all.  He was acting in movies by 1951 and had regular television and even leading television roles by the mid 1950s.  His breakthrough star role came with The Magnificent Seven in 1960.

Reviews like this tend to become hagiographies, and I don't intend for that to be the case.  In fact, I don't like most of the Bronson movies from the 1970s, when his star power was at its height.  Interestingly, he broke into full-scale stardom after age 50, which is rare in acting, but a lot of his roles of that period were cartoonish violent exercises.  He was married three times, the first time to aspiring 18 year old actress Harriet Tendler which ended in divorce nearly twenty years later, then to Jill Ireland, and lastly, after her death, to Kim Weeks.  His character in real life always remained hard to get at as he was intensely private and shy, but he was known to hold grudges for protracted periods, seemingly caused, in some people's minds, by lasting surprise that he'd succeeded in movies.

So what, if any, lessons can we draw from this life?

Well, for one thing, while poverty certainly remains in the United States, early childhood stories like Bronson's have gone from common to extremely rare. We don't read about families of fifteen much, and if we do, they tend to more often than not be regarded as interesting oddities, like the now fallen Dugger family.  Bronson's family was big, because it was big, and there's not much else to that.

We also don't see miner works himself to death and then boys begin mining as kids stories either. But at that time, that was common.  Child labor laws were in effect by 1920, but in the coal mining regions of Appalachia, they obviously weren't really enforced.   This is an American story we thankfully don't see much of, even with the very poor, and even with immigrants.

It also demonstrates that even relatively recently an era remained in which people could be intensely private, even secretive.  Surprisingly little is known about Bronson as a person.  Finding out what happened to his fourteen siblings is darned near impossible, other than that they all retained the Buchinsky name.  We know that he was raised in a Catholic family, and his fist father-in-law, who was Jewish, objected to the marriage partially on those grounds, but we don't really know how observant Bronson was, if at all, as an adult.  Indeed, some rumor mills have him as a Lutheran or Russian Orthodox believer, both of which are unlikely.  He clearly wasn't observant in regard to the Catholic views on marriage.  He was a Nixon supporter and his series of early 1970s crime films are of a stout right-wing vigilante character, neither of which tells us more about his deeper views.  We just don't know that much about him.

American success story or American tragedy?  Hard to say.

October 29, 1941. Never Give In.

The SS murdered over 8,000 Jewish residents of Kaunas Lithuania.  Men, women and children were included in the massacre.

The Germans assaulted Tula and were turned back.  Yesterday I noted Guderian's weird comment about  the town, but what was omitted from the quote is that Tula gave the Germans the dope slap. They'd never take it.  The "blond girl", as it was, wasn't yielding to German advances.

They did take Vololamsk outside of Moscow, but in an effort that expended so many resources that it caused them to have to halt.

In essence what was occurring was the end of Operation Barbarossa and Operation Typhoon, part of it.  The Germans had been facing increasing Soviet resistance for weeks, but up until now, save for Leningrad, the Red Army had always been defeated.  Now, it wasn't being.  It was not only slowing the Germans down, in some places it had stopped yielding entirely.  German advances, on the other hand, were evolving from rapid forays with occasional sieges, to outright pitched battles involving massive losses.

Churchill delivered a speech destined to become famous at Harrow, with it being known as the "Never Give In" speech.

Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master's kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world — ups and downs, misfortunes — but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home? Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed. We are not so poorly armed today; but then we were very poorly armed. We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack; and I expect you are beginning to feel impatient that there has been this long lull with nothing particular turning up! 

But we must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months — if it takes years — they do it. 

Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must "...meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same." 

You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period — I am addressing myself to the School — surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated. 

Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer. 

You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honour, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter — I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: "Not less we praise in darker days." 

I have obtained the Head Master's permission to alter darker to sterner. "Not less we praise in sterner days." 

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

A ten-month-long boycott of radio broadcasters by ASCAP was revolved.

Cole Porter's musical play, Let's Face It, was released.  Wikipedia describes the plot thus:

Three suspicious wives, Maggie Watson, Nancy Collister and Cornelia Pigeon invite three Army inductees to Maggie's summer house in Southampton on Long Island to make their husbands jealous. Jerry Walker is engaged to Winnie Potter, and, because he needs the money, agrees to the plot. The wives's philandering husbands leave on yet another camping trip. Winnie, hearing of Jerry's involvement, brings in two friends (who are actually girlfriends of the other two soldiers) to pretend to be interested in the older men. The husbands actually do go fishing. Winnie and her friends crash Maggie's party and the husbands unexpectedly return home.

I think I'd have passed on this one.