The first known indoor hockey match took place at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, Quebec.
The Page Act, which we already discussed, keeping out Chinese women on dubious grounds, went into effect.
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The Nazis offered Hungarian rescue worker Joel Brand an offer which has been termed the "Blood for Goods" deal. It was an offer to free 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews, releasing them to an Allied country, save for Palestine (oddly) for goods. The offer was extended through Adolf Eichmann to Brand, who was a pre-war Hungarian Zionist.
Brand carried the message to the Allies, making his way through Turkey to Egypt, where he was arrested by the British. The British did not take the offer seriously and believed it was a trick. The US was cautious about the offer but less hostile to it. British opposition to exploring it ended the matter, and the British press leaked it and termed it blackmail by the fall.
At this point in the war, members of the SS were not completely loyal to Hitler and there is some reason to believe that this was a camouflaged effort to open up communications with the Western Allies in order to advance a separate peace, a delusional prospect of that is what they were thinking.
Brand moved to Israel after the war and was haunted the rest of his life by the failure of the proposal. He died visiting Germany in 1964, at age 58.
A Royal Air Force variant of the B-24, a Liberator B Mark VI crashed into the Griffintown neighborhood of Montreal after taking off from Dorval Airport. The crew and ten civilians were killed.
My mother, then 19 years of age, would have been working in the city at this time, so was likely on the Griffentown side of the river when the accident occured.
The first combat helicopter evacuation completed in the CBI:
The Luftwaffe raided shipping at Portsmouth and Plymouth-Devonport in a nighttime raid. The same night, the HMS Black Prince and three Canadian destroyers engaged German warships in the English Channel, sinking the T-29 and damaging the T-24 and T-27.
The T-39 series of German ships were torpedo "boats", but due to their size they were more in the nature of corvettes.
Allied forces landed at Humboldt Bay, New Guinea.
The British government announced that it had a £2.76 billion deficit, £89 million smaller than anticipated.
The United Negro College Fund was established.
George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, died at age 63.
Herriman was creole and born in New Orleans, although he speant much of his adult life in Los Angeles. The Creole are their own distinct ethnicity, with some noting that means by default that they are of "mixed race", something that a lot of non Louisianians don't realize as they confuse creole with Cajun, the two not being the same. Under the bizarre rules of American culture, Herriman would have been regarded as "black" in some regions of the United States, although legally, and equally bizarrely, he could at the time choose to self identify as white or black, neither of which really describes his ethnic heritage. He self identified as white, which makes sense, as to do otherwise would have hindered his career.
Herriman was a shy and gentlemanly man. A Catholic, he married his childhood sweetheart and had two children, as well as a lot of pets, of which he wsa very fond.
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Crossing over this bridge frightened me as a child.
On this day in 1942 the Germans commenced the "Channel Dash" in an effort to run two battleships from the port of Brest to their home ports in Germany. The battleships were the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, accompanied by the cruiser Prinz Eugen. They'd been enduring bombing by the RAF in Brest.
The German effort commenced under the cover of night on February 11 and with radio jamming which precluded British agents from radioing about the ship's departure. It was covered by the Luftwaffe, so the ensuing battle was an air and sea battle.
Both sides sustained damage and casualties in the effort, but the German objective was successful. Given that the Germans did in fact run the channel, albeit partially at night, it was a bit of an embarrassment to the British.
According to Sarah Sundin's blog, there were riots in Montreal over conscription plans on this date.
I'm not aware of the 1942 riots, although I am of 1944 riots. At any rate, conscription had been in place since 1940, but at that time conscripted troops could not be required to serve overseas unless they so volunteered, resulting in an enduring Canadian controversy. Troops who would not volunteer were termed "zombies" by those who resented it. Resistance to conscription was particularly strong in Quebec, where Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis had called a snap election in 1939 to oppose the war only to lose his seat to Adelard Godbout, who had the support of the Federal government in the election.
French Canadian resistance to conscription has been an ongoing matter of controversy in Canada. Simply put, the Québécois were largely disinterested in the war, although 20% of those who volunteered to fight overseas were in fact Québécois. This makes for a complicated legacy in obvious ways.
US forces arrived to help defend the Dutch islands of Curacoa, Bonaire and Aruba with permission of the Dutch government in exile.
Also, according to Sundin, the US took over Dupont's supply of nylon, a critical war material used for a variety of things, including parachutes.
The documentary Our Russian Front was released on this date in 1942.
