Friday, January 21, 1944. Embarking for Anzio.

The invasion force for Anzio departed from Naples.

Naples harbor, January 21, 1944.

The Luftwaffe commenced Operation Steinbock, the nighttime strategic bombing of targets in southern Britain.  

The first night was not a success.  Only 96 of the aircraft made it to their targets.

Operations would continue into May, but the drain on the Luftwaffe actually made the operation a net loss.

The RAF bombed Magdeburg the same night.

The Red Army took Mga near Leningrad.

The Japanese put don the Jesselton Revolt in Borneo

Patrol on Bougainville.

 Task Force 58.4 on their way to aid in invasion of the Marshall Islands.

Friday, October 1, 1943. The Germans depart, and destroy, Naples.

The U.S. 5th Army entered Naples.  The Germans burned the University of Naples and the Teatro di San Carlo on the way out.

German wartime poster attempting to recruit Italians to an SS formation.

The German appeal to the Italians didn't seem to be well calculated.

Hitler ordered Kesselring to hold a line south of Rome.

As a total aside, it was this date in 1943 that the German police and the Waffen SS adopted the M43 field cap, the famous billed cap that was patterned on the Bergmütze that had long been worn by German alpine troops. A similar hat had long been in Finnish use, nicknamed the "blood ladle".  German and Austrian alpine troops still wear a variant of it, as do many German hunters.

A very practical cap, the design had spread from mountain troops to the regular German Heer in a variant for North Africa, early versions of which had the ear flaps fixed in place, as some variants still do (including a variant now used as the Ukrainian field cap), but which the later versions allowed for them to be folded down, as with the Bergmütze.  The Afrika Korps version had a longer bill, which was retained for the M43.  When adopted by the Heer, it replaced the flat cap (garrison cap) which had been adopted in the 1930s.  The flat cap is a fairly useless cap, and the Bergmütze was a very practical one.  

As Waffen SS mountain units had already adopted the Bergmütze, they were allowed to fix the Edelweiss cap badge to their caps on this day, that being a symbol previously used only by the Heer.

Sarah Sundin noted the liberation of Naples and another item:

Today in World War II History—October 1, 1943: In Italy, US Fifth Army and British X Corps enter Naples. US Third War Loan Drive ends, raising $19 billion (quota $15 billion).

W. Averll Harriman was named Ambassador to the USSR

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.