Saturday, December 12, 1942. Winter Operations.

The Germans launched Operation Winter Storm, an offensive that aimed to break through to trapped forces at Stalingrad.

Red Army T-34s in Operation Little Saturn.

The Soviets launched Operation Little Saturn on south of the Don.

The Knights of Columbus Hostel fire occurred in St. John's Newfoundland.  The fact that many suspicious items are associated with the fire, that other fire attempts happened in the same locality within a proximate time frame, and that the Catholic hostel housed many military and shipping personnel at the time have caused it to be suspected that the fire arose due to a Nazi act of sabotage.  99 people died as a result of the fire.

Sarah Sundin notes:

Today in World War II History—December 12, 1942: M3 submachine gun enters service with US Army. UCLA football team beats USC for the first time, 14-7; a war bond drive at the game raises $2 million.

The M3 was a wartime design that made use of stamping technology. The goal was to produce a reliable submachine gun at a much lower cost than the competing machined examples that then existed, a goal which was largely achieved.

The U.S. used submachine guns in a much different way than depicted in films and different from the way it was used in many other armies.  Generally they never showed up in the TO&E's of infantry units of any kind, including airborne units.  They did end up in those units, but through unofficial routes.  Submachine guns really served as defensive weapons for armored vehicle crews, for the most part, in the U.S. Army.  The M3 occupied that role into the 1990s.

Solider armed with M3 guarding German prisoners during Operation Overlord.  The jeep is unusual in that it's had a back deck extension afixed to it.

The M3 was nicknamed the "Grease Gun" due to its resemblance to that tool by U.S. troops.

As it was a Saturday, the Saturday weekly magazines were out.

The Saturday Evening Post had an illustration of a hunting dog by tools of the trade and a photo of its owner, now in the service.

Colliers had an illustration by Polish artist Arthur Szyk in his unique style depicting the Japanese allegorically as a bat over Pearl Harbor.

Thursday, November 6, 1947. Meet The Press Premiers.

Meet The Press, the longest running television program in the United States, premiered in that format.  It had previously premiered on radio as American Mercury Presents:  Meet the Press on October 5, 1945.

While I very much favor This Week over Meet the Press, it occurs to me that somewhat ironically, as I listed to the audio podcast variant, I listed to it closer to the radio version.

The first guess for the then 30-minute Thursday night program was James Farley, the Postmaster General and DNC Committee chairman.  The initial moderator was Martha Roundtree, reprising her role from the radio variant, and the only woman moderator of the show to date.  Roundtree hosted the program until 1953.

She died in 1999 in Washington D.C., nearly blind since the 1980s, due to the harsh effects of primitive television lighting.

As noted, I do listen to it, but I'm not a fan of the current moderator, Chuck Todd.  Indeed, I was hoping for a second female moderator in the form of Kasi Hunt.

On the same day, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov told a Moscow audience that the means of making an atomic weapons were no longer secret.  American intelligence took that to mean that the Soviet Union knew how to build a bomb, but didn't necessarily have one.  The Soviets, who had penetrated the American government fairly successfully, suspected that the US was working on such a weapon by 1942 and started their own project accordingly.  Nonetheless, they had not developed a bomb by this point themselves, but were only two years away from doing so.

Canada invited Newfoundland to join the Canadian Dominion.

Wednesday, February 18, 1942. A bad day at sea.

It wasn't a good day for the Allies. 

February 18, 1942: 80 Years Ago—Feb. 18, 1942: Japanese land on Bali, cutting ferry link from Australia to Java.

The above item from Sarah Sundin's blog shows how menacing the Japanese advance was becoming to Australia, constituting, at least from an Allied and Australian prospective, a real threat to the Australian mainland.

On the same day, the Japanese began to murder Chinese in Singapore that they regarded as a threat in the Sook Ching operation.

Chiang Kai-shek met with Mahatma Gandi in Calcutta, in one of the odder  tête-à-tête's of the war.

The USS Truxton and the Pollux ran aground at Lawn Point, Newfoundland, in a storm, resulting in over 200 deaths.  On the same day, the Free French submarine Surcouf may sank off of Panama after colliding with the US freighter Thompson Lykes.

The Sucouf might be described as, frankly, weird.  It was a huge submarine that featured two 8 in deck guns.  It's entire crew of 130 went down with her.

Some submarine hit the Truxton, at any rate, although her crew thought it was a U boat and some still think that may be the case.  She may have actually been sunk due to friendly fire from a Catalina cruising the area, or another US aircraft doing the same.

The Japanese photo magazine Ashai Graph, which oddly published its name in English and Japanese, featured Japanese tanks in Singapore on its cover.

August 11, 1941. Margarita Carmen Cansino in Life Magazine.

American and British senior military leaders discussed the joint conduct of war against Nazi Germany for the first time at the conference at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The United States, of course, was not yet a declared belligerent in the war.

Which doesn't mean that the US wasn't a participant in it.  The US was, as we've noted here before, highly active in escorting into the Atlantic, if not across it, and at this point had aircraft operating out of Iceland and Northern Ireland in that effort.

Aircraft of the Soviet Air Forces, embarrassed by the Soviet Navy's raid on Berlin a few days prior, raided Berlin itself with heavy bombers in a raid which could hardly be regarded as successful and sustained high losses.

Rita Hayworth appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in a négligée. 

Hayworth in 1946.

The photograph is interesting in part because it was hardly salacious. While she is in négligée, it's pretty conservative to say the least.  Moreover, she was on the cover in a conservative bikini, which of course even if conservative, is a bikini.  The pose, on top of a bed, may have been the most salacious thing about it.  The photo ent on to become the second most popular pinup of the World War Two era.

Hayworth was born to a Spanish father and an Irish/English extraction mother in the United States, and her real name was Margarita Carmen Cansino.  By 1941 she was already an entertainment veteran.  She never graduated from high school as she was already working at the time, having completed no more than a grade 9 education, and in later years she'd tell Orson Welles, one of a string of spouses, that her father had abused her as a child.

Hayworth as a dancer at age 12, before her Spanish ancestry was de-emphasized.

Her name was changed after she began to have some early roles in film as the movie industry found both her name and her dark hair too "Mediterranean".  Indeed, not only was her named changed (she adopted her mother's maiden name) but her hairline was too, by electrolysis, giving her the famous looks that she had throughout the main part of her career.

Hayworth in 1935, before efforts were made to change her appearance.

Hayworth defined a certain type of glamour in her era, and lived a fairly typical Hollywood life which included a string of marriages.

The entire Haywood story, put back in the context of the times, is a mirror on our society, a bit, to the present day.  She was a teenaged actress when she first appeared in movies, by which time she'd already been in entertainment for years and years.  Abused sexually as a child, she'd have a string of marriages, all stories that we could expect to read today.  Nonetheless, she was regarded as glamorous and the public didn't hold her domestic troubles against her in any fashion during her career.  The public also didn't find her Life Magazine illustration shocking, but the troops found it pinup worthy.  Decency standards has obviously moved substantially in the 20th Century in terms of what was regarded as a decent depiction, including what was regarded as decent to wear.  Her swimsuit on the cover of Life would have been regarded as indecent in the early 1920s, but that had already changed by the mid 1930s.

Saturday August 9, 1941. The Atlantic Charter Conference commences.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt commenced a secrete meeting at Placentia Bay at the U.S. Naval Station at Little Placentia Sound. The Navy's presence on the Newfoundland coast was already established even though this was prior to the American entry into the war.

HMS Prince of Wales, on which Winston Churchill had crossed the Atlantic for the meeting, and the USS McDougal which served to ferry the dignitaries to their respective ships.

This meeting would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter Meeting.

Permanently inhabited since 1671, the town of Placentia, founded as Plaisance, had a population of about 8,000 people in 1941, down from a high of 16,000 in 1900. The population at that time, 1941, was approximately the same as it had been in 1921, but it's since declined to less than half of that.  The decline in the cod fishing industry and the closure of the American base in 1970 provides the explanation for that.

Newfoundland was a British administered dominion at the time, not yet part of Canada.

On the same day, Charles Lindbergh gave a speech in Cleveland in which he accused those in favor of entering the war of plotting to create incidents that would draw the US into it.