Friday, December 12, 1941. The spreading of disaster.

The Struma when she was new in 1867.

With the United States now in the war, Hitler announced in a meeting in the Reich Chancellery that a full scale effort to exterminate European Jews would commence.  This was noted in our item on Today In Wyoming's History: December 12:

Adolf Hitler announces extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.

The meeting was held behind closed doors and no official records of it exist, but at least two of the participants noted what was to occur.  Goebbels noted the following in his diary entry for the day:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.   

Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

Hitler was referring to an earlier speech of his in which he'd stated that if the Jews caused a second World War, they'd be annihilated.  Of course, the Jews hadn't caused either WWI or WWII.  The first and the second statements show the warped way in which Hitler imagined Jews to be in control of things around the globe, as a bizarre view still held by some today.

This conference is often noted as one of the stepping stones to the German "Final Solution".  The Germans were, of course, already killing Jews en massse in the East so what exactly this meant in real terms is a bit difficult to discern.  All throughout 1941 murder repression had been a constant feature of German policy towards Jews withing their territorial control, and murder certainly had been since the invasion of the Soviet Union.  Things were getting worse for the Jews by the day prior to December 7.

Indeed, on this day:

Germans begin house-by-house search for Jews in Paris.  

Also, on this day the Struma, a cargo ship, left Romania with over 700 Jewish passengers fleeing Europe.  Turkish authorities would not allow it to allow the passengers of the disabled vessel to disembark at Istanbul as it feared they'd be given certificates to travel to Palestine by the British.  The British for their part did not, and urged the Turks to return the vessel to Romania.  Ultimately, Turkey towed the vessel into the Black Sea, where it was sunk by a Russian submarine.

Jews in Germany were forbidden on this day to use telephones.

The wide-ranging Japanese offensive in the Pacific kept on expanding.

1941 British decide to abandon northern Malaya. 

Japanese abandon their first attempt to capture Wake. 

Japanese complete the occupation of southern Thailand. 

Japanese invade Burma. 

Japanese troops land at Legaspi, southeastern Luzon and advance from Vigan and Aparri. 

Filipino pilots engaged Japanese pilots over Batangas Field. They were successful in the air action, in spite of flying obsolete P26 fighters, sustaining one loss.

Naval Air Transport Service is established  

The Navy, going into the war, was extremely short of transport aircraft.  After the war the NATS woudl be ultimately folded into the Military Airlift Command.

U.S. Navy takes control of the ocean liner Normandie while it is docked at New York City.   

UK declares war on Bulgaria.

 Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States. India declares war on Japan.  

Haiti, El Salvador and Panama declared war in Germany and Italy.

1941   The Wyoming Township, Michigan, Police Department founded.

Director Frank Capra joined the U.S. Army.

In other news from the entertainment industry, the move The Wolf Man was released.

Gatherings were happening at college campuses across the US. like this one in Wisconsin.

Campus Reacts to WWII

These members of the Salvation Army were photographed in Australia.

Australian Salvation Army officers, December 12, 1941.

Diana Barrymore sat for a series of portraits in the studios of the famed black and white portrait photographer Arnold Genthe, who was approaching his final months.  

She was the daughter of actor John Barrymore and died of undetermined causes in 1960 at age 38.  Her short life was troubled and her career produced a limited number of appearances.

Friday August 15, 1941. The coming war.

Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of embattled Britain, and Franklin Roosevelt, President of the ostensibly neutral United States, jointly wrote Josef Stalin, the head of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union who had presided over the decimation of its officer corps just before World War Two, stating:

We realize fully how vitally important to the defeat of Hitlerism is the brave and steadfast resistance of the Soviet Union and we feel therefore that we must not in any circumstances fail to act quickly and immediately in this matter on planning the program for the future allocation of our joint resources

It's often noted that the United States was quite involved, obviously, in aiding the fighting Allies prior to December 7, 1941, but running across these day by day entries such as this really do provide quite a revelation.  The US, in a communication such as this, was effectively acting as if it was at war.

It nearly was, although it wasn't a declared belligerent yet.  Just this past week, however, the US had entered into a "charter" with the UK about what the post-war world should look like, and it had made a declaration under the Monroe Doctrine, quite sensibly and in keeping with its historical position, that it would not allow German U-boat attacks in the Western Hemisphere.  But at the same time the House of Representatives had nearly started sending inductees into the Army home, as the first inductees had planned on, when their October conscription dates were up.

Roosevelt remains a controversial President in some quarters, particularly for his role in expanding the government in the Great Depression.  It's interesting how the shock and horror of the Second World War, once we were in it, has pretty much silences his pre-war actions in edging up, and indeed over, the line that crossed into war.  His view and attitude were correct, but the degree to which the US not only flaunted its neutrality, but pretty much ignored it short of an actual declaration of war, is really remarkable.

On the same day, the Philippine Army Air Corps was inducted into the United States Army Air Forces in the Far East.

Ceremony at Camp Murphy in the Philippines on August 15, 1941, Gen. MacArthur presiding.

This gets into the peculiar status of the Philippine military at the time.  The Philippines were slated for independence in 1946, and they had their own military establishment, which had been created in 1935.  Nonetheless, the islands were not yet fully independent, although they were functioning in a quasi independent manner, sort of like pre-1918 British dominions, although less so.

Nonetheless, as war with Japan grew closer, and recent embargoes upon the Japanese made it nearly inevitable at this point, the wisdom of incorporating the infant air force into the US establishment was obvious.  On this day, it was done.  The move was more than symbolic, it actually made the Philippine Air Corps an American military unit.