Wednesday, June 2, 1943. Lwów Ghetto brougth to an end.

The Germans completed the liquidation of the Lwów Ghetto in Poland.  The city, which once contained a population of 160,000 Jewish Poles, is now in Ukraine and known as Lviv. It had been contested for in the Polish Ukrainian War.  During that battle, the Jewish population of the town had formed its own militia.

Sarah Sundin notes in her blog:

Today in World War II History—June 2, 1943: Combat debut of US 99th Fighter Squadron, the first Black unit in the Army Air Force (“Tuskegee Airmen”), in a Twelfth Air Force mission to Pantelleria.

And, a link from another blog we follow:

June 2, 1943: The Death of Nile Kinnick

Wednesday, March 14, 2023. International cartographers

By Krzysztoflew, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2394054

The Conference of Ambassadors of the League of Nations, deciding unresolved claims from the Polish Ukrainian War, 1918-1919, awarded Eastern Glacia to Poland including Lviv, Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) and Tarnopol (Ternopil).  Ukraine had, by that time, functionally ceased to exist. Following World War Two, the Soviet Union would redraw the border to give them to Ukraine and move the Poles west, and likewise move Germans west as well, redrawing the German frontier as well.

Millions of people found themselves moving, or if they'd already been refugees, unable to return home.

By Spiridon Ion Cepleanu - History Atlases available., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17831314

To a large extent, this reflected both the mixed national boundaries of empire and the sharpening of nationalism following World War One.  The Poles and the Ukrainians blended into each other on the western fringes of the Russian Empire, and some Polish populations remain in Ukraine today.  Lviv, for its part, had a significant Jewish population before the Second World War resulted in their extermination.  The Poles, as a people, extended much further East before the Soviet Union forcibly redrew its border after World War Two.  Russia also redrew Ukraine's border after 1919 to Russia's favor.

Paris Peace Conference map of Ukraine.  Note that its borders were considerably larger, and that it does in fact include Crimea.  And in this map, Moldova was largely Romanian.

Of note today, Ukraine once extended further north, and further east.  Russia effectively sits today on land that it started occupying in the 1920s that had been Ukrainian.  Today, however, it should not be presumed that Russian territory originally claimed by Ukraine retains a Ukrainian population.

Also of note, Ukraine today sits pretty much within a smaller version of its original claimed modern borders.  A large section of Poland ended up within it following World War Two, but about 60% of that had been claimed by Ukraine right after World War One, reflecting in part the mixed Polish Ukrainian population in that region at the time.

August 31, 1919. The Motor Transport Convoy gets a day of rest, no rest in Kiev, turmoil in Chicago

Railroad station, Carson City, 1940.  It likely didn't look much different in 1919.  The man is waiting for the mail, which was moved by train at the time.

On this day in 1919, the Sunday day of rest returned to the command.

It darned near had to. The command was behind, by several days, in its original anticipated schedule, but it had taken it 20 hours across the dust and muck of the Nevada desert to travel the stretch before Carson City, and this on a road that was theoretically a designated highway, although the designation at that time was just that, a designation.  Very little of the Lincoln Highway, as we've seen, was improved in any fashion whatsoever.  There had been problems with teh road the entire way, but after the column hit Nebraska the road became worse with each mile, with Utah's and Nevada's roads being particularly bad.

Speed, of course, in the era was relative. . . .

The command was provided "Union religious services".  I have no idea what that actually means.  General ecumenical perhaps?  Non protestant soldiers with Sunday obligations, which at this time would have largely been Catholics, but perhaps some Greek Orthodox, would have had to hike into town to see what was available for them.

And there was transportation to Hot Springs for bathing, which was no doubt welcome.

And some worked, including the operator of a tractor.

Emblem of the former Socialist Party of America

Meanwhile, in Chicago, a city the convoy  had passed through some weeks earlier, day two of the Socialist Party of America's Emergency National Convention saw the bolting left wing of the party.  The English speaking bolters, on this day, formed the Communist Labor Party in its own convention.

This was addressed a bit yesterday when it was related that the emergency was the rise of a radical, or rather more radical, left wing of the party that was hearing the siren song of Communism.  In this, the US Socialist Party was going through the same struggle that Socialist parties everywhere were.  Nearly all of them had started out as hardcore radical parties, but over the years as their fortunes had risen, their positions became less radical as they moved towards accepting democratic forms of government.  Ironically, World War One, during which it had been supposed that Socialist would take the position that all worker should be united in opposing the war in favor of the solidarity of labor, in fact saw the opposite development and the movement of mainstream Socialist towards accepting representative democracy.  At the same time, all the same parties saw movements within them that were extremely radical.  As this process occurred, these parties split.  In Russia, the split saw the rise of four different Socialist parties, with the Communist Party being the most radical.  Germany saw a succession of splinter parties that eventually saw two parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party emerge.

In the U.S. the Russian Revolution gave rise to the Communist Party of America in May, 1919.  The Socialist Party continued on but radical elements within it were attracted to Communism. The Emergency National Convention was called to address this, and to put an end to it.  By that point, however, the right wing Socialist were a minority in the party.  While they seized control of the convention, they could not keep the left wing from walking out, which it did and on this day, in their own convention, the English speaking radicals formed the Communist Labor Party.  Ironically, the Emergency Session had come about due to the left wing demanding that it occur in order to move the Socialist Party towards Communism.

The Communist Labor Party was not to be long lived as it merged with the Communist Party of America the following year, which then became the Communist Party of the USA.  The Socialist Party of the USA would continue on, with various swings and splinters, until 1972 when it changed its name to the Social Democrats, USA, reflecting the evolution of the party.  Ironically, the Social Democrats have not seemed to really benefit from the current flirtation in some circles in the US with social democracy.  The Communist Party USA still exists as well, with its high water mark really having come during the 1930s.

Elsewhere, the fights brought by Communism saw dramatic events take place in Ukraine where the Whites entered the city, taking it without a fight from the Reds during the Russian Civil War but ending up fighting, slightly, forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic that entered the town simultaneously.

Russian White victory parade on this date in 1919 in Kiev.

The entire event in some ways is emblematic of the confusing nature of the Russian Civil War.

The Ukrainian People's Republic was an Ukrainian effort to create an independent government for the region following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the withdraw of the Germans from the region.  During that period various forces contested for control of the new country with a directorate emerging that had the most support. At the same time, the country found itself facing a Soviet invasion in January 1919 and it also found itself at war with Poland to its west.  To compound matters, White Russian forces contested with the Red Army for control of the region, and Ukrainian Greens sought to bring anarchy to the country, fielding an army of their own.

Under these conditions the independence of Ukraine was unlikely to occur but the region did manage to survive surprisingly long.  On this day the re emergent Whites took Kiev but the Ukrainian government sought to as well, not appreciating the ability of the Whites to move as quickly as they did.  The Whites retained control of the city.  The Ukrainian People's Republic effectively came to an end in 1921 with its territory divided between the Soviet Union and Poland, although it would amazingly maintain a government in exile up until the country was able to form its own government again following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: 1919 Advice About Substituting Foods in U.S. to Help Needy Children Abroad

A look at the immediate post World War One World:

1919 Advice About Substituting Foods in U.S. to Help Needy Children Abroad

It's interesting how, in our American memory, when World War One ended, it just ended.  Looking back we just recall the end of the war as the turn to peace and all that was good about that.

But in reality, millions of Europeans were refugees.  We've published some photos of them here recently.  A lot of the French were attempting to return to their homes only to find them destroyed.  French farmers who had been driven out of their lands due to the fighting returned in many cases to find a totally altered landscape (a landscape that we'll be posting some images of here soon).

And this wasn't limited to Europe.  In the Middle East millions were adrift.  An entire people, the Armenians, had been in peril since the beginning of the war and many had been victims of genocide.  Those who had survived had been driven east and west, with some ending up as far away as the United States.  In the region of their homeland, the opportunity to break free from former colonial masters meant border combat with other regions doing the same which were their neighbors.

Fighting raged on elsewhere also.  In Germany fighting went on in individual cities and towns over what Germany was to become.  Germany had been on the knife's edge of starvation in the Fall of 1918 and now that the war had ended, the situation was somewhat alleviated, but only somewhat.  On Germany's borders a war raged with Polish revolutionaries, supported by a newly born Poland, over whether certain regions would be Polish or German.  Likewise, the Poles were fighting off a Czech invasion from the south over which border regions would be Polish or Czech. At the same time the Poles were fighting the Ukrainians over large sections of their frontier due to the rarely noted ethnic fact that the Poles simply grade into the Ukrainians, and the two people are closely related.  And the Poles were fighting off a Red Army invasion as well, part of an effort to impose a Communist regime on Poland and whose Red Army commander, Trotsky, imagined might carry his Red forces all the way to Berlin.

Russia was in an enormously violent civil war, which the United States and the other Allies were participating in, in varying degrees. And not doing too well at the century removed moment either.  The Russian Civil War would prove to be a human tragedy of epic proportions, in no small part because both sides became vicious in regard to the other, and the Communist became genocidal nearly from the onset.  Millions would die in that war, following the Great War in which millions of Russians had died.  Millions more would die due to Communist violence, purges and acts of intentional starvation after the Civil War ended in a tragedy that, for the Russians, started in 1914 and would really only abate just before 1950.

The Reds were also fighting in the Baltics, with all the Baltic nations struggling to break away from the Russian Empire, aided in their struggle mostly by the British, but to a degree by the Finns, who had succeeded in that effort and who had fought their own, brief, very violent, civil war in the closing days of World War One.  All over western Russia and what had been parts of the Russian Empire stranded German troops had yet to return home, with some them still serving in combat at that against Red forces they'd helped come about through their late Imperial government's ill thought out intrigues. 

In a bit of a foretaste of what was to come for all of the remaining European colonial powers after World War Two, the United Kingdom was suffering a rebellion in its oldest colony, Ireland.  The UK was pursuing a policy of ignoring the newly formed Irish Dail, but the IRA wasn't ignoring the UK and had already commenced a terrorist rebellion against it.

Things were a mess.

November 26, 1918. Letters home with scruffy photos. News photographs with polish appearance. Wyoming for Pershing? The murder of the Jews of Lvov, Rumors of War between Peru and Chile.

Post card home of Harold A. Stivers, 311th Infantry, 78th Division.  Stivers refers to his dress, which he regarded as a little rough.  It is interesting.  He's wearing the by then standard overseas cap and a leather jerkin.  American troops wore the jerkin much less often than the British, with whom it had become standard late in the war.  He notes that his puttees aren't wrapped correctly.  Puttees, used by the British and the French during the war, were adopted by the Americans but they didn't completely replace leggings.  After the war, the American Army quickly went back to leggings.

The contrasting photograph of Gen. Leroy S. Upton, commander of the 57th Bde, 29th Division, who presents a much more polished appearance. Gen. Upton is wearing private purchase lace up, and thick soled, riding boots with speed laces. . . a much preferable piece of footgear for actual field conditions than the standard field boots of the time.

One of the Cheyenne newspapers was declaring that Wyoming would support drafting Pershing for a 1920 Presidential run, or otherwise supporting him in that effort.

No doubt, the news was not in error.  Pershing was the son in law of Francis E. Warren, Wyoming's Senator, and very well remembered there.

And the tax on automobiles was coming off.

The other Cheyenne paper was reporting about the looming war between Chile and Peru, and on the horror of ethnic genocide in Lvov.  And there was fighting, of a different type, in the streets of New York City.

Countdown on the Great War, November 2, 1918: British and Canadians take Valenciennes, German subs strike again, German sailors make demands, Polish Ukranian War spreads, and the Flu marches on.

Hugh Cairns, Canadian who posthumously won the Victoria Cross, the last VC awarded to a Canadian for action during the Great War.

1. Canadian and British troops capture Valenciennes, France, on the border with Belgium, after heavy fighting. During the fighting the heroism of Canadian Sgt. Hugh Cairns would result in his being awarded the last Victoria Cross of World War One to a Canadian soldier.  His citation reads:

For most conspicuous bravery before Valenciennes on 1st November, 1918, when a machine gun opened on his platoon. Without a moment's hesitation Serjt. Cairns seized a Lewis gun and single-handed, in the face of direct fire, rushed the post, killed the crew of five, and captured the gun. Later, when the line was held up by machine-gun fire, he again rushed forward, killing 12 enemy and capturing 18 and two guns.

Subsequently, when the advance was held up by machine guns and field guns, although wounded, he led a small party to outflank them, killing many, forcing about 50 to surrender, and capturing all the guns. After consolidation he went with a battle patrol to exploit Marly and forced 60 enemy to surrender. Whilst disarming this party he was severely wounded. Nevertheless, he opened fire and inflicted heavy losses. Finally he was rushed by about 20 enemy and collapsed from weakness and loss of blood. Throughout the operation he showed the highest degree of valour, and his leadership greatly contributed to the success of the attack. He died on the 2nd November from wounds.

2.  Allied forces in the Balkans reach Bosnia but halt as cease fire with a crumbling Astro Hungarian Empire is signed.

3.  The war started yesterday between Ukrainians and Poles in the Austro Hungarian territoryof Galicia spread to Przemyśl. The fighting would go on, with occasionally cease fires, with the town going back and forth between the various sides, for ten days until the Poles prevailed and were accordingly able to send supplies to Lvov.  Today the town is on the Polish Ukrainian border.

In 1918 the town had an overwhelming Polish majority population, with the second largest ethnic group being Polish Jews.  Poles, Polish Jews, and Ukrainians all had formed militias to defend their parts of the city before fighting had broken out.

4.  The British cargo ship Murcia was torpedoed by the German submarine UC-74 in the Mediterranean with the loss of one hand.  The Germans scuttled four submarines on the same date.

5.  Miss Hattie Raithel of Denver Colorado, volunteer Red Cross nurse, died of the Spanish Flu in England.

6.  German sailors held an open air meeting in Kiel to air their grievances and to try to gain closure tied to German unions (many of which the working class sailors would have been close to anyhow), the Independent Social Democratic Party adn the Social Democratic Party.  The result was a call for a subsequent larger mass meeting the following day.