Saturday December 17, 1923. Headlines obsolete and current.

 

Sometimes, the headlines are rather similar to what we read today.  Aliens smuggled into U.S. "wholesale".  Mass shooting.  Others are thankfully firmly cemented in the past.

And some are just weird.

And then things stay the same in other ways:

Fascists Black Shirt Commandant General of the Blackshirts, Cpt. Cesare Maria De Vecchi, arrived in Mogadishu to take office as the colonial governor of Italian Somaliland, which would require military expeditions into its more remote regions.

He had started out in life as a lawyer before his fascist role.  After the Italian surrender in 1943, he had allowed German troops into areas under his command, but nonetheless was condemned to death by the Social Republic.  He went into hiding and died of natural causes in 1959, having been briefly involved in the post war neo fascist movement.

William Butler Yeats delivered his Nobel address.

Turkey and Hungary entered into a treaty of friendship.

A patent was applied for in the UK for the pioneering Celestion electric speaker for radios.

Monday, December 28, 1942. Funding the Manhattan Project.

President Roosevelt authorized a major expenditure on the Manhattan Project, effectively significantly funding the project for the first time.

Hitler issued Directive No. 47.  This directive concerned the war in the southeast, and more particularly the Balkans and Crete, now that Allied attacks on those locations were a possibility.

On the same day, the costly but effective Tatsinskaya Raid ended in the East.

According to Sarah Sundin:

Today in World War II History—December 28, 1942: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 28, 1942: French Somaliland switches allegiance from Vichy to Free French, the final French territory in Africa to do so.

She also reports that the Germans began to experiment with sterilization of female prisoners at Buchenwald. 

March 20, 1941. Forced Allies, Weak Allies, and Future Allies.

The Yugoslavian parliament, facing demands from Nazi Germany, voted to join the Tripartite Pact 16 to 3.  The result of the vote would soon prove not to work out they way it had been planned.

Yugoslavia was, on this day, a reluctant ally of the Germans at best.  And the Germans should have given some thought to what having reluctant allies meant.  Nazi Germany based its ideology on a radical concept of racism, and yet already, at this early stage of the war, it found itself entering into alliances with nations populated by peoples it otherwise claimed to despise.  And some of those people despised them right back.

Added to that, while they were enlisting Balkan states for the war, they were also enlisting states whose armies were not necessarily up to the same quality as theirs, and which had exhibited no strong desire to get into the war on any side.  Germany already had one ally that had entered the war voluntarily, Italy, which was proving to be a net drain on its efforts.

Indeed, on this day Indian troops advanced 100 miles and took Hargeisa in Somaliland, which exposed Italian Ethiopia.  

On the same day, U.S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Wells warned the Soviet Ambassador that the United States had picked up intelligence indicating that Germany intended to attack the Soviet Union.  This was by far not the only warning the Soviets would receive, but Stalin would not take action on any of them.