Thursday, August 5, 1943. WASPs.

While by this point, this story is now confusing because of predecessor organizations, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were officially formed.

WASP wings.

The Red Army recaptured Orel.

The British took. Catania, Sicily.

The crew of the PT-109, including future President John F. Kennedy, were found by two Solomon Island coastwatchers, namely Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana.

Eva-Maria Buch and Rose Schlösinger of the Red Orchestra were executed in Berlin.

Most of the members of the Red Orchestra were Communists, but 22 year old Buch was not.  Indeed, she was Catholic.

Tuesday, February 16, 1943. Mildred Harnack executed. Theresienstadt temporairly spared. Domenikon not spared. Norwegian paratroopers drop. Stalin asks for a "second front".

Himmler ordered a cessation of deportations of elderly Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto, resulting in a complete sessaion of deportations of all Jews from there for six months.  Oddly, the ghetto had been designated as a location where elderly Jews could live out tehir lives, albeit not comfortably, resulting in the order, but a peson has to wonder to what extent the order simply wasn't practical, given the massive strain hte war had put on the German railways system, which was being compounded by German deportations.

Italian soldiers commenced reprisal murders of Greek civilians at Domenikon which would result in 175 Greek men being killed.

Norwegian paratroopers were dropped by the British at Skrykenvann in preparation for a raid on the hydro plant at Vemork, targeted at heavy water production.

East German stamp in honor of the Harnacs.

Mildred Harnack, née Fish, a 41-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, was executed by guillotine at Germany's Plötzensee Prison on orders of Adolph Hitler.  

Harnack was an academic who married Arvid Harnack, a German academic. The couple moved to Arvid's native land, and in the 1930s the couple, if not outright Communists, were at least serious fellow travelers, something not that unusual for academics at the time.  While this was the case, they nonetheless were members of the American Church in Berlin, a Protestant church which Americans attended prior to the war.

The Harnacks were members of the Red Orchestra, which lead to her arrest and execution.  

The story of her death is largely unknown in the US and was in fact suppressed by the US government due to their Communist sympathies.   The U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) concluded her execution "justified", which legally it likely was, given that the sentence for treason was death everywhere at the time. That doesn't make her effort any less noble, of course.

Josepah Stalin, who was fighting a one front, if gigantic, war wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, reiterating the need for a "second front".  The United States was, of course already engaged in a second front in North Africa, a third front in the Pacific, and a basically a fourth front on the Atlantic, none of which involved the Soviets.

The Western Allies, throughout the war, loyally plade this sharade with Stalin, who was, of course, a former German ally, none of which is to belittle the giant Soviet war effort, but which is also not to ignore that the effort was being heavily supplied by the Western Allies.  Soviet propoganda, particularly in the USSR itslef, was so effective on thsi score, hoewver, that unfortunately modern Russians still believe it.

Former slave George Washington Buckner, and later U.S. Minister to Liberia (1913 to 1915) died in Indiana at age 87.  He was also a physician.

Tuesday, December 22, 1942. Execution of the Red Orchestra.

The Third Reich executed Arvid Harnack, Harro Schulze-Boysen, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, Elisabeth Schumacher and Kurt Schumacher.

Harnack was a Marxist journalist.  Harro Schulze-Boysen was a left wing publicist who was serving as a Luftwaffe officer.  Libertas was his aristocratic wife. Kurt Schumacher was a sculptor who was a Communist, and who had served in the German Army.  His wife Elisabeth, who was half Jewish, was an artist and photographer.  They were the Red Orchestra resistance group, although there were others who participated in it.

Hitler approved production of the A4 rocket, which would eventually be fielded as the V2.

The V2, upon being deployed, would consume 1/3d of Germany's alcohol production.

Pic magazine hit the stands with an alluring female cover gal and an article promising the "Truth about Dieppe".

Sunday, September 6, 1942. Positioning

Irish Army recruiting poster.  By this point, the Irish Army could really have needed a hand, given that so many military age men had entered the British Army that Ireland was effectively incapable of defending itself, and was relying on overage, and underage, men in the Home Guard.

On this day in 1942, the German U-375 stopped the Egyptian sailboat Turkian and sank her with 13 rounds from a deck gun.

All 19 crewmen were allowed to abandon ship.

British coast artillery replied, but to no effect.

A spectacular example of poor marksmanship on both sides and pointless destruction.

The Germans captured Novorossiysk.

Two policemen were shot dead in Belfast in day two of rising tensions in Ireland.

Arvid and Midlread Harnack, nee Fish, of the Red Orchestra were arrested.

East German postage stamp commemorating the Harnack's.

Mildred was American born and had moved to Germany as an academic in the 1920s.  Her husband Arvid Harnack was a German Communist and a lawyer.  Their arrest effectively brought about the end of the Red Orchestra.

Dorothy Dandridge, the first African American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, married Harold Nicholas in Hollywood.  They would divroce in 1951.

Monday, August 31, 1942. The arrest of the Schulze-Boyen's.

Today in World War II History—August 31, 1942: Australians launch offensive against the Japanese at Milne Bay, New Guinea. Canada requires unemployed men and women to take war work.

An interesting entry on Sarah Sundin's blog.

I wonder how many unemployed Canadian men there really were by this point in 1942?

The aptly named Libertas Schulze-Boyen, a German aristocrat, and her husband Harro, a Luftwaffe officer, were arrested by the authorities.

The couple had in fact gone from being Nazis or radical right winters, Harro even had a swastika carved into his leg, to being the focal point of the Red Orchestra, a resistance group that was centered on providing information to the Soviet Union.

Libertas was a French protestant by birth, but fit into that oddly European class of aristocratic families that were nearly stateless.  She attended school in Switzerland and moved to Germany in 1933 where she joined the Nazi Party and was, at first, an ardent Nazi. She married Harro in 1936, after having lived with him a year, something very unusual at the time.  Herman Goering gave her away at the wedding, showing how close they were to senior Nazi figures.

Harro, in contrast, had opposed the Nazis since 1933, being therefore a really early resistance figure.  He had been part of the "Radical Nazi" organization Black Front, which was a Nazi splinter group formed by Otto Strasser which kept the original socialistic Nazi economic policy which the party abandoned under Adolph Hitler.  He was also from an aristocratic family, and one that had ties to publishing. Both Harro and Liberas were writers.  He became a pilot in 1933, and in spite of being an anti-Nazi joined the Luftwaffe.

In spite of their common opposition to the Nazis, their marriage was not a united one. Harro was a self-confessed libertine, and she had caught him in bed with an actress, which nearly led to their divorce.  Only the fact that they were both involved in their resistance movement kept this from occurring.

They were both executed in December. She was 29 and he was 33.

German tanks made it through the minefields at Alam el Halfa and turned north to attack what he supposed to be the Allied rear, only to be met with anti tank guns and tanks staged there by Montgomery.  Montgomery, moreover, did not deploy his tanks in the old cavalry melee style that the British had done previously, although German and British tank losses, 22 and 21 respectively, were about equal.  The Afrika Korps lost one of its senior commanders, Georg von Bismarck, due to a mine.

The British small scale raid Operation Anglo attacked Rhodes.