Sunday, September 3, 1944. An agreement to end the Continuation War.

A ceasefire, to take place on September 4 at 8:00, was agreed to in the Continuation War.  The Germans commenced Operation Birke to try to keep a supply of Finnish nickel from Lapland.

Residents of Couvin, Belgium, flock into the streets to welcome the vanguard of American troops which arrived after driving out the Nazis. 3 September, 1944.

Residents of Couvin, Belgium, flock into the streets of their town to cheer the vanguard of American troops rolling eastward across their country into Germany. 3 September, 1944.

Residents of Chimay, Belgium, gather in their town square to welcome their liberators, the first American troops to reach their town. 3 September, 1944.

S/Sgt. Robert Troxler, left, of Elson College, N.D., and Pvt. Charles Forkas, right, of Rutland, Vt., both members of an infantry unit, walk along a French road to rejoin their unit after having escorted some German prisoners to the rear of the line. They are fighting the Nazis still holding out around Brest, France. 3 September, 1944.

The British Second Army took Brussels. The U.S First Army took Toumai.

The French 1st Infantry Division entered Lyons.

Gerd von Rundstedt was restored as Oberbefehlshaber West, replacing Walter Model, in the face of rampaging disaster.

Execution of political prisoners  was halted in Bulgaria.

Could it have been any clearer that Germany was defeated?

Nonetheless, Germany begin the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Westerbork, Amersfoort, and Vught.

The U.S. Navy bombarded Wake Island.

Last edition:

Saturday, September 2, 1944. Finland calls it quits.Labels: 1940s, 1944, Belgium, boats and ships, British Army, Bulgaria, Canadian Army, Chichijima, Continuation War, Finland, George W. Bush, Personalities, Poland, Polish Home Army, U.S. Navy, Winter War, World War Two

October 7, 1943. Murder

The Germans murdered 1,313 Jewish former residents of the Bialystok Ghetto at Auschwitz.  Most of them were children.  Bialystok's ghetto had seen a failed uprising.

Over 100 people, mostly Italian civilians, were killed when a bomb planted by the Germans went off at the post office in Naples.

Shigematsu Sakaibara (酒井原 繁松) reading a statement following his conviction of war crimes.

The Japanese murdered 97 American civilians who had been held on Wake Island under the orders of Japanese naval commander Shigematsu Sakaibara (酒井原 繁松).  He'd be sentenced to death for the event after the war.

Sakaibara believed an American landing was imminent, which would not justify in any fashion the murders.  It was, however, what led him to give the order.  After at first denying the murders had occured, he would ultimately confess to them and express regret, but also maintain that the Allies had no authority to try him and that his sentence was unjust following the American use of nuclear weapons.

The New Georgia Campaign came to an end with an Allied victory.

Lassie Come Home, the first Lassie film, was released.

Tuesday, October 5, 1943. OSS Coup Plots

For the first time since a failed attempt in 1943, U.S. aircraft bomb Wake Island.  Surface vessels also shelled the island.

In an example of the rogue nature of the OSS, Theodore Morde, of the Reader's Digest, at the request of OSS head William J. Donovan, met with the German Ambassador to Turkey Franz von Papen to encourage the latter to attempt a coup against Hitler.  Roosevelt was not informed of the effort.

The Washington Homestead Grays won the 1943 Negro World Series, beating the Birmingham Black Barons.

Thursday, July 8, 1943. The execution of Jean Moulin, Looming Operation Husky, Stalled Operation Citadel, Bombing Wake, Smog in Los Angeles.

Jean Moulin.

Jean Moulin, the first President of the National Council of the Resistance, but for less than two months, was executed by the Germans.  He had been arrested due to a betrayal that's never been solved. He was one of the individuals who was tortured under Klaus Barbie.

General Eisenhower arrived in Malta in anticipation of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily.

By this point, it was obvious that an imminent invasion of Sicily was coming. The Allies were bombing it heavily.  Nonetheless, German attention was focused on the East, at Kursk, which had entered its fourth day of fighting.  In the north, Ponyri station switched hands back and forth.  The 9th Army attacked the second Soviet line, which featured defense in depth, a Soviet tactic, and failed to breach it.  The 9th Army was in turn suffering critical losses.  Model was forced to commit the last of his armored reserves.

In the south, the Germans broke through the second defense line in the Oboyansk direction, but then withdrew after a strong counterattack.

B-24s operating from Midway bombed Wake Island in the first land based strike on Wake.

The escort carrier USS Casablanca was commissioned.

Smog became a problem for LA.

Friday, February 24, 1942. The Battle of Los Angeles

 

The Battle of Los Angeles occurred started on the night of February 24, 1942, and lasted into the morning of February 25, the result of jittery nerves amplified by a submarine shelling Ellwood the day prior.  Much of what sparked the event remains somewhat of a mystery.

The Air Force's official history of the event summarizes it as follows:

During the course of a fireside report to the nation delivered by President Roosevelt on 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine rose out of the sea off Ellwood, a hamlet on the California coast north of Santa Barbara, and pumped thirteen shells into tidewater refinery installations. The shots seemed designed to punctuate the President's statement that "the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies." Yet the attack which was supposed to carry the enemy's defiance, and which did succeed in stealing headlines from the President's address, was a feeble gesture rather than a damaging blow. The raider surfaced at 1905 (Pacific time), just five minutes after the President started his speech. For about twenty minutes the submarine kept a position 2,500 yards offshore to deliver the shots from its 5½-inch guns. The shells did minor damage to piers and oil wells, but missed the gasoline plant, which appears to have been the aiming point; the military effects of the raid were therefore nil. The first news of the attack led to the dispatch of pursuit planes to the area, and subsequently three bombers joined the attempt to destroy the raider, but without success. The reluctance of AAF commanders to assign larger forces to the task resulted from their belief that such a raid as this would be employed by the enemy to divert attention from a major air task force which would hurl its planes against a really significant target. Loyal Japanese-Americans who had predicted that a demonstration would be made in connection with the President's speech also prophesied that Los Angeles would be attacked the next night. The Army, too, was convinced that some new action impended, and took all possible precautions. Newspapers were permitted to announce that a strict state of readiness against renewed attacks had been imposed, and there followed the confused action known as "The Battle of Los Angeles."

During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening many flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 pm, Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of "enemy planes, " even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano." From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance. 

Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: "swarms" of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from "very slow" to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The dawn, which ended the shooting and the fantasy, also proved that the only damage which resulted to the city was such as had been caused by the excitement (there was at least one death from heart failure), by traffic accidents in the blacked-out streets, or by shell fragments from the artillery barrage. Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the incident quickly became as involved and mysterious as the "battle" itself. The Navy immediately insisted that there was no evidence of the presence of enemy planes, and Frank Knox announced at a press conference on 25 February that the raid was just a false alarm. At the same conference he admitted that attacks were always possible and indicated that vital industries located along the coast ought to be moved inland. The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended, indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove "that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated." The Fourth Air Force had indicated its belief that there were no planes over Los Angeles. But the Army did not publish these initial conclusions. Instead, it waited a day, until after a thorough examination of witnesses had been finished. On the basis of these hearings, local commanders altered their verdict and indicated a belief that from one to five unidentified airplanes had been over Los Angeles. Secretary Stimson announced this conclusion as the War Department version of the incident, and he advanced two theories to account for the mysterious craft: either they were commercial planes operated by an enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or they were light planes launched from Japanese submarines. In either case, the enemy’s purpose must have been to locate anti-aircraft defenses in the area or to deliver a blow at civilian morale.

The divergence of views between the War and Navy departments, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles Times, in a first-page editorial on 26 February, announced that "the considerable public excitement and confusion" caused by the alert, as well as its "spectacular official accompaniments," demanded a careful explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service. In the United States Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether the incident was "a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away Southern California’s war industries." Wendell Willkie, speaking in Los Angeles on 26 February, assured Californians on the basis of his experiences in England that when a real air raid began "you won’t have to argue about it—you’ll just know." He conceded that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling of the Los Angeles episode a "recipe for jitters," and censured the military authorities for what it called "stubborn silence" in the face of widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army’s theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert "explains everything except where the planes came from, whither they were going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them." The New York Times on 28 February expressed a belief that the more the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: "If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? ... What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?" These questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of American air defenses.

At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert, although submarine-launched aircraft were subsequently used over Seattle. A careful study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons—known to have been released over Los Angeles—may well have caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the fact that anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to have been airplanes. After the firing started, careful observation was difficult because of drifting smoke from shell bursts. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area testified that he had first been convinced that he had seen fifteen planes in the air, but had quickly decided that he was seeing smoke. Competent correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry witnessed the shooting and wrote that they were never able to make out an airplane. It is hard to see, in any event, what enemy purpose would have been served by an attack in which no bombs were dropped, unless perhaps, as Mr. Stimson suggested, the purpose had been reconnaissance.

Now regarded by most as an amusing event, several people did die during it, and it showed the extent to which Americans were nervous and the defense of the coast uncoordinated.  UFO fans have adopted the event as their own, asserting that the unidentified objects were alien spacecraft.   The comedy movie 1941 was based on the event.

The Japanese actually did overfly US territory on this day, but with a submarine launched floatplane that flew over Pearl Harbor.

In a real air raid, the U.S. Navy raided Wake Island. The raid featuring carrier launched aircraft and surface ships targeted Japanese destroyers at Wake, but the Japanese thought it was an effort to retake the island.

A Soviet submarine sank the Panamanian registered MV Sturma which was carrying 781 Jewish refugees in the Black Sea.  Only one person survived.

German ambassador Franz von Papen survived a Soviet backed assassination attempt in Turkey when the assassin's gun misfired, and he accidentally detonated a bomb he was carrying.

The Voice of America began German language short wave broadcasts.

Norwegian Lutheran Bishops all resigned rather than swear loyalty to the Quisling regime.  The Lutheran Church, the state church of Norway.

Tuesday, December 23, 1941. The Fall of Wake Island.

An American defeat, but an oddly inspiring one, occured today, as we earlier reported at Today In Wyoming's History: December 23: 

1941 American forces on Wake Island surrendered to the Japanese. 

The Battle of Wake Island would turn out to be a surprising American point of pride early in the war, in spite of the loss of the atoll.  It took on sort of an Alamo image during the war.

Wake had been a U.S. possession since 1899.  The presence of Polynesian Rats on the island proves that it had very early Micronesian contact, but it had no permanent population until 1935 when Pan American established a hotel station there for its Pacific flying boat route.  The Navy did not establish a permanent base there until 1941, so everything located on it in terms of military installations was new.

The Navy and Marine Corps put up a very determined fight on Wake, and at first the Japanese were unable to successfully land on it. It provided a rare example of shore batteries successfully engaging naval vessels.  Efforts by the Japanese to take the island commenced on December 8, but took until this day in order to be successful.  Efforts to relieve the island from Hawaii failed.

98 American prisoners, all civilians, were held on the island by the Japanese until 1943 when the Japanese murdered them.  Military prisoners were removed to POW camps.  By 1943 the island had been cut off and the Japanese garrison began to starve, actually driving one of the birds species located on the island into extinction.  3/4s of the Japanese garrison died due to starvation.  The island surrendered to a Marine Corps detachment that landed on September 4, 1945, having previously learned of Japan's surrender, and after reburying their murdered victims.  The truth of the murders soon came to light, and several Japanese officers committed suicide over the incident.

While a Japanese victory, it was an early example of what was wrong with Japanese strategic planning.  First of all, the Navy and Marine Corps put up a determined fight over the island, showing that American ground forces in particular were willing to hold ground until the bitter end, a lesson that probably wasn't really being learned at the time due to the next item we'll note.  Secondly, the Japanese took the island, but in the end, it proved to be easy to isolate and the Japanese garrison was essentially taken out of the war and made subject to starvation, something other garrisons on remote islands would also experience.

In really bad news at the time:

 Gen. Douglas MacArthur decides to withdraw to Bataan.

Japanese begin offensive against Rangoon, Burma. 

The 440-foot tanker Montebello was sunk off the California coast near Cambria by a Japanese submarine. The crew of 38 survived, and in 1996 it was found that the 4.1 million gallon cargo of crude oil appeared intact. 

British troops capture Benghazi, Libya.

A conference of industry and labor officials agrees that there would be no strikes or lockouts in war industries while World War II continued.

The first C47 Skytrain entered US military service.

23 December 1941

Lots of the civilian variants, the DC3, were already in military service, but it wasn't until this date that the first example of the dedicated military version was delivered.  The civilian airliner had been introduced in 1935.

Over 10,000 C47s were built, or over 16,000 if the Li-2 Soviet produced version is considered, and amazingly they remain in service with the Columbian, El Salvadorian and South African air forces.  They were preeminently important as an Allied cargo plane during the Second World War, and they were used by every Allied power including the Soviet Union, which built 6,000 of them under license in addition to the ones that were supplied to the USSR via lend lease, making the Soviet Union the second-largest producer of the aircraft.

The role of the C47 in Allied airpower could hardly be understated.  It and the DC3 are one of the greatest aircraft ever produced.  Some DC3s remain in commercial use today (I've seen one in United Airlines colors as late as 2004) and they're actually being remanufactured as the Basler BT-67 for current use.

Thursday December 4, 1941. Rainbow 5.

The U.S. military plans for war with Germany, Rainbow 5, were leaked and appeared in two major newspapers. The spectacular leak, the source of which has never been determined, showed an intent to build a 10,000,000 man Army and deploy 5,000,000 men to Europe to defeat the Germans by 1943.  The resulting furor was enormous.

Naval trainees, 1941.

The Germans ridiculed the plans as impossible, but the German General Staff took it seriously and argued for a hiatus of offensive operations in the East in order to attempt to take the United Kingdom out of the war before Britain could be used as a staging area for American troops. Hitler rejected the idea.  Rainbow 5 did in fact become the basic plan adopted by the United States during the war.

Japanese tasks forces set out for destinations in Malaya and Thailand.  Japanese aircraft scouted Wake Island undetected.

Friday, November 28, 1941. The USS Enterprise departs Pearl Harbor.

A task force centered on the USS Enterprise left Pearl Harbor in order to deliver twelve Marine Corps F4F aircraft to Wake Island.  But for this, the Enterprise would have been at Pearl Harbor on December 7.

The Enterprise would complete that mission on December 4, and then it turned around to return to Pearl Harbor.  It would have arrived there on December 6 but for bad weather.

The Enterprise's departure was known to the Japanese, due to reporting from a consulate based intelligence officer they had there.  At this time, this meant, due to reassignments and repairs, only one carrier remained in Pearl Harbor.

The Army concluded the Carolina Maneuvers.

A brand new, at that time, Jeep and a 37mm anti tank gun in the Carolina Maneuvers.

The maneuvers were massive in scale, involving 350,000 men.

The direction things were moving in was obvious, inside at least the Government.

German general Johann von Ravenstein was captured by New Zealanders in North Africa, making him the first German general officer to become a prisoner of war during World War Two.

The Soviets retook Rostov on Don.

The O-21 at Gibraltar.

The Dutch submarine O-21 sank the German U-95.