Friday, March 24, 1944. Pvt Theodore J. Miller, The Great Escape and the Ardeatine Massacre.

Nineteen year old Marine Corps Pvt. Theodore J. Miller who had become a famous face following being photographed being loaded back onto a landing craft after Eniewetok was killed on Ebon Atoll.

 

Today In Wyoming's History: March 24: 1944   76 Allied officers escaped Stalag Luft 3, which was later the topic of Paul Brickall's book "The Great Escape."

Seventy-six Royal Air Force POWs escaped from a single tunnel from Stalag Luft III in Silesia.  Seventy-three would be recaptured, almost all fairly rapidly.  Fifty of them were subsequently murdered after being recaptured.  

The Gestapo undertook an investigation of the escape and Commandant von Lindeiner-Wildau, who had started off as an assistant to Göring, was removed and threatened with court-martial.  He escaped prosecution by feigning mental illness.  He ended up in command of an infantry unit and was wounded in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.  He had, as commandant, followed the Geneva accords and did have the respect of the prisoners.  He died in 1963 at age 82.

An effort to bring the guilty to justice following the war was undertaken.  The man who selected the men to be killed, SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, did not survive the war as he was ironically executed as one of the members of the July 20 plot.  Trials were held in 1947 and 1948, at which time the British government called off any future war crime prosecutions.

Stalag Luft III was a big camp and continued on after the event.  It's the camp featured in the recent series Masters of the Air, and it's the camp where a coworker's father had been a prisoner.  The murders of the POWs had a huge chilling effect on escapes, and attempts were much reduced after that.

The escape was massive, although it did not really tie up German resources in any significant way.  It also had the effect of provoking what had long been feared, although only temporarily, which was a Gestapo insertion into the POW system.  Air POWs were held by the Luftwaffe as a point of privilege. 

The event had an outsized lasting impact on the British. The movie based on Brickall's book (which is an excellent book) has become, oddly, a Christmas routine in the United Kingdom. 

The three men who successfully escaped were:

• Per Bergsland, Norwegian pilot of No. 332 Squadron RAF, the 44th escapee.  He remained a pilot after the war, eventually becoming a commercial pilot and an airline executive.
• Jens Müller, Norwegian pilot of No. 331 Squadron RAF, the 43d escapee.  He also remained a pilot and became an airline executive.  His escape took him to Sweden with Bergsland.
• Bram van der Stok, Dutch pilot of No. 41 Squadron RAF, the 18th escapee.  The most decorated pilot in Dutch history, he escaped through the Netherlands down the escape line through Spain and reentered combat before the end of the war.

It's of note that not one of the escapees who managed to get away were British.

It's also worth noting that the famous film fictionalized some elements for the audience.  Luft Stalag III was a massive camp and prior to the escape the Germans had separated American POWs, who had been mixed with the British, from the British.  There were no Americans in the escape at all.

Likewise, while the film correctly shows three men making good their escapes, two onto Sweden and one onto Spain, it condenses the timeline for the event and makes the Dutch pilot an Australian, and one of the Norwegian pilots a Pole.

In Italy, the Germans carried out the reprisal Ardeatine Massacre and killed 335 people in retaliation for a partisan attack in Rome the day prior.

The Germans surrounded the Jewish Greek town of Ioannina, which had been home to Greek Jews for 2,000 years, and marked the houses in the town by the religion of the home's occupants.

200 inmates of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland were shot.

Mieczysław Wolski and Janusz Wysocki were shot for assisting Jews in Poland.

In Rome, Ivanoe Bonomi resigned as president of the Comitato Centrale di Liberazione Nazionale due to internal problems the organization had amongst its internal factions.  He would return to politics shortly, however.

The Germans prevailed in the Third Narva Offensive.

RAF Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade survived a fall of 18,000 feet without a parachute, his descent from his Lancaster arrested by pine trees and soft snow.  Alkemade had knowingly jumped out of his stricken aircraft without a parachute as his plane was on fire, and the parachute with it.

Fighting continued on Bougainville.

And also in the Admiralities.

R. Lee Ermey, who started his adult career in 1961 as a Marine, and who was medically discharged in 1972, was born in Emporia, Kansas.  He broke into movies while studying in the Philippines on the GI bill, with the role of the drill sergeant in The Boys In Company C, a film which was so close in plot to Full Metal Jacket, save for the fate of the DI, that the second film resulted in a lawsuit.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, March 23, 1944. Defeat at Cassino.

1940s, 1944, Bougainville, German SS, Italian partisans, Italy, Monte Cassino, National Guard, Operation Strangle, Partisans, Personalities, Rome, Vermont National Guard, World War Two

Thursday, March 9, 1944. Bombing of Tallinn.

The Soviet Air Force destroyed 53% of Tallinn, Estonia.

In terms of World War Two destruction, this isn't particularly remarkable, but it is well remembered in Estonia to this day, where the day is marked.

This is not to excuse areal carpet bombing in the Second World War. . . by anyone.  All of it, to my mind, fits into the category of war crimes. And predictably, the bombing of Estonia resulted in increased Estonian resolve to resist the Soviets.

President Roosevelt authorized Dr. Stephen Wise and Dr. Abba H. Silver of the American Zionist Emergency Council to announce: “When future decisions are reached, full justice will be done to those who seek a Jewish national home.”

The 5th Marine Regiment took Talasea in an unopposed operation in New Britain.

On Bougainville, Japanese counterattacks against the Army's 37th Infantry Division failed to make significant gains.

The Japanese 33d Division reached the location of the headquarters of the British 17th Division.  Gen. Cowan initially refused to believe the news.

The Red Army took Starokonstantinov.

The USS Leopold was sunk by the U-255 in the North Atlantic. 28 of 191 men survived.

Argentina's President Ramirez resigned and turned over the miltiary government of Argentina to Edelmiro Julián Farrell, who would in turn yield to Juan Peron shortly after World War Two.

Pedro Ramirez had come to power via a coup. The fascist leaning dictator had strong connections with Germany, having been trained in Imperial Germany in the early 1910s, and having married a German wife.  He participated in the coup of 1930, after which he had been sent to Italy to observe the Italian Army. In the 1940s he organized the Argentine  Milicia Nacionalista, later called the Guardia Nacional, and authored a program for a state ruled by the militia. In 1942, Ramírez  hewas appointed War Minister by President Ramón Castillo, and began to reorganize the Argentine Army.  During that time, modeling things after what had happened in fascist states in  Europe, the Guardia Nacional joined with a political party to form the fascist "Recuperacion Nacional".  He participated in the May 18, 1943, coup after being dismissed from his post.

Last prior:

Wednesday, March 8, 1944. Battle of Imphal begins.

Tuesday, February 22, 1944. Change of command at Anzio, Cementing Poland's fate.

John P. Lucas was relieved as the commander of VI Corps due to the ongoing problems at Anzio.  Perhaps ironically, he had been critical of plans for the operation, Operation Shingle.

Lt. Jack C. Montgomery, a Cherokee, performed the actions that would cause him to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty on February 22, 1944, near Padiglione, Italy. Two hours before daybreak a strong force of enemy infantry established themselves in 3 echelons at 50 yards, 100 yards, and 300 yards, respectively, in front of the rifle platoons commanded by 1st Lt. Montgomery. The closest position, consisting of 4 machineguns and 1 mortar, threatened the immediate security of the platoon position. Seizing an M1 rifle and several hand grenades, 1st Lt. Montgomery crawled up a ditch to within hand grenade range of the enemy. Then climbing boldly onto a little mound, he fired his rifle and threw his grenades so accurately that he killed 8 of the enemy and captured the remaining 4. Returning to his platoon, he called for artillery fire on a house, in and around which he suspected that the majority of the enemy had entrenched themselves. Arming himself with a carbine, he proceeded along the shallow ditch, as withering fire from the riflemen and machinegunners in the second position was concentrated on him. He attacked this position with such fury that 7 of the enemy surrendered to him, and both machineguns were silenced. Three German dead were found in the vicinity later that morning. 1st Lt. Montgomery continued boldly toward the house, 300 yards from his platoon position. It was now daylight, and the enemy observation was excellent across the flat open terrain which led to 1st Lt. Montgomery's objective. When the artillery barrage had lifted, 1st Lt. Montgomery ran fearlessly toward the strongly defended position. As the enemy started streaming out of the house, 1st Lt. Montgomery, unafraid of treacherous snipers, exposed himself daringly to assemble the surrendering enemy and send them to the rear. His fearless, aggressive, and intrepid actions that morning, accounted for a total of 11 enemy dead, 32 prisoners, and an unknown number of wounded. That night, while aiding an adjacent unit to repulse a counterattack, he was struck by mortar fragments and seriously wounded. The selflessness and courage exhibited by 1st Lt. Montgomery in alone attacking 3 strong enemy positions inspired his men to a degree beyond estimation.

He passed away in 2002 in his native Oklahoma at the age of 84.

The VIII Bomber Command became the 8th Air Force, as Big Week carried on.

Nijmegen was bombed by the U.S. Army Air Force by mistake, killing 200 civilians. Dense fog caused the error.

A Dominican monastery in Zagred was hit in bombing.  Eight theology students died in the incident. Archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac sent a letter to the British ambassador to the Holy See in response.

The Red Army took Krivoy Rog.  The Germans wisely withdrew from the city rather than be encircled, wisdom that Hitler hadn't always allowed it to display in the face of Soviet offenses.  3/4s of Soviet Territory had now been retaken by the Red Army.

In an example of realpolitik, Churchill stated in the House of Commons that he supported Soviet border demands and that the UK had not guaranteed the Polish border.

French poet and Resistance member Robert Desnos was arrested in Paris.  He would die in June 1945 shortly after being liberated from a concentration camp.

British lead Greek resistance fighters derailed a troop train in the Tempe Valley and killed 400 German troops.

The US landed forces on Parry Island on the Eniwetok Atoll. There is fierce Japanese resistance.

As Sarah Sundin notes, Eniwetok Atoll was pre-war Japanese territory, having been taken by the Japanese from the Germans in 1914.  Interestingly, the Japanese had not really bothered to administer the island until World War Two, leaving it up to locals to govern the islands themselves for the most part.

The Germans had administered it as a colony from 1885 to 1914.

The I-37 sank the British tanker British Chivalry in the Indian Ocean and then surfaced and fired on the survivors.  It's commander, Nakagawa Hajimi was found guilty of war crimes for this incident in 1948.  He'd be sentenced ti eight years hard labor, of which he served six.

In 1978, it was revealed that Nakagawa had also been responsible for the sinking of the Australian hospital ship Centaur in April 1943.

Sunday, Saturday, December 19, 1943. The Hopeville Martyrs.

Corsair damaged over Bougainville, December 19, 1943.

On Panay Island, in the Philippines, ten American Baptist missionaries, along with a handful of other Americans, were captured by the Japanese Army after having been in hiding for two years.

They offered to be executed in exchange for the release of Filipino's captured with them and were in fact killed by the Japanese, adults by beheading and children by bayoneting.

American forces captured the Japanese airstrip at Arawe, New Guinea.

Liberty Ship SS James Withycombe which went aground off Fort Randolph, Canal Zone, December 19, 1943.

Saturday, December 18, 1943. German terror expands.

T/5 Cletus H. Moert, Louisville, Ky., holds pigeon and while reading message taken from its leg. Pozzilli Sector, Italy. 18 December, 1943.

Heinrich Himmler revoked most exemptions for Jews married to Gentiles in Germany.  Jewish spouses, for the most part, ordered deported to Theresienstadt in January, with exceptions for couples that had very young children or who had lost a child in combat.

The SS murdered 118 men at Drakela, Greece, in a reprisal for partisan activities.

The US 5th Army captured Monte Lungo.  San Pietro is taken by the 36th Infantry Division.

Three officials of the Kharkov Gestapo were tried before a Soviet military Court, found guilty and sentenced to death.  All three, Hans Rietz, Wilhelm Langfeld, and Reinhard Retzlaff would be executed the following day.

The U.S. Army formed a Counter Intelligence Corps unit for the Manhattan Project.

The Japanese destroyer Numakaze was sunk by the US submarine Grayback.

Famous British rocker Keith Richards was born in Kent.

Cpl. Albert Allen of Chicago, Ill., and Cpl. Byron Davis of Lansing, Mich., (15th Weather Squadron), sit down to a meal of "J" rations, December 18, 1943 on New Britain.  Cpl. Davis appears to be wearing jump boots.

Monday, December 13, 1943. The Kalavryta Massacre.

The German 117th Jäger Division destroyed Kalavryta, Greece and killed 460 adult men of the town.  We noted this event a few days back.  It was a reprisal for partisan activity.

1,462 U.S. bombers carpet bombed Bremen, Hamburg and Kiel.  P-51Ds are used as escorts for the first time in the raid.

The U-172, U-391 and U-593 were sunk.

Wednesday, December 8, 1943. Kalavryta

German General Karl von Le Suire, commander of the German  XXXXIX Mountain Corps, ordered the burning of the Greek city of Kalavryta and the execution of its male population in reprisal for the execution of 80 German prisoners of war by partisans.  They would ultimately kill 58 men and boys in Rogoi, and 37 in Kerpini.  At Mega Spilaio they murdered 22 monks and visitors.

Von Le Suire would surrender his command to the Soviets at the end of the war, and he would die in their captivity in 1954 at age 55.

The Battle of San Pietro Infine commenced with Italians fighting alongside the Allies.

On the same day Free French troops, some of whom were North African, began to be introduced to the fighting in Italy while veterans American and British units started to be withdrawn in order to be used in Overlord.

President Roosevelt visited Malta.

The Australians prevailed in the Battle of Wareo.

The U.S. Navy bombed Kwajalein 

Legendary rock music artist Jim Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida.

Talented but deeply personally troubled and an alcoholic, Morrison's father was a Navy officer who would rise to the rank of Admiral.

Sunday, October 24, 1943. The murder of Leonard Siffleet and H. Pattiwal

Australian POW, commando Sgt. Leonard Siffleet and Ambonese private H. Pattiwal  were murdered by the Japanese.

Their story is an odd one, as they were basically turned over to the Japanese by New Guinea natives who had ambushed them, once again demonstrating that native populations were not universally hostile to the Japanese.  They were interrogated and tortured, and then executed under the orders of Vice Admiral Michiaki Kamada.  The officer committing the murders had the process photographed.  His fate is unknown.

British psyop radio channel Soldatensender Calais, broadcasting on German frequencies, went on the air at 5:57 local time, filling the gap, with British broadcasts, every time Radio Deutschland was off the air due to bombing raids.

The Battle of Finschhaften resulted in an Allied victory

The U.S. Army captured Sant'Angelo in Italy.

The HMS Eclipse was sunk by a mine in the Aegean, resulting on the loss of 119 sailors and 134 soldiers it was carrying

The Japanese destroyer Mochizuki and five merchant ships were sunk southwest of Rabaul by American aircraft.

The U-566 was sunk in the Atlantic by a Vickers Wellington.

Wednesday, October 20, 1943. Naval events, Polish hero.

A Navy PBY and a Japanese Navy G4M exchanged fire off of Attu.  The unlikely exchange by two non fighter aircraft was the last combat action off of Alaska and the last off of any U.S. territory that would be part of the present fifty states.

Two gasoline tankers collided off of Palm Beach, Florida and exploded, killing 73 people on board one and 43 on board another, far more people than modern ships carry of the same type.  There were 28 survivors.

The United Nations War Crimes Commission was established.

The U-378 was sunk by U.S. aircraft.

From Sarah Sundin's blog:

Today in World War II History—October 20, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Oct. 20, 1943: Germans arrest Polish social worker Irena Sendler for smuggling 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

As she notes, Polish resistance bribed camp guards to release her and mark her down as executed. She lived until 2008.

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.

Saturday, July 17, 1943. Hitler orders the battle to stop.

Hitler ordered his commanders to withdraw and take defense positions at Kursk, following up on his July 13 order to end the offensive.  Von Manstein and others urged Hitler to continue on, but he overruled them.  At this point in the battle, the Germans had lost 252 tanks and sustained 64,000 casualties, whereas the Soviets had lost over 2,000 and had sustained 320,000 casualties, so Von Manstein's arguments were not without merit.

Erich von Manstein. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H01758 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5363524

It would soon prove to be the case that the Red Army had not been as damaged as Von Manstein believed, but a person can ponder what carrying on in Operation Citadel would have meant, keeping in mind that there was no reversing German fortunes, only delaying them, at this point.

We've dealt with Von Manstein's post-war fate a bit here:

Von Manstein, who would lose a son in the war, was an excellent German general who was known to openly clash with Hitler. However, that fact and his post-war writings have glossed over his culpability for horrific German actions during the war, something that was not uncommon with surviving officers of the German army who operated to create the "clean army" myth.  Von Manstein was one of those German figures who regarded Communism and Judaism as part and parcel of each other.

Von Manstein served a prison term post war for war crimes and did not rejoin the West German Army when it was formed, but did receive a secret veto over which German officers could be members of it.  He died at age 85 in 1973.

We didn't note in that entry that when he died, he was buried with full military honors.

The Krasnodara Trial, the first war crimes trial, concluded in the Soviet Union with all 20 Soviet citizens, collaborators with the Germans, convicted and 18 of them to receive the death penalty.

The Polish Uderzeniowe Bataliony Kadrowe (Striking Cadre Battalions, UBK), attacked East Prussian villages in the area of Johannisburg (Pisz) in retaliation for German atrocities in Bezirk Bialystok.  Oddly, Pisz is now in Poland and Bezirk Bialystok in Belarus.

The U.S. offensive at Munda Point in New Georgia concluded with limited tactical success. This was in part because the US troops and their leadership were green, which was recognized by the U.S. and resulted in reorganization of the command structure.  On the same day, the Japanese launched a counteroffensive, which would prove to be costly and unsuccessful.

Wednesday, July 14, 1943. Airborne landing at Primosole Bridge, Belarussians ordered to blow up the rail lines, US War Crime in Sicily,

British airborne dropped in Sicily in Operation Fustion, which was designed to take the Primosole Bridge. The action was one of two in Sicily which saw the oddity of Allied paratroopers fighting German paratroopers who initially thought the British were reinforcements. The German paratroopers had come in on the 9th as reinforcements.

Primosole Bridge after capture.

While the bridge was ultimately taken, the action itself had mixed results.

Following a meeting with Stalin, Gen. Panteleimon Ponomarendo leader of the Belarusian pro Soviet partisans, issued Order No. 42 directing 123 partisan units to destroy the rail lines that had been used by the invading Germans, thus making their retreat from Russia, particularly with heavy weapons, difficult.

Communist, or at least anti-German, Belorussian partisans, 1943.

Ponomarendo was an ethnic Ukrainian who had been either in the Red Army or a Communist politician/functionary since the early days of the Russian Civil War.  Destruction of the railways was something he'd urged.  During the war, his troops killed around 300,000 Germans, a massive number.

They also killed some members of the Polish underground, executing some of its officers.  It's claimed that his forces provided information on Polish underground members to the Germans.  His views on western Poland may be summed up by this statement:

The western oblasts of Soviet Belarus are an integral part of the Republic of Belarus. The nationalist divisions and groups formed by Polish reactionary circles should be isolated from the population by creating Soviet troops and groups consisting of working people of Polish nationality. Nationalist units and groups should be fought by all means.

Ponomarendo died at age 81 in 1984.

Belorussia lost 25% of its pre-war population during World War Two.  Young men were typically faced with no options other than joining the partisans or joining Nazi collaborationist elements.

The Battle of Mubo in New Guinea ended in an Allied victory.  The battle, between Australian troops and the Japanese, had been going on since April.

The Biscari Massacre occured when troops of the 180th Infantry Regiment, which had been performing so poorly that thought had been given to relieving its commander, killed 71 Italian and 2 German POWs in two separate incidents.

In the first incident, Maj. Roger Denman ordered Sgt. Horace T. West to take a group of POWs to the rear and hold them in an inconspicuous place for questioning.  He separated eight of them to be taken to S-2 for questioning, borrowed a Thompson submachine gun, and killed them.  The bodies were found the next day and the chaplain, Lt. Col. William E. King, took the matter up.

In the second incident, Cpt. John T. Compton, who was extremely sleep-deprived, ordered 35 Italian POWs shot on the belief that they had been snipers who had been firing at his command. They were executed by firing squad.  Compton later told the following to investigators about the incident:

Q. How did you select the men to do the firing?

A. I wished to get it done fast and very thoroughly, so I told them to get automatic weapons, the BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] and Tommy Gun.

Q. How did you get the men? Did you ask for volunteers?

A. No, sir. I told the [SGT] to get the men.

Q. Do you remember exactly what you told him?

A. I don't remember exactly.

Q. What formation did you get them in before they were shot?

A. Single file on the edge of a ridge.

Q. Were they facing the weapons or the other side?

A. They were in single file, in a column, rifle fire from the right.

Q. Were the prisoners facing the weapons or the other side?

A. They were facing right angle of fire.

Q. What formation did you have the firing squad (sic)?

A. Lined 6 foot away, about 2 yards apart, on a line.

Q. Did you give any kind of a firing order?

A. I gave a firing order.

Q. What was your firing order?

A. Men, I am going to give ready fire and you will commence firing on the order of fire.

While first passing off on it, Gen. Patton ordered that the participating soldiers be court-martialed.  West was convicted of pre meditated murder, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment.  His sentence was remitted in 1944, and he served the rest of the war, ironically gaining a semi heroic status as a sniper.

He died in Oklahoma in 1974.

Compton was court-martialed and acquitted, but a Judge Advocate review declared that the action had been unlawful.  Compton was transferred and then killed in Italy in 1943.

Both West and Compton sited a speech by Patton as the partial basis of their action.  Compton specifically stated:

During the Camberwell operation in North Africa, George S.Patton, in a speech to assembled officers, stated that in the case where the enemy was shooting to kill our troops and then that we came close enough on him to get him, decided to quit fighting, he must die. Those men had been shooting at us to kill and had not  marched up to us to surrender. They had been surprised and routed, putting them, in my belief, in the category of the General's  statement.

Patton was cleared of wrongdoing by investigators, and this was likely at least in part a defense crafted by their lawyers.

While not really knowing the story of either men, West was 32 years old at the time of the incident and seems to have likely been a fairly tough Texan/Oklahoman.  He may really not have seen anything wrong with his actions.  Compton seems to have been extremely fatigues, although that offers a poor excuse.

Beyond that, this event offers a rare glimpse into a well documented US war crime during the war.  Allied war crimes are not much discussed, and were not discussed at all until relatively recently, but they did occur.  Executions of POWs such as the West example, while certainly never sanctioned, were more common in the ETO than we might like to imagine, and taking Japanese POWs was something that was only rarely done, for a variety of reasons, after the fairly early stages of the war, one of those reasons being that the Japanese weren't inclined to surrender.  The strafing of farmers was also much more common in the ETO than recognized for the most part.

For this same day, on Sarah Sundin's blog, the following is noted:

Today in World War II History—July 14, 1943: On Sicily, British Eighth Army takes Vizzini, Lentini, and Simeto. In Krasnodor, Russia, Soviets try 11 Germans in the first war crimes trial of the war.

Tuesday, June 29, 1943. Wartime childcare, Coca Cola for GIs, Wallace blunder, Reprisal at Waksmund, Encylical

Congress passed a bill providing a whopping $20,000,000 for childcare for working mothers.  According to Sarah Sundin, 3102 child care centers were established which served, if that is the proper word, 600,000 children.

Photo taken for the June 1943 issue of Colliers with a Father's Day theme. The lieutenant is shown wearing wings, so he is an air crewman.

You can almost hear Bernie Sanders starting to gush about it, retrospectively.

Vice President Henry Wallace made a speech attacking Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones, damaging his credit with President Roosevelt.

I can't find what Wallace said, but Wallace was in the political far left and sometimes suspected of being a Communist.  Indeed, The New Republic, which he later served in a senior position in, declared him to be one in an anniversary issue, which is remarkable.  He doesn't seem to have really been, but he was so far to the left, it's remarkable that he'd ever been chosen for this position.

Roosevelt would dump him in his next campaign, which perhaps should provide a lesson for Joseph Biden.

Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower requested "three million bottled Coca-Cola (filled) and complete equipment for bottling, washing, capping same quantity twice monthly".

More on that can be read about here:

June 29, 1943 – During WWII General Eisenhower Requisitions Ten Portable Coca-Cola Bottling Plants

The Germans conducted a severe reprisal massacre in Waksmund, Poland, aimed at punishing support for the Polish resistance.

Pope Pius XII released his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi.

Friday, May 14, 1943. The sinking of the AHS Centaur.

The AHS Centaur hospital ship was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-177 killing 268 of the 363 personnel on board. There were no patients. They were all Australian and British medical personnel and the crew.

The sinking of the marked Australian hospital ship sparked British and Australian outrage and an official protest.  Japan denied the sinking, but after the war, in the 1970s, blame was generally fixed in the I-777.  The I-777 was sunk in 1944, but it's commander, Hajime Nakagawa, survived the war, having been transferred to other duties prior to that time.  He never publicly spoke on the event.

On the same day, the Japanese lost the Ro-102 to American action, potentially PT boat action.  The German's lost three submarines at Kiel due to an American air raid, although all three would later be restored to action.  The U-640, sunk by a PBY off of Greenland, would not, however.

The United States Public Roads Administration reported that only a few states were observing the 35 mph wartime highway "Victory Speed Limit" imposed by the Federal Government.

35mph is slow, but not quite as slow as it would now be regarded.  Most cars were lower geared than they presently are, and pickup trucks were very much so.  Many state highways were narrow single lane highways at the time.

Wednesday, May 5, 1943. First Nuclear Strike Chosen

 

Choosing the first atomic target – May 5, 1943

From the linked in site:

May 5, 1943 is one of the most important dates, and possibly the least known, in the history of the nuclear age. It was the date when the first atomic bomb targeting decision was made — a full two years before the end of World War II in Europe.

Also from that site:

Like many I have concluded that the bombings were unjustified, though that is an opinion far from universally held. But some of my reasons may surprise you. I explained them in a talk I gave in Santa Fe in 2012, entitled From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

I'll be frank, I also view the bombings as morally unjustified acts.  Indeed, of the worst sort.  There's simply no escaping that the scale of a nuclear weapon, when used on a city, is going to have the primary effect of killing civilians.  Indeed, no matter how dressed up, by the wars end, that was looked at unflinchingly and was largely the point.

Of course, by that war the Allies had acclimated themselves to firebombing in Japan with the intent to destroy civilian housing, and thereby deprive Japanese war workers of their dwellings.  Once again, the use of force was over matched to the goal.  Striking factories is one thing, burning people to death in their homes quite another.

Make no mistake about it, Germans, under the monstrous Nazi regime, had become monstrous themselves, and in a way that no individual German can really excuse. The Japanese, who retained a peasant culture to a very large degree going into the war, likewise did, with the average soldier routinely committing murders and the entire military being acclimated to atrocity.  The Allies undoubtedly had the moral side of the war, and there's no two ways about it.  Nonetheless, that doesn't excuse the crimes committed by the Allies themselves, which in the case of the Western Allies came principally from unprincipled bombing.  Over European skies, the British were much more guilty of this than the Americans, having turned to inaccurate night bombing early in the war out of necessity, but then having readily adopted the liberal bombing views of "Bomber" Harris thereafter.  In the Pacific, the United States, the major Western combatant, went to free bombing of civilian targets with firebombs by the end of the war, as noted.  In some ways, the atomic bomb could almost be viewed as an extension of the late war firebombing, but in a new, much more devastating, and horrifying, way.

Sarah Sundin noted a true World War Two technological landmark, the first flight of the P51B.

Today in World War II History—May 5, 1943: 80 Years Ago—May 5, 1943: First flight of production-model North American P-51B Mustang (with a Packard-built Merlin engine), at Inglewood, CA.

The combination of the British engine with the P51 airframe, in what had been an Anglo-American project to start with, would revolutionize and completely alter the performance of the fighter.  It would be the P51B that would really start long range bomber escorts all the way into Germany.

Sundin noticed several other events of this day on her blog, including that Admiral Sir Charles Little was naval as the Allied naval commander for the invasion of France from Britain, although he would not hold the post long.

She also noted that the Japanese launched an offensive south of the Yangtze toward Chongqing. The often forgotten front, to the West, in China, remained Japan's largest ground commitment and in many ways most important theater of operations in the war. 

Twenty-seven ships of all types were lost in the war on this day.

A new law went into effect in California requiring marriage licenses to identify race.  Interracial marriage was illegal in California, as it was in much of the United States.

Sunday, November 22, 1942. Trapped.

The Red Army established a bridgehead across the Don at Kalach-na-Donu, trapping 250,000 German and Romanian troops at Stalingrad.

The Germans, facing plenty of problems on the Don, formed Army Group Don with Erich von Manstein as its commander.  The group was located between Group A, in the south, and Group B, in the north.

Von Manstein, who would lose a son in the war, was an excellent German general who was known to openly clash with Hitler. However, that fact and his post-war writings have glossed over his culpability for horrific German actions during the war, something that was not uncommon with surviving officers of the German army who operated to create the "clean army" myth.  Von Manstein was one of those German figures who regarded Communism and Judaism as part and parcel of each other.

Von Manstein served a prison term post war for war crimes and did not rejoin the West German Army when it was formed, but did receive a secret veto over which German officers could be members of it.  He died at age 85 in 1973.

Paul Ludwig von Kleist was made commander of Army Group A on this day as well.

Von Keist would not be as lucky as Von Manstein, post-war.  He was turned over by the Western Allies to Yugoslavia and convicted of war crimes there.  The Yugoslavians then turned him over to the Soviets, who also convicted him of war crimes.  He died in Soviet captivity of a heart attack in 1954 at age 73.

Wednesday, September 9, 1942. The Japanese raid on Mt. Emily, Oregon.

A Yokosuka E14Y launched from the Japanese submarine I25 near Cape Blanco, Oregon dropped incendiary bombs on Mount Emily, Oregon, in an attempt to start a forest fire.

Pilot Nobuo Fujita who bombed Mt. Emily.

The effort did in fact result in a small fire, but the rain drenched bush wasn't conducive to a conflagration.  One small fire was put out by the Forest Service.

No damage was done, but Franklin Roosevelt ordered a news blackout of the event.  

It was the first areal bombing of the continental United States.

The pilot, Nobuo Fujita, survived the war and later visited nearby Brookings.  He donated his family's 400-year-old samurai sword to the city.  He died in 1997 at age 85.

Hitler relieved Wilhelm List of command of Army Group A and took over command of it personally.  List never returned to service.  He was charged with war crimes after the war and sentenced to life imprisonment.  However, he was released in 1952.  He died in 1971 at the age of 91.

The British landed at Majunga in western Madagascar in order to end remaining Vichy French resistance on the island.