"Scene in a kitchen of a typical Russian family. These people are among the many who have been recently liberated by rapid Allied advances at the newly established Displaced Persons Center at Briey, France. 4 October, 1944." There's obviously more to this story than what the caption provides.
Operation Nordlicht began in Finland by the German Army. It was a planned withdrawal using scorched earth tactics, with the final line to be in Lyngen Municipality in Troms county, Norway.
"This photo shows a GI relaying fire data for artillery back from forward observation post near Havert, Germany. 4 October, 1944. 29th Infantry Division."
The Battle of Morotai more or less ended, with the ending being an Allied victory. Some fighting would continue to the end of the war.
Moscow asked for permission for the Red Army to enter Bulgaria.
The Serbian collaborationist government was dissolved.
Worcester Massachusetts issued instructions to blacksmith Timothy Bigelow, it's representative to a provincial Congress:
You are to consider the people of this province absolved, on their part, from the obligation therein contained, and to all intents and purposes reduced to a state of nature; and you are to exert yourself in devising ways and means to raise from the dissolution of the old constitution, as from the ashes of the Phenix, a new form, wherein all officers shall be dependent on the suffrages of the people, whatever unfavorable constructions our enemies may put upon such procedure.
The 1st Army broke through the Siegfried Line north of Aachen.
The first large group of Nazi prisoners that were captured by the Americans following their breakthrough of the Siegfried Line. 3 October, 1944. 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division.
The RAF broke the dikes around Walcheren Island, flooding it.
Partisans attempted to kidnap fascist Italian Social Republic Minister of the Interior.Guido Buffarini Guidi with tragic unsuccessful results.
A conference between the United Kingdom and Egypt on Egyptian independence ended without success.
The New York Giants scandal resulted in American League president Ben Johnson, upset over an inadequate investigation in his view, calling Kenesaw Mountain Landis a "wild-eyed, crazy nut".
With Soviet troops across the Vistula not crossing the river, something often regarded as intentional, the Germans prevailed in defeating the Warsaw Uprising. 200,000 Poles were killed in the battle, most of them civilians, and central Warsaw destroyed. Between 2,000 and 17,000 German troops were killed in the battle. Around 15,000 Polish underground and Polish Home Army troops were killed. 15,000 went into captivity.
There's good reason to believe that Stalin saw the Poles and the Germans fighting in the city to his overall benefit. It killed a lot of Germans, and it killed non communist Poles.
The Battle of Aachen commenced with an American offensive.
The Battle of the Scheldt commenced.
Pack train of 2nd Indian Mule Co., Royal Indian Service Corps, which helped supply British 1st Div. 2 October, 1944. Near Crespino, Italy.
Japanese resistance on Peleliu's Mount Amiangal was defeated.
Lucian Truscott appeared on the cover of Life Magazine.
Cpl. Charles A. Klein, 1929 45th Street, Pennsauken, New Jersey, seals his soldiers' ballet. 2 October, 1944. 6th Armored Division.
The first French regiment of Paris, France, recently organized and put in uniform, passes in review. 2 October, 1944.
Execution of a French traitor who acted as a spy for the Germans and received 2000 Francs ($40.00) for his services. Traitor is tied to post as firing squad gets ready. 2 October, 1944.
Today In Wyoming's History: October 2: 1924 Governor William B. Ross died while in office . His wife, Nellie Tayloe Ross, would become the US's first women governor the month thereafter when she won in a special election in spite of not campaigning. She would serve only until 1926, however, when she would loose a subsequent election.
Secretary of State Frank Lucas became interim Governor.
His widow, Nellie Tayloe Ross, would be forever remembered as the first female governor in the United States, but her life was full of tragedy. The Ross' had lost a baby. Of two three surviving sons, James A. Ross was killed a car accident near Saratoga in 1928 at age 25. Only George Tayloe Ross survived of their children, going on to be a lawyer in New York. He died in 1991.
The Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes received preliminary approval at the League of Nations.
Troops under cover in a ditch in a rice field, October 2, 1899. The troops above are from an unidentified unit, but are equipped with obsolescent trapdoor Springfield .45-70 rifles. The ones below are Kansas state troops are are even more antiquated in their equipment, still wearing blue wool shirts, although many troops still did at this time.
yesterday. Unlike the vision of a lawyer, I don't have a really nifty sportscar or something and I don't want one either. My daily driver is 27 years old. My regular truck is, as noted, a large one ton diesel with over 200,000 miles on it.
It's beginning to get a rust problem.
And I don't care that some of my colleagues are totally baffled why I don't buy something newer. At age 61, one year younger than my father was when he died, and being in two occupations, one of which is high stress, I don't plan on really making it long enough for any new vehicles to make sense. Besides that, I like what I like, and I like standard transmissions.
I had to get diesel fuel before I came back. In thinking about it, it's not every day you see a guy dressed in wool dress pants, white shirt, and tie, filling up a large ranch truck type truck.
Anyhow, a man pulled up next to me as the gas station driving a very nice car licensed in Oregon. He rolled down his window and spoke to me in a thick Arab accent. My hearing isn't great, so I had to have him repeat his question, which he did.
He was asking for gas money, he said, and pulled off two large gold rings and offered them to me.
That was weird, I don't carry cash anymore, and it was a bit too weird for me to say "yes".
I've never had an experience like that one before.
Miss Betty Brittian, Pasadena, Calif., hands Cpl. Wm. B. Brooks, Clayton, Ga., inside the tank, a cup of coffee and doughnuts. 1 October, 1944. Company B, 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion.
The Battle of Tornio began with a Finnish attack on German positions in Lapland.
The U.S. Army took Monte Battaglia. II and IV Corps launch an offensive towards Bologna.
The Germans commenced the Putten Raid in the Netherlands, removing 660 men in reprisals for a failed assassination attempt on a German official.
British commandos landed at Poros, Greece. Greek troops landed at Mitilini, Lemnos, and Levita.
British General General Richard McCreery assumed command of the 8th Army, in Italy. General Oliver Leese, was assigned to command Allied Land Forces, Southeast Asia.
Gen. Rudolf Schmundt, age 48, died of wounds sustained in the July 20 plot. He had been an adjutant to Hitler.
Sally Reed, Durham, Mass., a Red Cross worker somewhere in France, does a bit of KP on the large containers about her--and she doesn't believe in signs for they're all coffee urns. 1 October, 1944.
Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, and the only President to live to age 100, was born in Plains Georgia.
Widely admired personally, he was not a terribly successful President and served one term.
Governor Ross was dying.
Ireland's Defence Forces (Óglaigh na hÉireann) were formed by the unification of the Irish Army, the Irish Naval Service, the Irish Air Corps and the Reserve Defence Forces,'
Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned New York Giants player Jimmy O'Connell and coach Cozy Dolan due to a bribery scandal.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
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