Posted on 09/10/2011 6:17:33 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/sep41/f10sep41.htm
Panzer groups rolling ahead
Wednesday, September 10, 1941 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... German General Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 attacks southward on Soviet forces east of Kiev reaches Konotop. General Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 begins a breakout from their bridgehead over the Dniepr near Kremenchug.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/10.htm
September 10th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: Submarine HMS Stubborn laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: Paris: The collaborationist newspaper, L’Oeuvre describes the burgeoning black market for food. “Nothing has been settled about how to feed Paris. .... indispensable vegetables are swept off the board and only the minority who can pay through the nose enjoy them. People of average means are .. deprived, ...and have not the wherewithal to take the time to go and eat in Normandy or Brittany. Potatoes are .. unfindable. But the Black Market manages to infiltrate enormous quantities for restaurants or customers willing to pay 8 or 9 francs a kilo.”
GERMANY: U-525 laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
NORWAY: Oslo: Guards with Tommy guns are patrolling the streets of Oslo tonight after a savage crackdown by Josef Terboven. Hitler’s commissioner for Norway. Two trade union leaders have been executed after a summary court martial and four others have been sent to gaol.
An 8pm to 5am curfew is in force. Dance halls are closed and the sale of alcohol is forbidden. Newspaper editors have been sacked and all meetings, indoors and outdoors have been banned. Terboven declared martial law after reports that the Norwegian unions were calling a general strike in opposition to the Nazi regime. Terboven accused “communist elements” in the unions of “disturbing the industrial peace in a criminal manner.”
The underground anti-Nazi newspaper Fri Ragbevegelse has called on the people to remain calm, but to fight “with all secret means for their rights.”
U.S.S.R.: Guderian attacks south, and east of Kiev, reaches Konotop. The 1st Panzer Group begins the breakout of their bridgehead over the Dniepr River around Kremenchug. Both Army Groups Centre and South are aimed at Kiev. Generalleutnant Walter Model’s 3 Pz. Div. (XXIV Pz.K) captures Romny. (Jeff Chrisman)
Soviet submarines SC-407 and SC-408 commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
CANADA: Minesweepers HMCS Cowichan and Wasaga arrived Halifax from builder Esquimalt, British Columbia.
Patrol boat HMCS Nenamook launched Victoria, British Columbia. Corvette HMCS Charlottetown launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
U.S.A.: Charlie Chaplin was accused today of using the cinema to “poison the minds of the American people to go to war”. Senator Bennett Champ Clark, a leading isolationist, told a Senate sub-committee investigating propaganda charges against Hollywood that United Artists was dominated by Chaplin and Alexander Korda, two British subjects, who were using it to make pro-war propaganda. United Artists made The Great Dictator.
Chaplin, he said, had made his fortune in America, but never thought well enough of it to become a US citizen. He claimed that British propaganda had dragged America into the last war.
The hull of the second USS Satterlee (DD-626) is laid down. (Jack McKillop)
ATLANTIC OCEAN: The German submarine U-501 (KptLt Hugo Förster CO) is sunk at 2330 hours in the Straits of Denmark south of Angmagsalik, Greenland, in position 62.50N, 37.50W, by depth charges and ramming from the RCN corvettes HMCS Chambly (Cdr. James Douglas “Chummy” Prentice RCN Commanding Officer)and HMCS Moosejaw (Lt. Frederick Ernest Grubb RCN, CO). The Canadian ships had been proceeding to the assistance of escort of convoy SC-42 when they made an ASDIC contact and Chambly immediately depth charged. After the first depth charge run U-501 surfaced right next to HMCS Moose Jaw during her turn. The commander of U-501 leaped about 9 feet (2.7 meters) from his boat and onto the bridge of the corvette without even getting his feet wet! Fearing another boarding attempt the corvette opened the range and, as the U-boat passed her bows, rammed the U-boat and then straddled her with gunfire preventing the German crew from manning their deck armament and causing enough damage to cause her to start sinking. A boarding party from Chambly, led by Lt Edward Theodore Simmons, then boarded the U-boat and once inside found the lighting system and instrumentation wrecked and heard the tell tale sound of rushing water, all of the boarding party except one were able to clear U-501 before she sank. Stoker William Irvin Brown of Chambly and 11 members of U-501’s crew were lost as she sank. Of the sub crew, 37 of the 48 men aboard survived.
Retired Commodore Jan Drent’s translation of 1999 statement by two former U-501 crewmembers: “The truth concerning the loss of U-501...” based on a statement by Fritz Weinrich, Chief Mechanican, 1st Class, U-501 “...I was then ordered by the engineer officer to use a ready-use hammer to smash the torpedo firing calculator in the conning tower. He went to the radio room and started wrecking its equipment....I went up to the bridge and observed Chambly’s boat. It came alongside and the heavily-armed Canadian boat’s crew climbed on boat...One of the boat’s crew secured the bow line to U-501’s rail. It later turned out that this was Stoker W.I. Brown... “...I observed all...from the bridge...Three Canadians, armed with pistols, started to climb up. I was about to clear the bridge when I was blocked. I was ordered to go down into the boat, but was unwilling to comply. I could now see that U-501 was sinking fairly quickly. I could also observe that Stoker Brown had dived under the surface to let go the bow line...He succeeded. Using all the facial gestures at my command and excuses I attempted to argue with the orders to go back down into the boat given by the leader of the prize crew, Lieut. Simmons. Among other expressions, I said: “No good, boat alles kaput!” Lieut. Simmons did not react to my protests and, using a dawn pistol, was forcing me to go down. (N.B. Simmons’ renacted all this in the NFB film/video, “Corvette Port Arthur”) When I went to pull a flashlight out of my blouse pocket this immediately triggered the order: “Hands Up!!” I was frisked thoroughly by the three Canadians....A sea coming from astern washed into the bridge before I could descend into the boat. Everyone on the bridge was lifted by the wave...The boat then sank by the stern...The Canadians now attempted to swim towards the boat...The Canadian W.I. Brown was swimming alongside me in the water and was also trying to reach the boat. He was about two or three meters away from me. He had secured a bicycle inner tube around his upper body as a life jacket. Suddenly there was a gurgling sound and he sank below the surface.” “As is customary among seafarers, our treatment in Chambly was fair and comradely... “All other versions in general circulation about the sinking of U-501 are not in accordance with what actually happened and therefore incorrect and fabrications! U-501 was not sunk by depth charges, gunfire, or by being rammed. There was also no internal explosion. The Canadians were never inside U-501. The Canadian rating W.I. Brown did not go down with the boat but drowned in the sea...In my judgement he became hypothermic because of his light clothing”
(Jack McKillop)
U-111 sank SS Marken.
U-432 sank SS Muneric, SS Winterswijk and SS Stargard in Convoy SC-42
U-652 damaged SS Baron Pentland and SS Tahchee in Convoy SC-42
U-81 sank SS Sally Maersk in Convoy SC-42
U-82 sank SS Empire Hudson in Convoy SC-42
U-85 sank SS Thistleglen in Convoy SC-42. (Dave Shirlaw)
A shame we didn’t let the Germans take out the Soviets before we kicked their nazi asses.
Interesting article about the isolationist Senators denouncing foreign-born, i.e. Jewish, Hollywood producers. The producers cleverly hire Wendell Willkie to represent them.
I sincerely doubt the Germans were patrolling Oslo with “Tommy guns”. MP 38s or 40s, bu Tommy Guns? Taken from the Norwegians or Brits? Don’t think so.
It was 24th September 1941. Mercilessly the southern sun beat down on the featureless steppe before Perekop and lay heavily over the saline marshes of the Sivash. The Soviet 156th Rifle Division was holding its deeply staggered defenses. The central approach to the Crimea was covered by 276th Rifle Division. This division belonged to the Soviet Fifty-first Army, commanded by Colonel-General F. I. Kuznetsov.
His order was: "Not an inch of soil to be surrendered!"
But a general's order is valid only as long as his troops are alive. After a three days' battle the 46th and 73rd Infantry Divisions burst through the neck of land. They overcame the Tartar Ditch, took the strongly fortified village of Armyansk, and thus gained open ground again for deployment.
Colonel-General Kuznetsov threw his 40th and 42nd Cavalry Divisions as well as units of 271st and 106th Rifle Divisions into his last defenses along the isthmus of Ishun. The curtain was about to rise on the last act of Manstein's plan.
It was now up to the " Leibstandarte " and the Mountain Corps to complete the breakthrough and to storm the peninsula.
Victory was within reach. But for the time being the Soviet High Command was able to foil the daring plan of attack. Farther north, in the Nogay Steppe, along the anti-tank ditch before Timoshevka, there was much cautious whispering and coming and going during the night of 23rd/24th September. The regiments of 1st and 4th Mountain Divisions were being relieved for their employment in the Crimea. Rumanian mountain troops of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Mountain Brigades were taking over the sector. Their headquarters staffs were being briefed. One German battalion after another handed over its positions to the Rumanians and moved off to the south.
"Hurry up, men; we are off to the sunny Crimea," the NCOs were urging on the companies of 91st Mountain Regiment. The men were marching at a fast pace. By the following morning they had covered 24 miles.
Of Regimental Group 13 only one battalion of infantry and one of artillery were left in their old positions. The headquarters section of 4th Mountain Division intended to move off to the Crimea with them.
"Everything ready?" Lieutenant-Colonel Schaefer, the chief of operations of 4th Mountain Division, asked Major Eder, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 94th Mountain Artillery Regiment.
"Everything ready to move off, Herr Oberstleutnant," the gunner officer replied.
"What on earth is going on over there?" Schaefer suddenly asked in surprise.
A little distance away Rumanian infantry were hurriedly pulling out of the line.
"Eder, you run across to the Rumanian Brigade HQ and ask what's happening!" Eder did not have to ask many questions.
The Rumanians were busy packing.
They were flinging their belongings up into their lorries and getting away as fast as they could. "Russian break-through," they assured him.
As though in confirmation, rifle-fire broke out near by. Alarm! The Russians are here! The Soviets evidently had got wind of the relief by Rumanian formations. With newly brought up forces of their Ninth and Eighteenth Army they attacked the covering lines of the Eleventh Army just as it was regrouping. Some units of the Rumanian Third Army retreated at once. The Russians pressed on, put the entire 4th Brigade to flight, and tore a nine-mile gap in the front.
Faced with this situation, Manstein was compelled to recall his Mountain Corps again and employ it at the penetration point.
To complete the disaster, the Soviets also achieved a breakthrough on the southern wing, at General von Salmuth's XXX Corps. A break-through in the sector of the Rumanian 5th Cavalry Brigade was sealed off by the combat group von Choltitz with units of 22nd Infantry Division, and the front propped up again. After that followed a penetration on the Corps' northern wing. The Rumanian 6th Cavalry Brigade retired. In order to clear up this new crisis the 170th Infantry Division, placed under the Mountain Corps, had to be stopped and the " Leibstandarte," which was already en route for thé Crimea, turned about and employed against the penetration.
Manstein's plan to break into the Crimea by surprise and take Sevastopol by a coup had failed.
Instead, the Eleventh Army was now in danger of being cut off from the Crimea in the Nogay Steppe, and of being encircled and possibly destroyed in the narrow strip of land between the Dnieper line and the Black Sea.
But in large-scale operations with their changing fortunes crises frequently turn into lucky chances.
The two Soviet Armies which were putting such pressure on Manstein's divisions had neglected their flank and rear cover. That was to prove their doom—and that doom was Kleist.
The 1st Panzer Group under Colonel-General von Kleist had discharged its task in the gigantic battles of encirclement at Kiev by the end of September and was then available for new operations. At Dnepropetrovsk General von Mackensen's III Panzer Corps had established and held a bridgehead over the Dnieper and Samro. From this bridgehead and from Zaporozhye Kleist broke through the Soviet defenses on the Dnieper, turned to the south in the direction of the Sea of Azov, and struck at the rear of the two Soviet Armies.
Before the Soviet High Command even realized what was happening its Armies, which had only just been on the point of annihilating Manstein's divisions, were themselves in the trap. Hunters became hunted, and offensive presently turned into flight. The battle of encirclement on the Sea of Azov raged across the Nogay Steppe, in the Chernigovka area, from 5th to 10th October.
The outcome was disastrous for the Soviets. The bulk of their Eighteenth Army was smashed between Mariupol and Berdyansk. The Army's Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant-General Smirnov, was killed in action on 6th October 1941 and was found dead on the battlefield. More than 65,000 prisoners trudged off to the west. Two hundred and twelve tanks and 672 guns fell into German hands. It was a victory. But far too often during these past three weeks had the fate of Eleventh Army been balanced on a knife's edge. No doubt the German High Command took this bitter experience at the southern end of the Eastern Front as a warning that reliable victories could not be won with dissipated forces and inadequately coordinated operations.
At long last, therefore, Manstein received the sensible instruction to storm only the Crimea with his Eleventh Army. The capture of Rostov was assigned to Kleist's Panzer Group, to which Eleventh Army was ordered to hand over first the XLIX Mountain Corps and presently also the SS Brigade " Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler." But the decision came three weeks too late.
If this order, which at last made allowance for the actual strength of Eleventh Army, had been issued three weeks earlier the Crimea would have fallen, and Sevastopol would very probably have been taken with a surprise coup by fast formations, as envisaged in Manstein's bold plan. Three weeks are a long time in war. And turning time to good profit was one of the outstanding skills of the Soviet High Command. As it was, Manstein and his Army were now faced with a protracted and costly battle.
Tomorrow: In the Suburbs of Leningrad
"A group of young children gaze out at the photographer just prior to their execution by an Einsatzkommando.
An estimated one million Jewish children died in the Holocaust, most of them in the gas chambers of the death camps.
As the Germans swept into Soviet territory, they sometimes turned the task of killing Jewish children over to their Ukrainian allies."
"Dean of faculty at Berlin University, Dr. Franz Six was an SS general commanding a unit of Einsatzgruppe B and responsible for murdering more than 50,000 Jews.
He was sentenced to only 20 years in prison and served but four because John McCloy, American high commissioner of Germany, chose to use him in the U.S. counterintelligence service.
He later testified on behalf of Adolf Eichmann at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem."
The photo of the children is heartbreaking. I looked at it and then read the caption. It was painful.
So here's the key question: how many more Americans are you willing should die once the Ruskies are out of the fight?
And just to make it interesting, suppose some of those extra dead Americans were your grandfathers, or other close relatives -- how many of them do you want to sacrifice?
I'm certain that's precisely the question President Roosevelt asked himself -- for maybe two seconds -- before deciding it was much better to let the Soviets die killing Germans than make our guys do it.
So instead we had the embarrassing spectacle of FDR kissing "Uncle Joe" Stalin's *ss and giving him whatever he wanted to stay in the war -- and not make a separate peace just like those same Communists had done in the First World War.
We probably would have sacrificed less had we concentrated on defeating Japan first while letting the Nazis and Soviets slaughter each other - then we could have hit the weakened Germans. In effect, the Soviets did this when the stayed out of the Pacific war until we effectively defeated Japans; then they attacked the retreating Japanese in Manchuria and Korea.
I doubt if there is any way the US could have defeated Japan faster than we did, even had we ignored the European theater to focus all attention on Japan.
Remember, among other things: that effort required a huge Navy with over 100 aircraft carriers, large & small, and many hundreds more of other war and transport ships.
These were still being produced in 1945, and no way would the US have invaded Japan without them.
And in the end, the US did not invade Japan, instead our A-bombs finally convinced the Emperor the fight was over.
So it simply is not possible for the US to have defeated Japan before August 1945.
And had Germany still been in the fight then, the US would have turned our A-bombs on Germans -- since they are who the Bomb was originally developed for.
Also remember, history records several attempts by both Stalin and Hitler to reach a separate peace.
Thankfully none were successful.
In 1941 Hitler brushed aside Stalin's feelers, and after 1942, when Stalin was convinced of his ultimate victory, he would not entertain any German peace feelers.
But Stalin constantly demanded Britain and the US open up new fronts in Europe, to take some pressure off his armies.
And Churchill and Roosevelt constantly promised Stalin new fronts, beginning in 1942 (North Africa) and every year after-wards.
Had Stalin become convinced the US and Britain would not come to Russia's rescue, he doubtless would have done just what those same Communists did do in the First World War -- sign a separate peace.
Bottom line: all things considered, in a war where something like 75 million people died, the US achieved the greatest victory with the least loss of US lives that anyone could realistically imagine.
So any proposed alternate scenarios have a major burden of proof to show how they would achieve the same victory with even fewer US military casualties.
Unfortunately as beacame clear in a few years, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory with so many of the people liberated from the nazis only to fall under the dictatorship of the commies.
Six was designated to command the SS and SD in Britain, and later Vorkommando Moscow. Needless to say, he never took up either appointment.
You need to understand that President Roosevelt's goals, and those of Americans of the 1940s, never included the rescue of Eastern Europe from either Nazis or Communists.
To the vast majority of Americans, Eastern Europe might as well been the far side of the moon.
Americans were not willing to die to save Eastern Europe from anybody.
What Americans did care about were Britain and France -- Britain because most Americans came from British ancestry, and France because the United States owed a huge debt of gratitude to the French for their financial and military support during the American Revolution.
So Roosevelt's major goals in Europe were to first save Britain and France, then defeat Germany thoroughly enough it would never again threaten the world.
And since those goals were met, to someone like Roosevelt the rest was unfortunate, but unavoidable.
You assume there would have been combat with Nazi Germany in the short run. I disagree. Indeed, but for Roosevelt’s belligerence in word and action, and his attempts to lure hitler into giving him a casus belli in 1940 and 1941, Germany may well have not declared war on the United States oin December 11th, 1941, since the Tripartite Pact was defensive only.
As to the premise that we could not have defeated Japan earlier than 1945, several salient points. First, without war in Europe, the U.S could potentially have stripped, to some degree, her Atlantic fleet and sent it to the Pacific; much in the manner FDR stripped units from the Pacific Fleet to reiforce the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor. Second, without war in Europe, the U.S could have sent a far greater number of troops and supplies to the Pacific with the shipping they were using to convoy goods to Britain.
But thirdly, and most importantly, how were the Germans going to threaten us. First, a Navy that can’t reach England isn’t going to reach the U.S, especially with the Royal Navy in their way. Second, the Germans had NO strategic bombing capability capable of reaching the U.S at that time. Third, the Germans were already overextended militarily. The bulk of their Army was in Russia. They had troops fighting in Africa. They had garrisons in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Crete, Yugoslvia, Romania, you get the idea. They had neither the troops or air units to cause us any anxiety.
As to the atomic bomb, Germany’s development of nuclear weapons was derailed by-Adolf Hitler. He refused funding for scientific projects that couldn’t deliver the goods within a year or so. And Hitler considered physics a “Jewish” science. So that bomb was coming any time soon.
The U.S had strategic interior lines against its’ two enemies. They could have concentrated their forces, especially air forces, against the Japanese, crushed or left them to starve, and then turned their attention [if necessary] to the Germans. Japan didn’t have to be invaded. By 1944 we had destroyed almost all their fleet, left them with pilots suitable only for target practice, cut them off from food and resources, and could turn the entire country into a cinder.
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