Posted on 09/16/2011 5:02:34 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance
I really enjoy these WW2 era posts you make!
Thanks for all your time and effort :-)
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/sep41/f16sep41.htm
Germans trap Soviets around Kiev
Tuesday, September 16, 1941 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... The forces of German Panzer Group 2 (Guderian) and Panzer Group 1 (Kleist) link up near the town of Lokhvista, encircling 600,000 Soviet troops in a pocket which stretches west for a 100 miles to Kiev.
In Iran... The Shah abdicates in favor of the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after the Allies decide that he has not co-operated in expelling Axis nationals from the country.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/16.htm
September 16th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: Corvette FS Commandant Detroyat (ex HMS Coriander) commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: Paris: Hauptmann Scheben is shot dead on the boulevard de Strasbourg, 12 hostages are shot in consequence.
Attacks on German military property result in another ten French hostages being executed.
GERMANY: Hamburg: The city suffered a heavy RAF attack last night.
U-306, U-417 and U-666 laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
U.S.S.R.: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel orders 100 Russians to be executed for every German soldier killed by partisans.
IRAN: The Allies decide to occupy Teheran. This comes after the current Shah of Iran, Reza Khan Pahlevi, has not done enough to expel Axis nationals from the country. The Shah will abdicate in favor of the Crown Prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his pliable 22 year old son, who will flee his country in 1979. With Soviet and British armies threatening Tehran, he has little choice.
For two weeks since the armistice following the Anglo-Russian invasion, the shah had refused Allied demands to expel Germany’s legation, to hand over Iran’s German community for internment, and to facilitate Allied rail links from the Persian Gulf to the USSR.
SYRIA:Damascus: Free French forces, with British backing, terminate the French mandate and agree to guarantee Syria’s independence.
THE NEW YORK TIMES states that “Free France acting in agreement with her ally, Great Britain, has undertaken to terminate the mandate and grant Syria the status of an independent sovereign State and to guarantee the new State by treaty.” (Jack McKillop)
CANADA: Nova Scotia: Convoy HX-150, the first to be escorted by the US Navy, leaves for Europe.
Leaving Halifax the convoy will be escorted by the Canadian Navy up to a point south of Newfoundland, where US navy destroyers will take over, giving formal protection. They will take the convoy to a mid-ocean meeting point where the escort will be handed over to the British Western Approaches Command. This is intended to be the pattern for all fast convoys of the HX type in future. The Canadians will continue to escort the slower SC convoys all the way to the mid-ocean meeting point.
The east bound convoys are bringing war supplies and many foodstuffs which the British are beginning to accept as their daily diet, such as condensed milk, powdered egg, spam and baked beans.
The escort support from the US will mean that the Royal Navy will be able to divert three escort groups from the North Atlantic to cover Gibraltar and Sierra Leone convoys, US Navy Catalinas, operating, from bases in Iceland, and US Army Flying Fortresses, based in Argenta, are also expected to take on convoy duties.
July and August have already seen a dramatic decrease in the number of merchant ships sunk in the Atlantic. During the first half of the year monthly losses averaged 400,000 tons; it has now dropped to little over 100,000 tons per month. There are several reasons for this. For a start, Bletchley Park is now able to read a significant part of the U-boat Enigma traffic.
The information from this is passed to the Admiralty’s submarine tracking room which can then identify U-boat concentrations. It passes details of these to HQ Western Approaches, the naval command responsible for the BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC, which can then re-route convoys.
Located with the Western Approaches HQ, and under its operational control, is No. 15 Group RAF Coastal Command. Its aircraft range far and wide over the north-east Atlantic from their bases in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Iceland. The north-west Atlantic is covered by the Royal Canadian Air Force. Both forces still suffer from a lack of very long-range aircraft, which means that the mid-Atlantic, south of Greenland, does not have air cover. Known as the “Black Pit” or “Black Gap”, it presents the most dangerous area for convoys. Despite this, improved methods of detecting U-boats, with more and better-trained escort vessels, are helping to reduce losses.
Convoy SC-42 makes harbour having lost 15 ships for a total of 65,776 tons out of a 65-ship convoy.
U-98 sank SS Jedmoor in Convoy SC-42. (Dave Shirlaw)
Corvettes HMCS Dunvegan and Morden arrived Halifax from builders in Sorel and Montreal, Province of Quebec respectively
(Dave Shirlaw)
U.S.A.: Destroyers USS Butler and Gherardi laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
ICELAND: A Danish first officer, Henrik Bjerregaard of the Sessa, has recently recovered sufficiently from an ordeal of 19 days adrift in Artic waters to tell his story.
The Sessa, a former Danish ship flying the Panamanian flag, was transporting provisions from New York to the American ships in Iceland when she was torpedoed by a U-boat. She sank in two minutes. Bjerregaard remembers: “I had no lifebelt, but I grabbed a pole as I was thrown into the water. A seaman joined me, and we hung on for two hours. Then we floated to a lifeboat which was upside down.... we stayed on the lifeboat all night ... Next day a raft from the ship drifted alongside, and as we could not right the boat we jumped on the raft ... After seeing we had a drum of water and tin of biscuits, I cut a sliver off the raft and started to keep a log.”
“Every day at sunrise I made a notch to mark another day. After the tenth day one man died, and on the 13th two more died ...On the 17th day all our water went ...on the 19th day, as I lay utterly exhausted, I heard a ship’s siren and raised myself to see the Stars and Stripes of an American destroyer.”
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: The 24th Pursuit Group (Interceptor) is formed, effective October 1, 1941, the Bombers remained within the 4th Composite Group. (Marc Small)
See American Airlines already using the sexy stewardess to sell tickets. The $13 ticket from NY to DC would be equivalent to about $190 today.
Glad you like them, Bobalu. I enjoy the process, though it does get a little frantic at times. Especially with Sunday editions and big news days. And I think there may be an increase in the latter in the coming months. The frequency of Sunday editions should remain about the same.
That is what brought my attention to that ad when I saw it. What a shock - sex sold before the decadent sixties, or fifties, or whenever our moral state was supposed to have deteriorated beyond hope.
There are many old WW2 newsreels hosted on YouTube.
Those would make a nice addition to your posts.
"September signaled a wave of persecution against Jews in Bessarabia.
For two months beginning in September, Romanians and Germans deported some 120,000 Bessarabian Jews from their homes to camps in Transnistria, Romania.
Any who fell behind were shot.
Those who survived the march told of mothers who could barely stand, carrying their children's corpses until they could receive a proper burial."
"Karl Jäger was an important Nazi functionary and SS colonel who took command of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A and of security police for Lithuania.
He ordered the murder of thousands of Lithuanian Jews by having them shot in pits.
Jäger eluded police for many years after the war, but was arrested in 1959.
He escaped hanging by committing suicide."
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