Posted on 07/16/2012 4:21:53 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1942/jul42/f16jul42.htm
Red Army fights for Rostov
Thursday, July 16, 1942 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... Soviet resistance against the German advances near Rostov stiffens.
From Moscow... Soviets release figures of German losses from the start of their summer offensive. Their numbers, 900,000 are considered to be exaggerated.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/frame.htm
July 16th, 1942
UNITED KINGDOM:
Escort carrier HMS Ravager launched.
Destroyer HMS Rapid launched.
Minesweeping trawler HMS Neave launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: Paris: The roundup of Jews begins. Its scale earns it the name “La Grande Rafle,” The Great Raid. The five arrondissements are sealed off. Whole parts of the city are dislocated. Some advance warnings are leaked out, spreading by word of mouth through the Jewish community, with the result that almost half of those on the lists have left home and escaped arrest.
9,000 French police combed the city, snatching every foreign born Jew they could find. They have arrested 14,000 registered “stateless” Jews. 6,000 have been sent to Drancy, the first stop on the long journey to Auschwitz; 3,000 children are among nearly 7,000 Jews gathered in the huge sports stadium called the Velodrome d’Hiver, waiting for their turn to go.
The weather is very hot. They have a single water tap and ten latrines between them. Some of those arrested last night have not clothes at all. The guards are brutal, the squalor unimaginable.
GERMANY: RAF bombers swooped through cloud to bomb the Ruhr and other targets in north-west Europe at dusk tonight. They were relatively minor raids, using cloud cover as a new tactic to thwart the Kammhuber Line of ground-controlled interception “boxes” in which Luftwaffe fighters patrol. First introduced in 1940, the system now has no fewer than 250 fighters. The RAF has been attempting to detour the boxes, but they are being extended to stretch from northern Denmark to south of Paris.
U-323, U-324, U-325, U-326, U-327, U-328, U-903, U-904, U-1171, and U-1172 ordered
U-631 commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
CROATIA: In a western world beset by gloom, at least one anti-Nazi army is winning victory after victory - but few know about it. Gathering strength every day as it fights its way into Croatia, Tito’s partisan army has succeeded in capturing several major towns and hundreds of villages in this country ruled by the pro-German Ustachi under their leader Ante Pavelich.
The fighting has been savage, with countless atrocities - particularly by the fanatical, long-haired, bearded Ustachi as they retreat before Tito’s disciplined partisans. Captured Ustachi and their collaborators can expect no mercy from Tito’s People’s Courts. Mass executions are commonplace.
Tito is wasting no time in turning “liberated” Croatia into a soviet state with its own newspaper, postal service, schools and health services. Volunteers are cleaning up and repairing desecrated Orthodox churches.
A courier service - mostly of young girls on cycles or horseback - is playing a vital role in partisan communications.
U.S.S.R.: Russian resistance to the Germans stiffens as the Germans near Rostov.
NEW ZEALAND: Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, USN, issues Operation Plan 1-42 identifying the command structure for the upcoming operations in the Solomon Islands. Vice Admiral Frank J. Fletcher commands the Solomons Expeditionary Force; Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes command the Air Support Force consisting of three carrier air groups; Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner commands the Amphibious Force; and Rear Admiral John S. McCain will command the land-based Allied air units as Commander, Air Solomons (ComAirSols). (Jack McKillop)
CANADA: Corvette HMCS Kitchener arrived Halifax from builder Quebec City, Province of Quebec. (Dave Shirlaw)
CARIBBEAN SEA: About 0900, the unescorted and unarmed Gertrude was ordered to stop by U-166 about 30 miles northeast of Havana, Cuba. The crew was asked to abandon ship and they left immediately in a 14-foot motorboat. U-166 then sunk the trawler by gunfire or by a scuttling charge. The motorboat with the crew ran out of fuel before reaching shore and drifted for 78 hours before being spotted by a Civil Air Patrol aircraft about three miles south of Alligator Reef Lighthouse. A boat out of Whale Harbor brought the three men ashore. (Jack McKillop and Dave Shirlaw)
At 0934, the unescorted Beaconlight was struck by one torpedo from U-160 on the starboard side between #8 and #9 tanks and five minutes later by a second torpedo on the same side in the engine room. The ship began to sink immediately about ten miles NW of Galera Point, Trinidad. One crewman was lost. 38 crewmen and two British gunners (the ship was armed with one 12pdr aft and two .30cal machine guns on each side of the bridge) abandoned ship in three lifeboats. They were picked up six hours later by the small steam passenger ship Trinidad and landed at Port of Spain the same day. The drifting wreck had to be sunk by the Dutch tug Roode Zee in position 10°58N/61°10W, to prevent her being a menace to navigation. U-160 misidentified the tanker as the Gallia.
At 1543, U-161 attacked Convoy AS-4 about 500 miles north of St Thomas, Virgin Islands and observed two hits on a first ship after 2 minutes 32 seconds and heard a third detonation after 3 minutes 35 seconds. Achilles reported one ship sunk and another possible damaged. In fact, only two torpedoes sank the Fairport. The Fairport in station #12 was struck on the port side in the #4 hold by the first torpedo and in the #1 hold about 12 feet below the waterline by the second. The first blew off the #4 hatch cover and started a fire that incoming seawater quickly extinguished. The other torpedo opened up a large hole 30 feet long by 25 feet wide in the hull. The engines were secured immediately and the gun crew fired one shot to indicate the direction of the torpedoes. Five minutes after the hit, all ten officers, 33 crewmen, 14 armed guards (the ship was armed with one 4in, four .50cal and two .30cal guns) and 66 US Army personnel on board abandoned ship in two lifeboats and five rafts. After ten minutes the vessel sank stern first. USS Kearny picked up all survivors after the destroyer had dropped depth charges and landed in New York on 21 July. (Dave Shirlaw)
ATLANTIC OCEAN:
"Info: Our guest is military historian and author Antony Beevor. He discusses his newly released historical narrative, “The Second World War.” Beevor talks about the origins of the conflict spanning from before Hitler’s invasion of Poland to the aftermath of the war and its global impact on the major powers of the day. He describes Adolf Hitler’s dark and chaotic final days, including his marriage to Eva Braun and the couple’s subsequent suicide. He details the time and circumstances of the start of World War II for each of the participating countries, and he discusses actions taken by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur to suppress information at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946. He relates how he went about researching and assembling the volume of information he used to write the book. He describes his writing style and the barn he converted to a library in England to research and write the book."
""Brian Lamb: I’m trying to find the quote, of course I can’t fast enough, but there was a quote in here that people might be surprised about and that would be where you quote Teddy White, who was such a prominent figure in this country in the ’60s, when he wrote about the elections.
BEEVOR: Yes.
LAMB: Buying the Mao as a successor to Chiang Kai-shek as being a better deal.
BEEVOR: Yes. I’m afraid the war’s, say a lot of, shall we say New Deal idealism and I think that certainly more and more historians now are accepting that in fact Chiang Kai-shek has had rather a bad deal in history. He had an impossible situation. Yes, there was a lot of corruption within his own organization and all the rest of it, but when you see what Mao did later; the witch hunts of any opponent, the killings, the humiliation and destruction of almost anybody who might be slightly dubious, let alone oppose Mao’s personal command.
I mean it wasn’t a question of being anti-communist; it was a question of unless you absolutely bowed down to Mao as a – as a god you know you were regarded as an enemy. And this was madness, frankly. But it was terrifying that so many people were able to bow – buy the story which the Communists were – the Chinese Communists were putting out at the time; that they were the ones fighting the Japanese and the Nationalists were doing nothing.
This is totally untrue. Mao was very careful and was giving orders the whole time to his troops. You know don’t take on the Japanese; we need to keep our weapons and our ammunition ready to destroy the Nationalists in the civil war that will follow – inevitably, which will follow the Second World War.""
I have read two of his books: Berlin: The Downfall 1945 and Stalingrad.
So is Stalingrad a good book? That city is starting to appear on the situation maps in the daily news. The battle line appears to be moving in that direction and could reach there before long.
Good one Mr. Simpson.
"The treatment of French Jews at the hands of the Nazis offers a poignant reminder of the fragile nature of democracy.
Though French Jews were emancipated in 1790 and well integrated into the fabric of French society on the eve of World War II, their fate was altered dramatically in 1942.
"Beginning in the summer Jews in France were rounded up and deported to the East, where they were executed.
The roundups that began on July 16, 1942, targeted mostly stateless and foreign-born Jews, though British and American Jews were exempt from the operation.
Those who were caught in the first wave were interned in the Paris sports arena known as the Vélodrome d'Hiver.
"With 7000 people packed into the arena, a facility that lacked food, water, and sanitary facilities, the conditions were horrible.
Internees were confined for several days before being deported.
From the Vélodrome d'Hiver, Jews were deported to Drancy (a camp in the suburbs of Paris) or other temporary internment centers before being shipped to Auschwitz.
"In all, at least 77,000 Jews from France were murdered during the Holocaust, including Henri Sznajderman and his mother (both pictured).
Most died at Auschwitz, while others were killed at Majdanek and Sobibór or while in detention.''
A long letter in The New York Sun of June 20 . . . describes how [the West Virginia] was struck at Pearl Harbor by “four torpedoes and two bombs, one of which fired the forward part of the ship” and which obviously caused great damage. Yet yesterday’s list of American naval losses included only one battleship lost – presumably the Arizona – and one damaged, presumably the capsized Oklahoma.
That evidence that the Navy has been less than forthcoming on U.S. ship losses should have given Baldwin a clue as to why the entire Japanese fleet wasn’t hunted down and sunk at Midway.
Greater results – in fact annihilation of an eighty-ship armada – might have been achieved if our surface ships had been able to close within gun range of the enemy.
Little does Baldwin realize that the last thing Nimitz wanted was for the U.S. fleet to venture within range of the enemy battleships.
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