What happened today? Part III

The Battle of Santa Cruz was the last of the carrier battles around Guadalcanal. Both sides had to withdraw their mauled carriers. This battle set up conditions for the surface fleet actions in the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal in mid-November.
The Japanese fleet consisted of four carriers: Shokaku (CV), Zuikaku (CV), Junyo (CVE), and Zuiho (CVL); four battleships: Hiei, Kirishima, Kongo, and Haruna; nine cruisers; 28 destroyers; eleven submarines and seven other ships.

On the US side was a fleet of less than half that size: Enterprise (CV-6), Hornet (CV-8), South Dakota (BB-57), Portland (CA-33), Northampton (CA-26), Pensacola (CA-24), Juneau (CLaa-52), San Diego (CLaa-53), San Juan (CLaa-54), and 14 destroyers. The light cruisers were new anti-aircraft types with sixteen 5" guns, rather than the fifteen 6" guns carried by most light cruisers.

The Battle of Santa Cruz Island took place 26 October 42 without contact between surface ships of the opposing forces. That morning Enterprise planes bombed carrier Zuiho. Planes from Hornet severely damaged carrier Shokaku, and cruiser Chikuma. Meanwhile, Hornet, was fighting off a coordinated dive bombing and torpedo plane attack which left her so severely damaged that she had to be abandoned. Destroyers Mustin and Anderson attempted unsuccessfully to sink the burning hulk with nine torpedoes and shellfire. Japanese destroyers eventually sank her by firing four 24-inch torpedoes at her blazing hull.

Enterprise was hit twice by bombs with 44 killed and had 75 wounded. Despite serious damage, she continued in action and took on board a large number of planes from Hornet when that carrier had to be abandoned.

Porter (DD-356) stopped to pickup a downed air crew and was torpedoed either by I-21 or a ditched TBF. An Enterprise pilot dived to machine gun the torpedo, but was not in time. Porter was abandoned and sunk by Shaw (DD-373) after that ship took off her crew.

That evening the American forces retired to the southeast. Although the battle had been costly, combined with the Marine victory on Guadalcanal, they had turned back the attempted Japanese parry in the Solomons. American losses of a carrier and a destroyer were more severe than the Japanese loss of one light cruiser, yet the battle gained time to reinforce Guadalcanal against the next enemy onslaught. Furthermore, the damaging of two Japanese carriers and a major loss of air crews sharply curtailed the air cover available to the enemy in the subsequent Naval Battles of Guadalcanal.

Enterprise entered Noumea, New Caledonia, for repairs by Vestal (AR-4); she sailed for the naval Battle of Guadalcanal with repair crews still on board, launched her planes and retreated with her planes joining Cactus air force. South Dakota took a bomb on the forward gun mount but participated in the naval Battle of Guadalcanal. San Juan took a bomb through the fantail; she repaired in Sydney and missed the next big battle.

 

1940 - De Gaulle sets up the Empire Defense Council


On this day in 1940, French Gen. Charles de Gaulle, speaking for the Free French Forces from his temporary headquarter in equatorial Africa, calls all French men and women everywhere to join the struggle to preserve and defend free French territory and "to attack the enemy wherever it is possible, to mobilize all our military, economic, and moral resources...to make justice reign."

De Gaulle had a long history fighting Germans. He sustained multiple injuries fighting at Verdun in World War I. He escaped German POW camps five times, only to be recaptured each time. (At 6 feet, 4 inches tall, it was hard for de Gaulle to remain inconspicuous.)

At the beginning of World War II, de Gaulle was commander of a tank brigade. He was admired as a courageous leader and made a brigadier general in May 1940. After the German invasion of France, he became undersecretary of state for defense and war in the Reynaud government, but when Reynaud resigned, and Field Marshal Philippe Petain stepped in, a virtual puppet of the German occupiers, de Gaulle left for England. On June 18, de Gaulle took to the radio airwaves to make an appeal to his fellow French not to accept the armistice being sought by Petain, but to continue fighting under his command. "I am France!" he declared. Ten days later, Britain formally acknowledged de Gaulle as the leader of the "Free French Forces," which was at first little more than those French troops stationed in England, volunteers from Frenchmen already living in England, and units of the French navy.

Another Free French movement had begun in Africa, under the direction of Gen. Henri Giraud. De Gaulle eventually relocated to Africa after tension began to build between himself and the British. Initially, de Gaulle agreed to share power with Giraud in the organization and control of the exiled French forces-until Giraud resigned in 1943, unwilling to stand in de Gaulle's shadow or struggle against his deft political maneuvering.

Whatever disagreements the British had had with de Gaulle, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was pleased with the French general's appeal to his countrymen's patriotism and the creation of the Empire Defense Council, which would organize necessary resources for military operations. Churchill believed it would "have a great effect on the minds of Frenchmen on account of its scope and logic. It shows de Gaulle in a light very different from that of an ordinary man."

 

1939 - Himmler orders each SS man to sire a child before going to war.

1940 - Italy attacks Greece.

 

1942 - Holocaust: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

 

1941 - World War II: Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves US$1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union.

1944 - Germans evacuate Saloniki
Last gassings in Auschwitz

 

1943 - World War II: Operation Goodtime launched - United States Marines invade Bougainville in the Solomon Islands.

 

1944 - As the front line is getting closer, Himmler orders dismantlement of Auschwitz.

 

1936 - U.S. presidential election, 1936: Franklin D. Roosevelt is reelected to a second term in a landslide victory over Alf Landon.

1939 - Agreement between Germany and USSR to resettle Germans living in the Baltic states and eastern Poland to the Reich.

1942 - Second Battle of El Alamein ends - German forces under Erwin Rommel are forced to retreat during the night.

 

2nd November 1944

almost the last unified SturmFW 190 attack agasint US bomber formations over Germany. JG 3 and JG 4 sturmgruppen attack. Then91st and 457th bg's really get clobberred but inreturn the Fw 190 units feel almost the same treatment.

Landing back at their fields the Sturm pilots give their accts of victories and losses and a special meeting between Hitler and the Luftwaffe General staff occurs where Hitler nearly sacks the entire Luftwaffe staff where he blames the Luftwaffe pilots for cowardice in the face of the enemy ..............

remember the fallen !

E ~

 

1939 - US President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the United States Customs Service to implement the Neutrality Act of 1939, allowing cash-and-carry purchases of weapons by belligerents.

1942 - Second Battle of El Alamein - Disobeying a direct order by Adolf Hitler, General Field Marshall Erwin Rommel leads his forces on a five-month retreat.

 

* 1937 - In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting and states his plans for acquiring "living space" for the German people.

* 1940 - U.S. presidential election: Democrat incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Republican challenger Wendell Willkie and becomes the United States' first third-term president.

 

1932 - Elections in Germany, despite of losses the NSDAP remains strongest party.

 

1923 - Beer Hall Putsch fails: In Munich, policeman and troops crush the first Nazi Party attempt to seize control of the German government.

1938 - Holocaust: Kristallnacht (also Reichspogromnacht) begins - In Germany, the "night of broken glass" begins as Nazi troops and sympathizers loot and burn Jewish businesses (the all night affair saw 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned, 91 Jews killed, and at least 25,000 Jewish men arrested).

 

1940 - Battle of Taranto - The Royal Navy launches the first aircraft carrier strike in history, on the Italian fleet at Taranto.

1940 - The German cruiser Atlantis captures top secret British mail, and sends it to Japan.

 

1942 - Fermi produces the first nuclear chain reaction


On this day, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist, directs and controls the first nuclear chain reaction in his laboratory beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, ushering in the nuclear age. Upon succesful completion of the experiment, a coded message was transmitted to President Roosevelt: "The Italian navigator has landed in the new world."

Following on England's Sir James Chadwick's discovery of the neutron and the Curies' production of artificial radioactivity, Fermi, a full-time professor of physics at the University of Florence, focused his work on producing radioactivity by manipulating the speed of neutrons derived from radioactive beryllium. Further similar experimentation with other elements, including uranium 92, produced new radioactive substances; Fermi's colleagues believed he had created a new "transuranic" element with an atomic number of 93, the result of uranium 92 capturing a neuron while under bombardment, thus increasing its atomic weight. Fermi remained skeptical about his discovery, despite the enthusiasm of his fellow physicists. He became a believer in 1938, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for "his identification of new radioactive elements." Although travel was restricted for men whose work was deemed vital to national security, Fermi was given permission to leave Italy an!

d go to Sweden to receive his prize. He and his wife, Laura, who was Jewish, never returned; both feared and despised Mussolini's fascist regime.

Fermi immigrated to New York City--Columbia University, specifically, where he recreated many of his experiments with Niels Bohr, the Danish-born physicist, who suggested the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. Fermi and others saw the possible military applications of such an explosive power, and quickly composed a letter warning President Roosevelt of the perils of a German atomic bomb. The letter was signed and delivered to the president by Albert Einstein on October 11, 1939. The Manhattan Project, the American program to create its own atomic bomb, was the result.

It fell to Fermi to produce the first nuclear chain reaction, without which such a bomb was impossible. He created a jury-rigged laboratory with the necessary equipment, which he called an "atomic pile," in a squash court in the basement of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. With colleagues and other physicists looking on, Fermi produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction and the "new world" of nuclear power was born.

 

1942 - Polish Christians come to the aid of Polish Jews


On this day in Warsaw, a group of Polish Christians put their own lives at risk when they set up the Council for the Assistance of the Jews. The group was led by two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz.

Since the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Jewish population had been either thrust into ghettos, transported to concentration and labor camps, or murdered. Jewish homes and shops were confiscated and synagogues were burned to the ground. Word about the Jews' fate finally leaked out in June of 1942, when a Warsaw underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade, made public the news that tens of thousands of Jews were being gassed at Chelmno, a death camp in Poland-almost seven months after the extermination of prisoners began.

Despite the growing public knowledge of the "Final Solution," the mass extermination of European Jewry and the growing network of extermination camps in Poland, little was done to stop it. Outside Poland, there were only angry speeches from politicians and promises of postwar reprisals. Within Poland, non-Jewish Poles were themselves often the objects of persecution and forced labor at the hands of their Nazi occupiers; being Slavs, they too were considered "inferior" to the Aryan Germans.

But this did not stop Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz, two Polish Christians who were determined to do what they could to protect their Jewish neighbors. The fates of Kossak and Filipowicz are unclear so it is uncertain whether their mission was successful, but the very fact that they established the Council is evidence that some brave souls were willing to risk everything to help persecuted Jews. Kossak and Filipowicz were not alone in their struggle to help; in fact, only two days after the Council was established, the SS, Hitler's "political" terror police force, rounded up 23 men, women, and children, and locked some in a cottage and some in a barn-then burned them alive. Their crime: suspicion of harboring Jews.

Despite the bravery of some Polish Christians, and Jewish resistance fighters within the Warsaw ghetto, who rebelled in 1943 (some of whom found refuge among their Christian neighbors as they attempted to elude the SS), the Nazi death machine proved overwhelming. Poland became the killing ground for not only Poland's Jewish citizens, but much of Europe's: Approximately 4.5 million Jews were killed in Poland's death and labor camps by war's end.

 

1945 - Senate approves U.S. participation in United Nations

In an overwhelming vote of 65 to 7, the U.S. Senate approves full U.S. participation in the United Nations. The United Nations had officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, when its charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and a majority of other signatories. Senate approval meant the U.S. could join most of the world's nations in the international organization, which aimed to arbitrate differences between countries and stem military aggression.

In approving U.S. participation in the United Nations, the Senate argued fiercely on a number of issues. Some senators proposed a resolution designed to force the president to receive congressional consent before approving U.S. troops for any U.N. peacekeeping forces. This resolution was defeated. The Senate also defeated a proposal by Senator Robert Taft that the United States urge its U.N. representatives to seek "immediate action" on arms control and possible prohibition of weapons such as atomic bombs.

The Senate action marked a tremendous change in the U.S. attitude toward international organizations. In the post-World War I period, the Senate acted to block U.S. participation in the newly established League of Nations. With the horrors of World War II as a backdrop, however, the Senate and the American people seemed willing to place some degree of trust in an even more powerful organization, the United Nations.

The United Nations provided a forum for some of the most dramatic episodes in Cold War history. In 1950, the Security Council, prodded by the United States and with the Russian delegation absent, approved a peacekeeping force for Korea. This was the first time a UN peacekeeping force was committed to an armed conflict. The U.N. also allowed world leaders to observe each other as never before, as in the 1961 incident when Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev presented an unforgettable spectacle by taking off one of his shoes and pounding his table with it for emphasis during a U.N. debate.

 

1941 - Roosevelt to Japanese emperor: "Prevent further death and destruction"


On this day, President Roosevelt-convinced on the basis of intelligence reports that the Japanese fleet is headed for Thailand, not the United States-telegrams Emperor Hirohito with the request that "for the sake of humanity," the emperor intervene "to prevent further death and destruction in the world."

The Royal Australian Air Force had sighted Japanese escorts, cruisers, and destroyers on patrol near the Malayan coast, south of Cape Cambodia. An Aussie pilot managed to radio that it looked as if the Japanese warships were headed for Thailand-just before he was shot down by the Japanese. Back in England, Prime Minister Churchill called a meeting of his chiefs of staff to discuss the crisis. While reports were coming in describing Thailand as the Japanese destination, they began to question whether it could have been a diversion. British intelligence had intercepted the Japanese code "Raffles," a warning to the Japanese fleet to be on alert-but for what?

Britain was already preparing Operation Matador, the launching of their 11th Indian Division into Thailand to meet the presumed Japanese invasion force. But at the last minute, Air Marshall Brooke-Popham received word not to cross the Thai border for fear that it would provoke a Japanese attack if, in fact, the warship movement was merely a bluff.

Meanwhile, 600 miles northwest of Hawaii, Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, announced to his men: "The rise or fall of the empire depends upon this battle. Everyone will do his duty with utmost efforts." Thailand was, in fact, a bluff. Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii was confirmed for Yamamoto as the Japanese target, after the Japanese consul in Hawaii had reported to Tokyo that a significant portion of the U.S. Pacific fleet would be anchored in the harbor-sitting ducks. The following morning, Sunday, December 7, was a good day to begin a raid.

"The son of man has just sent his final message to the son of God," FDR joked to Eleanor after sending off his telegram to Hirohito, who in the Shinto tradition of Japan was deemed a god. As he enjoyed his stamp collection and chatted with Harry Hopkins, his personal adviser, news reached him of Japan's formal rejection of America's 10-point proposals for peace and an end to economic sanctions and the oil embargo placed on the Axis power. "This means war," the president declared. Hopkins recommended an American first strike. "No, we can't do that," Roosevelt countered. "We are a democracy and a peaceful people."

 

Glenn Miller died on 15th December 1944.

R.I.P. Glenn!

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/agmiller.htm

 

Battle of the Bulgge 1944, Bastogne commander replies with the middle finger to the German surrender plans...........ah wait, his reply is "Nuts".

8 German night fighters are lost this night. 5 Bf 110G-4's and 3 Ju 88G-6's // 3 of the a/c shot down by Mosquito night fighters. More attrition for the tired Luftwaffe.