Posted on 12/10/2012 4:54:11 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1942/dec42/f10dec42.htm
Allies shaken by German offensive
Thursday, December 10, 1942 www.onwar.com
In Tunisia... The German troops continue to attack Medjez el Bab, the Allies barely hold them off.
On the Eastern Front... A small German counterattack in the Rzhev area achieves little.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/frame.htm
December 10th, 1942
UNITED KINGDOM:
Aircraft carrier HMS Implacable launched.
Destroyer HMS Roebuck launched.
Submarine HMS Surf launched.
ASW trawlers HMS Bream and Colstream launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
GERMANY: U-193, U-952 commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
MEDITERRANEAN SEA: Luftwaffe LT Sta (See) 222 loses one of its massive Blohm und Voss Bv 222 flying boats (V8) when it is shot down by RAF Beaufighters between Italy and Tripoli when flying in company with the V1 and V4 flying-boats. (21)
U.S.S.R.: Little ground is gained at Rzhev by a small German counterattack.
TUNISIA: British and Free French defenders drive off a strong German attack on Medjez el Bab.
NEW GUINEA: Papua: Australian troops yesterday took Gona, a key Japanese defensive position on the north Papuan coast from which the Japanese launched their ill-fated campaign to take Port Moresby. The savagery of the action against the fanatical resistance of the Japanese garrison at Gona is indicated by the 638 bodies found after the battle.
The four Australian battalions of the 21st Brigade assigned to take Gona have suffered dangerously high casualties. Already sharply reduced in numbers by earlier battle casualties and high illness rates from heat exhaustion, malaria and other tropical disease, they suffered a further 530 killed and wounded, more than 40%.
U.S.A.:
Minesweeper USS Symbol commissioned.
Escort carrier USS Core commissioned.
Corvette USS Alacrity commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
ATLANTIC OCEAN:
U-128 transferred three captives to the milk cow U-461.
U-174 transferred an ill crewmember to U-461. (Dave Shirlaw)
"The first "official" concentration camp in Germany, Dachau housed thousands of prisoners from throughout Europe.
Overcrowding, disease, medical experiments, and unrelenting work led to a high death rate, necessitating the building of a new and larger crematorium, with four furnaces, in 1942.
Baracke X (Barrack 10) also contained a gas chamber (pictured).
Disguised as a shower room, it was never put to use since the Nazis decided it was more efficient to send those judged mentally deficient or unable to work to killing sites, such as Auschwitz or Hartheim, Austria."
"Showing the public hanging of a young man who tried to escape, this drawing represents the brutality of life in the Kovno (Lithuania) Ghetto.
Mass killings in 1941 were followed by quieter days in 1942, a year free of large-scale Aktionen (deportations).
Yet even in these "peaceful" days, the ghetto inhabitants daily encountered Nazi oppression.
As this drawing from November 1942 shows, anyone who was caught breaking the ghetto's rules paid with his or her life."
"More than one million Jews from all corners of Europe were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed.
Nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews died there in mid-1944 alone.
Auschwitz also witnessed the deaths of about 70,000 non-Jewish Poles, 20,000 Gypsies, and 15,000 Soviet POWs."
"Smiling prisoners at the transit camp at Drancy, France, carry large loaves of bread in early December 1942.
This staged photo was taken to assure the Red Cross and Jewish organizations, as well as the French public, that inmates in the camp were being treated well.
Until then, prisoners had suffered badly from malnutrition, surviving on only meager rations."
"Aharon Liebeskind was a leader of the Kraków, Poland, Jewish underground.
Using the pseudonym Dolek, Liebeskind led the vocational training section of the Jewish Self-Help Society.
He was also co-commander of the resistance group He-Haluts ha-Lohem, which attacked the Germans in December 1942.
Liebeskind was killed in the subsequent hand-to-hand fighting."
"The Nazis began the liquidation of the Lvov (Ukraine) Ghetto in December 1942.
About 75,000 Jews had already been deported to Belzec before the final Aktion began.
While the Nazis told the deported Jews that they would be put to work, the Jews realized a worse fate once they reached Belzec, which reeked of decaying flesh.
"The majority knew everything," recalled one witness.
"The smell betrayed it."
In order to kill as many Jews as possible, as many as 800 people were crammed into a gas chamber that was only 192 square meters in size."
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