ITALY PUT UNDER MARTIAL LAW BY BADOGLIO TO PREVENT CIVIL WAR; FASCIST RULE ENDED (7/27/43)

Microfilm-New York Times archives, Monterey Public Library | 7/27/43 | Daniel T. Brigham, Milton Bracker, Alexander Werth, Drew Middleton, Hanson W. Baldwin

[Homer_J_Simpson]

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[Homer_J_Simpson]

Free Republic University, Department of History presents World War II Plus 70 Years: Seminar and Discussion Forum
First session: September 1, 2009. Last date to add: September 2, 2015.
Reading assignment: New York Times articles delivered daily to students on the 70th anniversary of original publication date. (Previously posted articles can be found by searching on keyword “realtime” Or view Homer’s posting history .)
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by freepmail. Those on the Realtime +/- 70 Years ping list are automatically enrolled. Course description, prerequisites and tuition information is available at the bottom of Homer’s profile. Also visit our general discussion thread.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

Selections from West Point Atlas for the Second World War
Kursk and Vicinity 1943: Battle of Kursk, 4 July-1 August 1943
Soviet Summer and Fall Offensives: Operations, 17 July-1 December 1943
Sicily, 1943: Italo-German Counterattack, 11 July and Allied Advance, 12 July-17 August 1943
South Pacific Area Operations: Capture of New Georgia, 21 June-27 August 1943
New Guinea Force Operations: Capture of Salamaua and Lae, 29 June-16 September 1943
The Far East and the Pacific, 1941: Status of Forces and Allied Theater Boundaries, 2 July 1942
India-Burma, 1942: Allied Lines of Communication, 1942-1943
Cartwheel, the Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls, and Concurrent Air and Naval Operations, 30 June 1943-26 April 1944

[Homer_J_Simpson]

Italians Rejoicing (Brigham) – 2-3
Badoglio’s Proclamation to Italy – 2
Underground Set for Coup in Italy – 3
Fortresses Strike – 4-5
Polish Executions Put at 3,200,000 (Bracker) – 5
Italy’s Upheaval Comes as Boon to Greeks; Tremendous Policing Job Looms for Nazis – 5
Russians Take 70 Villages, Gain 6 Miles in Orel Drive (Werth) – 6
War News Summarized – 6
Americans Drive for Eastern Sicily (Middleton) – 7
The Situation in Italy (Baldwin) – 8
The Texts of the Day’s Communiques on the Fighting in Various War Zones – 9-11

[Homer_J_Simpson]

http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1943/jul1943/f27jul43.htm

Allied and Axis troops locked in combat
Tuesday, July 27, 1943 www.onwar.com

Allied artillery firing at night on Sicily [photo at link]

In Sicily... Heavy fighting takes place at Agira and Nicosia.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/thismonth/27.htm

July 27th, 1943 (TUESDAY)

UNITED KINGDOM: The US VIII Air Support Command flies Mission Number 5; 17 B-26Bs bomb Tricqueville Airfield, France at 1825 hours.

Westminster: Churchill says that if Italy does not surrender, it will be “scarred and blackened from one end to the other.”

London: The Polish government in exile has received word of a new wave of mass murder in eastern Poland, as German forces clear the area to set up new lines of defence.

According to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph, the Germans are expelling and murdering Poles from a belt 60 miles wide, settling ethnic Germans there in order to boost defences. Lublin, Cracow and Radom are understood to be the centre of the killings, in which the Germans are accused of massacring the entire population, mainly peasants.

Whole towns and villages have been emptied in the terror, and up to 100,000 people have fled to the forests for sanctuary, abandoning their farms and livestock. It is said that the SS are rounding up Polish civilians by cordoning off areas and using artillery and tanks to flush them out.

GERMANY: Rastenburg: Hitler orders Mussolini’s liberation and his restoration as puppet leader in a German-occupied Italy.

U.S.S.R.: Polar Fleet and White Sea Flotilla: HS “Academic Shokalskii” - by U-boat gunfire, in Karsk Sea, close to Cape Sporii-Navolok (Sergey Anisimov)(69)

In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, the premier and dictator, issues Order Number 227 to motivate both the military and civilians in and around Leningrad; the order becomes known as the “Not one step backward” order. The order states that “panic makers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot. Not one step backward without orders from higher headquarters! Commanders…who abandon a position without an order from higher headquarters are traitors to the Fatherland.”

ITALY: Northwest African Strategic Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses hit the airfield at Capua and the railroad at Lioni.

SICILY: The fighting at Agira and Nicosia is heavy and inconclusive.

On the ground in Sicily, the US Seventh Army reaches Tusa and San Mauro and pushes toward Nicosia. In the air, USAAF Ninth Air Force P-40s attack tactical targets in battle area in northeastern Sicily, and others hit shipping at Catania. Northwest African Strategic Air Force B-25 Mitchells and B-26 Marauders bomb the landing ground at Scalea while Northwest African Tactical Air Force fighters and light bombers continue bombing and strafing of ports, shipping, bridges, landing grounds, and motor transport.

INDIA: The Chinese-American Composite Wing (CACW) manned by American-trained Chinese pilots, is activated at Karachi and assigned to the USAAF’s Fourteenth Air Force. The first two operational units are the 1st CACW Bombardment Group with B-25 Mitchells and the 5th CACW Fighter Group with P-40s. Each wing consists of four squadrons. These Chinese Air Force units will begin training in August and operational missions are scheduled to begin in October.

JAPAN: The Japanese Navy begins laying the LaPerouse minefield between Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands. This is an attempt to prevent US submarines from operating in this area.

SOLOMON ISLANDS: US Thirteenth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses bomb airfields at Kahili on Bougainville Island and Ballale Island; 8 P-38 Lightnings and 70+ US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft again attack the Munda area on New Georgia Island, hitting positions on Bibolo Hill and targets at Gurasai, Munda Point, and Munda Airfield.

US forces assault Horseshoe Hill in New Georgia and sink two Japanese destroyers at Rabaul.

Japanese submarine I-24 is sunk by the USS Scamp (SS-277) off the Admiralty Islands. (Mike Yared)(144&145)

TERRRITORY OF ALASKA: ALEUTIAN ISLANDS: 12 bombers and 20 fighters of the US Eleventh Air Force take off on 5 attack missions to Kiska Island. Several of the fighters jettison bombs. The other aircraft hit Main Camp, North Head and Little Kiska Island. The Japanese Navy’s Operation “KE GO,” the evacuation of their forces from Kiska, continues. The light cruisers HIJMS Kiso and HIJMS Abukuma and escorting destroyers take off 5,183 men undetected by US forces. Three midget submarines based on Kiska are destroyed by the retreating troops.

U.S.A.: It all started as a barroom dare, when two Army Air Corps pilots challenged each other to fly through a tropical storm. So, Maj. Joe Duckworth flew a propeller-driven, single-engine North American AT-6 “Texan” trainer into the eye of a tropical storm. Duckworth flew into the eye of that storm twice that day, once with a navigator and again with a weather officer.

These were generally considered to be the first airborne attempts to obtain data for use in plotting the position of a tropical cyclone as it approached land. Duckworth’s pioneering efforts paved the way for further flights into tropical cyclones. (Drew Halevy)

[BroJoeK]

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July 27, 1943:

• July 22: "Because the U.S. State Department continues to delay any action on the Riegner Plan to save 70,000 Jews, American Rabbi Stephen Wise pleads with President Franklin Roosevelt to support the plan.
  Roosevelt allows the plan to be killed because of "strenuous British objections."

• "July 23: "Forty-year-old Mandel Langer, active as an anti-Nazi saboteur since the end of 1942, is captured and executed in Toulouse, France.

• "The German armored offensive at Kursk, Russia, the largest tank battle in history, fails.

• July 24: "Twenty-one young Jewish partisans in Vilna, Lithuania, join with Soviet partisans behind German lines.
  North of Vilna, nine of the Jews are killed in an ambush at the Mickun bridge.
  Three days later, 32 relatives of the nine dead partisans are seized by the Gestapo at Vilna, taken to nearby gravel pits at Ponary, and executed.
  Bruno Kittel, head of the Gestapo in Vilna, announces that the entire family of any Jew who escapes the ghetto to the forest will be executed.
  If an escapee has no family or roommates, all residents of his building will be executed.
  Further, if any ten-man Jewish labor gang comes back short, the remaining gang laborers will be executed.

• "The Spanish government intervenes on behalf of 367 Sephardic Jews in Salonika, Greece, seeing that they are spared deportation to Auschwitz and sent instead to safety in Spain.

• "Britain's Royal Air Force begins raids against Hamburg, Germany.

• July 25: "Italian dictator Benito Mussolini resigns under pressure and is arrested.

• "A young Jew in the Janówska, Ukraine, labor camp near Lvov, apparently pleased by Mussolini's downfall, angers a Gestapo agent, who orders the youth hung upside down, his penis amputated and placed in his mouth, and his stomach kicked until he dies.

• July 27: "Germans murder 17 Jews discovered hiding in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto."

"The new leaders of the Polish government-in-exile, Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk (right, in uniform) and President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz (in suit), receive a report from their officers.
Initially established in Paris, the government-in-exile moved to London in July 1940.
From there officials broadcast radio messages of hope back to Poland.
They also used couriers like Jan Karski to learn as much as possible of what was occurring in Poland, and they tried to support the Resistance with arms and intelligence information."

"The drawings of Walter Spitzer dramatically portray the horrors of the Holocaust.
Here, the dead and the skeletal living are intertwined.
Arms and legs dangle over the side of the wagon as it makes its last journey."

"Spitzer's depiction of emaciated bodies in a variety of positions testify to the living hell of life in the camp."

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[henkster]

I think Stalin’s Special Order 227 “Not one step back” was actually issued last summer when German 6th Army was fighting in the Don Bend on the road to Stalingrad.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

The David Etherington daily log has good information but occasionally the years get mixed up.

If Stalin had realized that stand your ground laws are racist he probably wouldn't have issued that special order.