Posted on 09/02/2013 5:22:34 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1943/sep1943/f02sep43.htm
Red Army advances in Donets basin
Thursday, September 2, 1943 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... The Soviets announce gains in the Donets basin. Lisichansk, Kommunarsk, among other centers have been captured. The forces of the Bryansk Front take Glushkovo and Sumy.
In Italy... British battleships (Valiant and Warspite) bombard Italian defenses around Reggio.
September 2nd, 1943 (THURSDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: The US Eighth Air Force in England dispatches both the VIII Air Support Command and the VIII Bomber Command to attack targets in France.
- The VIII Air Support Command flies Missions 41 and 42: 216 B-26B Marauders are dispatched to 5 targets in France (36 per target); the missions to a power station at Rouen and Poix/Nord and Lille/Nord Airfields are aborted due to weather; 35 B-26s hit a power station at Mazingarbe and 69 hit a fuel dump at Hesden; 1 B-26 is lost.
- The VIII Bomber Command flies Mission 89 against airfields in France but because of unfavorable cloud conditions only part of one force is able to attack a target.
(1) B-17 Flying Fortresses are dispatched to airfields in northwestern France but the mission is abandoned at the French coast due to heavy clouds.
(2) 34 of 86 B-17s dispatched to Mardyck and Denain/Prouvy Airfields hit the target at 1922 and 1905 hours respectively. 182 P-47 Thunderbolts are dispatched to escort the bombers but they carry out fighter sweeps; 3 P-47’s are lost.
Frigates HMS Ballinderry and Odzani commissioned.
GERMANY: German doctors are allegedly turning the Hippocratic Oath on its head, using healthy prisoners as human guinea pigs for gruesome, often futile, medical experiments.
The experiments are performed at the Ravensbruck concentration camp, near Mecklenburg, according to the Polish interior ministry in exile. Today it published claims of abdominal surgery, the removal of bones and tissue from limbs and the deliberate infection of patients with tetanus and tuberculosis. In this way Professor Julius Gepphard has killed and crippled many.
Meanwhile, at Dachau, a camp near Munich, the Czech surgeon Dr. Franz Blaha has become expert in stripping skin from prisoners’ corpses; it is then cured and dried until it becomes like leather. In the camp workshops, the skin becomes purses, handbags, gloves, slippers, lampshades and riding breeches. Items of human skin - especially bearing tattoos - are prized by SS men as gifts for their wives.
Should the workshops, manned by prisoners who were previously craftsmen and leatherworkers, run out of material, the senior doctor, Sigismund Rascher, picks out 20 or so healthy-skinned young people and has them shot - in the neck, so as to not spoil their skins.
Ilse Koch, at Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, runs another of Hitler’s “tanneries.”
GERMANY: Hitler appoints Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and munitions, to the new post of Reich minister for arms and war production.
U-243, U-244, U-1195 and U-1196 launched.
U-861 and U-994 commissioned.
POLAND: At Treblinka Concentration Camp, a group of 13 Jewish slave laborers kill their SS guard with a crowbar while working outside the camp. Their leader, 18-year-old Seweryn Klajnman, puts on the guard’s uniform, and then “marches off” his fellow prisoners. All escape their pursuers and evade capture.
U.S.S.R.: The Soviet government announces the liberation of Lisichansk, Kommunarsk and other cities in the Donets basin.
ITALY: As the Northwest African Air Force completes the preinvasion attacks in preparation for Operation BAYTOWN (the British invasion of Italy on the Calabrian coast), having intensified them against Calabria during the past week, virtually all airfields in southern Italy except Foggia and its satellites have been neutralized. U.S. bombers, during the period from 18 August to today, have flown almost 3,000 sorties against communication targets. Small B-17 Flying Fortress attacks on the Brenner Pass temporarily interdicts the pass, the shortest route between Germany and Italy. Allied planes open intensive preinvasion attacks in support of Operation AVALANCHE (the invasion of Italy at Salerno), pounding airfields within range of Salerno day and night.
The Italian mainland defenses near Reggio were shelled by British battleships HMS Valiant (02) and Warspite (03). (John Nicholas)
USAAF Twelfth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses visually bomb five targets: (1) 76 bomb the marshalling yard at Bologna; (2) 21 bomb the marshalling yard at Bolzano; (3) 20 bomb the marshalling yard at Trento; and individual aircraft bomb targets of opportunity at Ora and Zambana. Only one aircraft was lost. Other missions flown by the Twelfth Air Force include B-25 Mitchells bombing marshalling yards at Bologna, Trento, Bolzano, and Cancello Arnone with fighters escorting the B-25s claiming 28 enemy airplanes shot down; and tactical aircraft, including RAF and USAAF Ninth Air Force airplanes, hit gun positions and other targets on the Italian toe, bomb rail communications at Bova Marina, Locri, Marina di Monasterace, Siderno Marina, Lamezia, and Catanzaro, and attack barges in the Golfo di Sant’ Eufemia and an ammunition dump at Saptri.
MEDITERRANEAN SEA: The Italian mainland defenses near Reggio are shelled by British battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite.
HONG KONG: 10 US Fourteenth Air Force B-25s and 5 P-40s bomb Hong Kong hitting the Kowloon area and attack shipping off Stonecutter’s Island and in the Lai Chi Kok area.
PACIFIC OCEAN: Two USN submarine sink Japanese ships. USS Seawolf (SS-197) sinks an army cargo ship in the East China Sea in position 31.28N, 127.24E, and USS Snapper (SS-185) sinks an escort vessel, 85 miles (137 kilometres) north-northwest of Truk, Caroline Islands, in position 08.40N, 151.31E.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: The USN submarine USS Bowfin (SS-287) delivers supplies and evacuates certain people from Binuni Point, Mindanao.
SOLOMON ISLANDS: 24 US Thirteenth Air Force B-25s and 60+ USMC aircraft pound Vila on Kolombangara Island, hitting AA and artillery positions and the area east of Ringa Cove on New Georgia Island. 18 B-24s, 20+ P-40s and P-39Airacobras, and 60+ USMC planes attack Kahili on Bougainville Island; shore installations, the airfield, and bridges north of the strip are hit.
NEW GUINEA: US Fifth Air Force B-25s, with 40 P-38 escorts, attack shipping at Wewak harbour, sinking 2 transports and damaging a third and shooting down 9 aircraft; barrage balloons offer some protection to the enemy ships. This is first USAAF observation of Japanese use of such balloons in the Southwest Pacific Area.
CANADA: Minesweeper HMS Moon (ex-HMCS Mimico) launched Toronto. Ontario.
Along with destroyers HMCS Algonquin (ex-HMS Valentine) and HMS Wessex.
"In the midst of degradation and despair, concentration-camp prisoners refused to allow their creativity to be stifled and destroyed.
Even as they struggled to survive, prisoners used whatever scraps of paper and stubs of pencils they could find to express themselves.
Through poetry and art, they affirmed their own existence and documented the horrors they feared might be forgotten.
"In Theresienstadt, the model camp/ghetto the Nazis established near Prague, Czechoslovakia, artists such as Felix Bloch produced "official" art on command while secretly creating works that portrayed Jewish existence as it was.
Teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis nurtured the talents of her young Theresienstadt charges, enabling them through art to transform the dark and dangerous world of the Nazis into a realm of light and love.
The drawings the children left behind portray images of butterflies and birds, sailboats and family gatherings.
But they also record the trauma of daily life, ghetto guards, and train departures to the death camps.
"One child's poem voices the longing reflected in the drawings of many: 'I'd like to go away alone/Where there are other, nicer people/Somewhere into the far unknown/
There, where no one kills another.' "
"As the architect of the Nazi program of genocide, Heinrich Himmler spent much of 1943 implementing the "Final Solution."
Named minister of the interior in August, Himmler utilized his control over the courts and civil service to advance the racial reordering of Europe, and paid particular attention to the fates of the 600,000 Jews he estimated to be in France.
During an October speech to SS Gruppenführers (major generals) at Posen, Germany, Himmler declared that the Nazis had a "moral right" and a 'duty' to exterminate the Jews.
He proudly hailed the SS role in that process.
Oddly, although Himmler told the group that the Final Solution was 'an unwritten and never to be written page in [SS] history,' he took pains to ensure that his speech was tape-recorded."
"Dr. August Hirt, director of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute in France, works on the cadaver of a Jewish person.
As part of the Nazi quest to prove Aryan racial superiority, Hirt aimed to establish a vast collection of skeletons from all peoples.
In 1943 the collection still lacked sufficient Jewish examples.
Thus, at Hirt's request, 86 Jews from Auschwitz, whose bone structure exemplified the desired characteristics, were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof, where they were gassed.
Their bodies were then sent to Hirt in Strasbourg, where the corpses were reduced to skeletons."
"In August 1943 30 women were taken from Block 10 at Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof, with their corpses then shipped to the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute for study.
Conducted under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) office of the SS, Dr. August Hirt's research was intended to yield an anthropological classification system.
He intended to separate inferior from superior races and prove Aryan superiority."
Of course he didn't give anything away by talking about the land invasion and march through France.
Buchenwald was the hub of a network of work camps. I have a Mauser 98K rifle that was manufactured at the Gustloff Werke near Weimar by Buchenwald inmates. I Didn't know what the "bcd" mark on the receiver ring meant when I bought it. Since I did my research I'm not really comfortable shooting it or even handling it. It lives in the back of the gun safe and doesn't get taken out much.
Wilhelm Gustloff was the founder of the Swiss Nazi party. In 1936 he was assassinated by a Jewish dental student from Croatia. After the assassination the Nazis German government seized the holdings of the Simson family who were Jewish industrialists. By some accounts this was the first Jewish property seized by the Nazis. These holdings included their arms factory near Weimar which had supplied G98 rifles to German forces in WWI and weapons to the Weimar Republic after the war. The Nazis renamed the arms factory in honor of Wilhelm Gustloff and staffed it with skilled slave laborers, mostly Slovenes, from the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1944 B17s of the U. S. Army Air Force bombed the factory killing most of the approximately 300 slave laborers, who were apparently kept at their work during the raid. What happened to any survivors I have been unable to find out.
The raid on Marcus is the first action by new carriers Essex, Yorktown and Independence. And it does signal that the USN is preparing for operations in the Central Pacific.
The thousands of Americans and Australians who have been fighting in the Solomons and New Guinea for the last year might take offense at the notion that the raid on the Marcus Is. constitutes the "real offensive."
That set of Kehoes didn't fair so well.
8^(
5.56mm
The Kehoes of Queens did their share, without a doubt. One son KIA, a daughter POW in the Philippines, and two other sons serving.
IU Archives Pyle at a typewriter in the Anzio beachhead area. Multimedia
SOMEWHERE IN SICILY, September 2, 1943 – You may never have seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among front-line officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be perfectly useless without his map.
It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps.
The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When it came from America, the 45th Division brought with it eighty-three tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that would be, but it would surely run close to half a million.
The 45th’s maps were far superior to any we’d been using and here’s the reason: Our maps were based fundamentally on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos immediately were flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.
They kept this process of correction open right up to the last minute. The 45th sailed from America only a short time before we invaded Sicily, and in the last week before it sailed the Map Section in Washington printed, placed in waterproofed cases, and delivered to the boats those eighty-three tons of maps, hot off the presses.
*
The 120th Engineers went back into antiquity for one of their recent jobs. They were scouting for a by-pass around a blown bridge when they stumbled onto a Roman stone road, centuries old and now unused and nearly covered with sand grass. They cleaned up the old highway, and used it for a mile and a half. If it hadn’t been for this antique road, it would have taken four hundred men twelve hours to build a by-pass. By using it, the job was done in four hours by one hundred fifty men.
The engineers were very careful throughout the campaign about tearing up native property. They used much extra labor and time to avoid damaging orchards, buildings, or vineyards. Sometimes they’d build a road clear around an orchard rather than through it.
This consideration helped make us many friends here.
I met a bulldozer driver who operates his huge, clumsy machine with such utter skill that it is like watching a magician do card tricks. The driver is Joseph Campagnone of Newton, Massachusetts. He is an Italian who came to America several years ago, when he was sixteen. He is all American now. He has a brother in the Italian army who was captured by the British in Egypt.
His mother and sisters live near Naples, and he hopes to see them before this is over. I asked Joe if he had a funny feeling about fighting his own people and he said, "No, I guess we’ve got to fight somebody and it might as well be them as anybody else."
Campagnone has been a cat driver ever since he started working. I sat and watched him for two hours one afternoon while he ate away a rocky bank overhanging a blown road, and worked it into a huge hole until it was ready for traffic. He is so astonishingly adept at manipulating the big machine that groups of soldiers and officers gathered at the crater’s edge to admire and comment.
Joe has had one close shave. He was bulldozing a by-pass around a blown bridge when the blade of his machine hit a mine. The explosion blew him off and stunned him, but he was not wounded. The driverless dozer continued to run and drove itself over a fifty-foot cliff and turned a somersault as it fell. It landed right side up with the engine still going.
*
Our troops along the coast occasionally got a chance to bathe in the Mediterranean. As an incidental statistic, the engineers during the campaign cleared mines off a total of seven miles of beaches just so the soldiers could get down to the water to swim.
Up in the mountains you’d see hundreds of soldiers, stark naked, bathing in Sicilian horse troughs, or out of their steel helmets. The American soldier has a fundamental phobia about bodily cleanliness that is considered all nonsense by philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.
Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 158-59. Pictures courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Just when I think I can’t be any more repulsed by what is happening . . . . Obviously, the womenfolk of the SS were aware of what their men were doing, but what kind of a monster would want a purse made of human skin???
The last few weeks we’ve been quietly building air bases in the Ellice Islands to support future operations in the Gilberts.
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