Thanks for posting these - I look forward to them every day.
The none-war news in this issue is interesting: Roosevelt (in many ways a covert socialist) signaling that he’d be willing to dump Wallace (an avowed socialist) for someone else as VP, with William O Douglas (one of the worst lefties ever on the Supreme Court) as a prominent candidate. No mention of Truman at all (that I saw), but plenty of indication they could have done a lot worse.
And the picture of the future queen suggests she was quite the babe at the time of WWII.
Thank goodness FDR let Wallace be replaced. President Wallace? Zoiks.
America once had an El Presidente for life.
"The ICRC was convinced it could do little to actually rescue Jews.
Unable to even learn the fate of most deportees, the ICRC tried to relieve suffering by sending a few parcels of food, clothing, and medicine to camp inmates whose whereabouts were known.
The shipments failed to reach those in greatest need.
The Nazis blocked most Red Cross attempts to visit concentration and extermination camps.
Only after increased pressure in 1944 did the Nazis grudgingly allow the Red Cross to inspect the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto.
The 'inspection', however, was a charade, as the Nazis briefly turned the prison into a comfortable 'model' ghetto.
Deceived Red Cross inspectors wrote a favorable report of conditions.
"The ICRC more effectively protected Jews through the work of its representative in Budapest, Friedrich Born, who participated in international efforts to halt the deportations from Hungary in 1944.
More than 50 years after the Holocaust, International Red Cross officials acknowledged that more should and could have been done, and that the organization's meager efforts constituted a 'moral failure.' "
Look at the beads of the exhaust from the V-1 as it crosses the sky of London. It is a shame that they cannot reproduce the sound of that as well. The sound was actually part of the terror as this distance-bomb would cause the people below to wait for the sound to stop as that marks when the wings release and the missile drops!
The sound was totally absent from the next "Vengeance" Weapon, the V-2, which gave no warning as a supersonic ballistic missile coming overhead. Which gave the most fright could only be answered by those resilient Brits who were the targets!
My father was serving with the US Marines in the pacific, and my mother and her father, were assembling planes, at the Vultee plant in Downey California.
They met at a USO dance in Oceanside California, and would marry in 1946 after the war.
Most people today, have no grasp of the magnitude of WWII, for America. The total population was 160 million, and 16 million served in uniform during the period.
That would be equivalent to 32 million Americans in uniform today.
Southern California had blackouts, lest it be easier for the Japs to bomb us. They DID shell the oilfields at Elwood north of Santa Barbara.
The LA/Long Beach harbors had nets, to keep Jap subs out. The floats were later stacked alongside the Pacific Coast Hwy. for many years, near Seal Beach.
http://www.nebraskaaircrash.com/crashsites/daykin1.html
Seventy years ago today a P-47 Fighter pilot 2nd Lt. Charles F. Jewett from Lakeland, FL became a WWII statistic along with seven crew members of the B-17. They were part of the more than 15,000 training fatalities Unfortunately, portions of the two planes were for a very short time occupying the same air space. This accident occurred approximately four miles south of the Nebraska farm which was my childhood home.
The area is near what was at that time Bruning Army Air Field and practically every day, fighter planes would fill the skies doing dog fights. When a flight of bombers came over, they would attack that formation. I was four and a half years old at the time and remember that my two older brothers, my younger sister and I, if we were not outside already, would always run out of the house to watch the action.
I did not see the accident, but both of my brothers did. They said that the fighter plane clipped the tail off the bomber. We did, however, in a day or two, pile into the Model A and toured the area. The P-47 was in my eyes at the time, in a large round, deep hole with oil and water. I do not remember there being a crater. The pilot was still with the plane. We never heard if he or his plane were recovered.
Parts of the bomber were strewn over a wider area. The main part, the fuselage was located a short distance from the road and Mother said that there were guards. She seemed to think that some bodies were still in there. Don’t remember seeing the tail, but sitting near the road in a wheat field was an engine, prop still attached with a burned spot around it in the wheat field.
In the 90s, I had occasion to look for the P-47 with a prototype mapping metal detector and was not successful in locating any buried metal structures. Turns out that to find something that is lost underground, it helps a lot to know where it is. Our system would do about an acre an hour at 5’ data point spacing. We did 10’ spacing, but likely did not have the right spot. The photo seems to indicate that we were too far east, not far enough into the field.