May 2003

Sunday, May 18, 2003

This week in History News by jwxspoon @ 18:58

May 17th, 1942...At Hvalfjordur, Iceland, USS Washington is joined by the Home Fleet, including the battleship HMS Duke of York and the carrier HMS Victorious. Also present is carrier USS Wasp and battlecruiser HMS Renown. With seven cruisers and 15 destroyers, this force will escort Convoy PQ-16, 25 merchantmen, to Murmansk.

The RAF makes life more miserable for the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, scoring three torpedo hits on her. Prinz limps back to Kiel.

Across the United States, patriotism is pumped up with "I Am an American Day," proclaimed by President Roosevelt. 1.2 million people gather in Central Park to hear a surprise broadcast from London by Charles De Gaulle, who tells the New Yorkers that France places its hopes for freedom in the United States.

In Burma, Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell is still marching on foot to retreat to India. "Soaked feet in brook. Rocky hillside in gorge. Tangkhuls squatting around their rice pots and fires. Lean-to shacks. What a picture if we only had a movie camera. Thatched covered bridge. Chinese soldiers. Burmese girls. Americans and Limeys all in the brook washing and shaving and soaking feet." The villages, with their totem poles, remind Stilwell of Alaska.

The best defense is a good offense, and the Germans show they are still the masters of that at Kharkov, when Army Group Kleist's two forces, 1st Panzer Army and 17th Army, barrel into the southern flank of the Barvenkovo Salient, while the 6th Army does the same from the north, trying successfully to cut off the Soviet offensive on Kharkov at its base.

The Germans attack with their usual skill, technology, and ferocity, and drive through the Soviets. The Germans have a 4.4:1 edge in tanks, 1.7:1 edge in artillery, and 1.3:1 edge in infantry on the battlefield. Soviet coordination is poor, and the Germans quickly gain local air superiority. Soviet officers lack adequate combat experience to handle the fast pace of the German blitzkrieg, and divisions come apart.

Meanwhile, down in the Crimea, the Soviets continue to evacuate across the Kerch Straits, leaving behind vast amounts of artillery and heavy equipment, which the Germans turn upon the besieged fort of Sevastopol.

May 18th, 1942...The Chinese 5th Army, down to the 22nd and 96th Division, is ordered to take up positions between Myitkyina in Burma and Fort Hertz. The 22nd will eventually stagger into India, while the 96th goes back to China, leaving the Japanese in the driver's seat.

Jacob Malik is appointed Soviet Ambassador to Japan.

Price ceilings set by the Office of Price Administration take effect in the US for retail goods, throughout the nation.

In Japan, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto and his staff officers ponder whether or not to postpone Operation "MI" until the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku are ready. The former is damaged from the Coral Sea action and the latter has lost most of her air group. After study, the Japanese decide not to postpone the operation, figuring that four carriers are more than enough to defeat the Americans.

May 19th, 1942...An old and timeless threat makes a new appearance in Hvalfjordur, Iceland, at 5:40 am. Mutiny. Ensign Carter, commanding the Naval Armed Guard of the freighter Ironclad, signals USS Washington that the civilian crew has broken into the ship's cargo, which includes a large amount of liquor consigned to the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. The crew is now drunk and running amok. Washington Capt. Howard Benson must quell the mutiny. He sends Marine Capt. Don Hittle and 10 armed leathernecks by motor launch across the harbor. They scramble up Ironclad's accommodation ladder, round up the 30 crewmen, and put them under guard. The Marines remain on board for a day, and are replaced by Army MPs from Reykjavik. Ironclad is scratched from the PQ-16 roster.

The Royal Air Force bombs Mannheim.

In Kure and Hashirajima, Japanese naval security is unbelievably sloppy. Barbers and bartenders all know the details of Operation "MI," to the exasperation of air officers.

With the Germans cutting off the Soviet Barvenkovo offensive from their rear, the Soviets cancel their offensive, do a fast U-turn, and try to fight their way out of the pocket and back to safety. Unfortunately, the attack is badly organized and uncoordinated.

A busy day for Soviet partisans, who blast railway tracks between Bryansk and Roslavl at five points. Hungarian security troops move in to fight the partisans, and do so by killing everyone in the villages. An irritated Josef Goebbels diaries: "In consequence, we can hardly get any agricultural work done in such regions."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt discloses details of the Doolittle Raid at a White House ceremony to personally award the Medal of Honor to Brig. Gen. James H. Doolittle. Seventy-nine other aircrew in the raid receive the Distinguished Service Cross.

More bad news for baseball fans, who are seeing their favorite players go into the military: night baseball is cancelled in New York for the duration of the war. The sky glow from ballpark lights at Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium (the Polo Grounds does not yet have lights) is endangering shipping.

On Guadalcanal, Coastwatcher Martin Clemens clears out at 1:30 p.m. from his offices at Aola and heads for Paripao in the bush. Clemens' party is led by the station dog, Suinae. Some 190 carriers haul chief clerk Daniel Pule's files. 16 men carry the big office safe, with 800 pounds in silver. Another dozen carry the teleradio, broken into its various parts. Michael the cook and his team haul the clanking pots and pans, while Anea, the jailer, escorts his civil prisoners. As Clemens is Guadalcanal district officer, he has to have the jail, treasury, and courts within reach. Pule and chief scout Andrew Langebaea stay at Aola to keep in touch with native scouts. Langebaea also plants a potato garden over the first hundred yards of the trail to Paripao, and completely obscures it.

Clemens reaches Paripao at 5:30 pm, and finds everything laid out, leaf hut combining office and house, other huts laid out nearby, wireless mast with palm fronds lashed for camouflage. Clemens sets up the teleradio and gets back in touch with Don McFarland on Gold Ridge and Snowy Rhoades on Lavoro, his colleagues.

May 20th, 1942...PQ-16 sails as scheduled. As no German fleet movements are reported, the battleships and carriers escort the convoy to a point near the "east coast of Iceland northabout," then peel off to conduct simulated torpedo attacks with Navy PBY Catalina flying boats and Army P-40 fighters.

Martin Clemens sets up a lookout to keep an eye on Tulagi at his Paripao hideout, a 50-foot tree at the edge of the village. Cane loops are nailed to the trunk for footing, and at the top he builds a camouflaged platform, six feet by six feet, complete with railing. A sentry stands watch, armed with field glasses and conch shell, on the opposing island.

The monsoon racks Burma, and the campaign is over. Japanese troops dig in on the Indian border, having inflicted the longest retreat in British history on their opponents. British troops retreated 1,000 miles, suffering 10,036 casualties, of which 3,670 are killed and wounded. The Japanese losses are 4,597 killed and wounded. Allied air losses are 116, of which 65 were destroyed in aerial combat, while Japanese losses are about the same. British troops stagger into India "utterly exhausted, riddled with malaria and dysentery, and deserved something better than the consideration or help which they received," Gen. William Slim writes.

Only in generalship -- Slim and Stilwell -- have the Allies outshone the Japanese, as the two leaders extricated their forces and maintained discipline in the face of impending disaster, unlike Percival in Malaya. Slim is determined to hit back, but not until his troops are fully trained for jungle fighting, have adequate transport, and command of the air. He will get all three.

The US Navy announces that on June 1 it will begin recruiting 1,000 blacks a month for shore and high seas service, and the Marine Corps will form a regiment of 900 blacks.

The Office of Civilian Defense is directed by FDR to formulate a "security program" which will supplement Army and Navy efforts to coordinate anti-sabotage measures developed by other agencies.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull battles his deafness and cleft palate to tell reporters that victory over the Axis may be achieved sooner than expected at the beginning of the war. He knows about the Manhattan Project. The reporters don't.

HMNZS Achilles and Leander put to sea from Vila in Fiji Hebrides for AA practice with their 6-inch guns and Oerlikons.

May 21st, 1942...In the Pacific, two admirals take up their duties. Rear Adm. Robert Theobald is appointed Commander Task Force 8, commanding all forces, Navy and Army, US and Canadian, in the Alaska area. The same day, Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley arrives in Auckland to command the Southwest Pacific Theater. Ghormley, an experienced officer and skilled diplomat, is unfortunately a lackluster combat leader. He will go on to lead the invasion of Guadalcanal. He sets up headquarters aboard the repair ship USS Rigel, a Pearl Harbor survivor, but is offered use of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Ghormley declines, believing that it's premature to put him under glass.

Adolf Hitler makes a fateful decision this day, he postpones the airborne invasion of Malta until Erwin Rommel can clear the British out of Libya. His reasoning is that the Luftwaffe, which is supporting both endeavors, cannot be in two places at once.

The Japanese agree to allow the Red Cross to visit British PoWs.

In Burma, Joe Stilwell's party covers 21 miles, and he meets up with the provincial administrator, who has not forwarded Stilwell's message traffic. "'Were they to be forwarded?' he says. Colossal jackass. Chow at fort and to bed with a hell of a cold. Mosquitoes inside the net." But there he boards a truck, and is finally on his way out of the battlefield, with his Chinese divisions, which will go to India for more training.

A busy day for the Final Solution: the Nazis deport 4,300 Jews from Chelm to Sobibor, 25 miles away. On arrival, all are gassed. The same day, 2,000 Jews are taken from the Volhynian town of Korzec and shot to death in the fields near by. The same day, the German industrial combine of IG Farben sets up a factory outside Auschwitz to create synthetic oil and rubber, in an effort to defeat two critical German shortages. The principal source of labor in this factory will be Jews deported to Auschwitz who are separated from their families, tattooed, and sent to the factories at Monowitz. Tens of thousands will die in conditions of unremitting toil, little food, and brutal guards.

Back in New York, the capsized hulk of the famous French liner Normandie still lies on her side in the Hudson River. Normandie caught fire on Feb. 9th and efforts to quell the blaze by pumping water into her capsized the great ship. Normandie was seized by US authorities as a troopship without permission of Vichy or Free French authorities, to the displeasure of both. Today the Navy announces that it can and will salvage the hulk, a year-long task. A special school will be established to train divers and salvage personnel for the job, using controlled pumping.

Why the Normandie sank will remain a mystery. It is believed by some that the Mafia sank the ship in a power play, to maintain their control of the docks and free boss Lucky Luciano during the war.

The same day, other New Yorkers who are category 1-B (slight physical defects) find out they will be called up on June 8th for limited military service.

In the "world's largest room" in Willow Run, Mich., the superiority of American industry is clearly seen as the first B-24E bomber rolls off the Ford Willow Run production line, in a factory created in 13 months.

The OPA announces that of the first 1.4 million car owners registered in the East for gasoline rationing, 30 percent got A cards, the lowest rations, and 9 percent got X cards for unlimited gasoline.

May 22nd, 1942...USS Washington and Wichita, joined by HMS Victorious and London, leave Iceland and head for Scapa Flow, escorted by nine destroyers. The big ships immediately slice into high seas and snowstorms.

FDR orders the Selective Service registration of all male Americans residents who reach the age of 18 or 19 before June 30 or has reached the age of 20 since Dec. 31, 1941. This fifth registration will generate 3.1 million new names. The same day he warns against a flood of post-Doolittle Raid optimism in the nation and says it will be a long war. After that, he presents the Gold Star "for exceptionally meritorious service" to Adm. Thomas Hart, who commanded the US Asiatic Fleet. Most of Hart's ships are in Davey Jones' Locker, his Sailors working on the Burma-Siam "Railway of Death."

80 young German Jews have been working at a farm in Steckselsdorf near Berlin, training for agricultural work in Palestine. Today they are ordered by the Gestapo to leave, and take with them two blankets, food, and toiletries. They are never seen again.

The Normandie report goes up to the Senate and says that "haste imposed upon the contractor by the Bureau of Ships" was "an important factor" in her loss. The same day, 27 merchant ships, totalling 270,000 tons are launched to commemorate the 10th annual Maritime Day. The War Production Board notes this event by announcing that there will be no new tires for the average motorist during the next two years because of the rubber shortage. That shortage will become a mess and a national scandal.