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April 18, 1943: Japan's Admiral Yamamoto killed when Americans discover and shoot down his airplaneApril 20, 1943: Jefferson Memorial dedicated on Jefferson's 200th birthdayApril 3, 1943: Shipwreck survivor Poon Lim rescued after 131 days adriftApril 12, 1943: Martin Bormann designated as Hitler's second-in-command
April 1, 1943 (Thursday)
Britain's SIGSALY terminal
SIGSALY, referred to as the X System vocoder or "Green Hornet", went into operation for use in secure phone conversations between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The new system, developed by AT&T's Bell Labs, encrypted speech into electronic signals that could be transmitted at the rate of 1,551 bits per second, and decrypted it at the other end, permitting the two wartime leaders to talk to each other without being understood by wiretappers. The terminals for transatlantic calls were at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and in the basement of Selfridges department store in London.
In the Second Battle of Sedjenane, Allied forces retook the Tunisian town of Sedjenane on the railway line to Mateur and the port of Bizerta.
Japanese forces launched Operation I-Go, an aerial counter-offensive in the Pacific.
The Royal Air Force marked its 25th anniversary by presenting Churchill with honorary wings. "I am honoured to be accorded a place, albeit out of kindness, in that comradeship of the air which guards the life of our island and carries doom to tyrants, whether they flaunt themselves or burrow deep," Churchill stated.
The Italian destroyer Lubiana was either sunk or stranded off the Tunisian coast and declared a total constructive loss.
April 2, 1943 (Friday)
King Boris III
On a visit to Germany, King Boris III of Bulgaria told German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that the 25,000 Jews in Bulgaria would not be turned over to German control, despite the alliance between the two Axis powers. At most, the King said, the Bulgarian government might intern its Jewish citizens in camps under Bulgarian control.
The German submarine U-124 was shelled and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean west of Oporto, Portugal by British warships.
The Battle of Manners Street, a riot in Wellington, New Zealand, between American servicemen and New Zealand servicemen and civilians, occurred when some of the American servicemen refused to allow Māori soldiers to enter the Allied Services Club. Dozens of people were injured but news of the riot was censored at the time.
Shipwrecked steward Poon Lim was rescued by Brazilian fishermen after being adrift for 131 days as the sole survivor of a British merchant ship, the SS Benlomond, which had been torpedoed on November 29, 1942.
Died:Conrad Veidt, 50, German-born film actor known for Casablanca, died of a heart attack while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles with singer Arthur Fields and his personal physician.
April 4, 1943 (Sunday)
Lady Be Good, an American B-24 bomber became lost over the North African desert after completing a bombing raid in Italy, ran out of gas, and crashed after its crew parachuted to safety. The nine member crew died of thirst, one by one, over the next eight days. For nearly 16 years, Lady Be Good would remain missing until its discovery on February 27, 1959. The bodies of the men would be found almost a year after that, on February 11, 1960.
William Dyess was able to escape from a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines along with nine other men, and to make his way through the jungle and to a ship that transported him to Australia. Once free, Dyess would be able to reveal to the world the atrocities of the Bataan Death March that had taken place after U.S. and Philippine forces surrendered on April 9, 1942.
An American B-25 bomber on a training mission went down in Lake Murray in South Carolina. The entire crew was rescued by a boater on the lake, but the B-25 sank to the bottom of the lake for the next 62 years, finally being raised on September 19, 2005 in nearly perfect condition.
German radio announced that three former imprisoned leaders had been turned over by the government of Vichy France, to Germany, in order to stop "establishment of a counter-government". Former Prime Ministers Édouard Daladier and Léon Blum, along with the former French Army commander in chief, General Maurice Gamelin, had been held in custody in France since shortly after the 1940 surrender, and would be sent to Buchenwald concentration camp until the end of the war.
Born:Mike Epstein, American MLB baseball player nicknamed "SuperJew"; in the Bronx
Died:Raoul Laparra, 67, French composer of the opera La Habanera; in an American air raid on Paris
April 5, 1943 (Monday)
Pastor Bonhoeffer
Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at the headquarters of the German military intelligence (the Abwehr) by the Nazi secret police (the Gestapo) along with lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi, and both were found to have incriminating materials in their possession, showing cooperation with the enemy in Britain. Adolf Hitler would order the execution of Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi, and the Abwehr director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, on April 9, 1945, less than a month before the conquest of Germany.
American bomber planes bombed the town of Mortsel in Belgium. The target was a local factory in which German fighter planes were being repaired. However, only four out of 216 bombs that were dropped hit the target, while the others destroyed most of the town of Mortsel, killing 936 civilians.
Born:Max Gail, American television actor who portrayed Wojo Wojciehowicz, on Barney Miller; in Detroit
The Little Prince, a children's book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was published. Saint-Exupéry would join the French Army later in the month, and would disappear the next year after his airplane was shot down in combat.
Five members of the U.S. Army Air Forces were rescued after having been marooned on an icecap in Greenland for almost five months. The men had been on a B-17 bomber that made a crash landing while searching for another lost plane, but were kept alive with supplies dropped by Colonel Bernt Balchen, an Arctic explorer and aviator.
April 7, 1943 (Wednesday)
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini began a four-day meeting at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg. Mussolini was in poor health and would spend most of the conference listening silently to Hitler's long rambling monologues; an attempt by Mussolini to bring up the possibility of making peace with the Soviets was swiftly rebuffed.
The British government published a plan drawn up by John Maynard Keynes for a postwar economy. The plan proposed an international monetary fund which could help any nation out of temporary financial difficulties. In return, that country would have to adopt policies aimed at restoring stability.
The Battle of Wadi Akarit ended in a Allied victory. American forces of 2nd Corps under General George Patton reached the El Guettar–Gabès road, where they linked up with the lead elements of the British 8th Army. With the Mareth Line broken in the south of Tunisia, the remaining Axis forces made a retreat to join the other Axis forces in the north.
Born:Michael Bennett, American choreographer and director (A Chorus Line), and winner of seven Tony Awards; as Michael Bennett DiFiglia in Buffalo, New York (died of AIDS in 1987)
Died:
Harry Baur, 62, French character actor, killed after being tortured by the Gestapo in Berlin
Died:Philip Slier, 19, a Jewish Dutch typesetter whose letters about life in a Nazi forced labor camp would be discovered in 1997, was killed in the Sobibór extermination camp
April 10, 1943 (Saturday)
Former American college football star Tom Harmon, who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, disappeared while flying over Surinam. The only member of his crew to survive a crash in bad weather, Harmon survived for seven days by drinking swamp water and eating rations, Harmon was able to make his way to Paramaribo and was able to rejoin his unit.
Frank Piasecki made the first flight of his own Piasecki PV-2, only the second successful American helicopter. The PV-2 "featured the first dynamically balanced rotor blades", differing it from the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, which had made its first free flight on May 13, 1940.
The British destroyer Beverley was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by German submarine U-188.
Martin Bormann was appointed as Secretary to the Führer, the second highest office in Nazi Germany.
The British War Office made its first report on the intelligence gathered concerning Germany's missile program, with the title "German Long-Range Rocket Development".
The crew of Lady Be Good; Co-pilot Toner is second from left
Eight days after he and his crewmates were lost in the Libyan desert in the crash of Lady Be Good, co-pilot and U.S. Army 2nd. Lt. Robert Toner wrote the last entry in his journal: "No help yet, very cold nite". The diary, and Toner's body, would be found nearly 17 years later.
On Budget Day in the United Kingdom, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood announced that the war had cost Britain a total of £13 billion to date and was costing £15 million per day. In the new financial year excess expenditure over revenue was estimated at £2,848,614,000.
April 13, 1943 (Tuesday)
Radio Berlin announced the discovery by Wehrmacht of mass graves of 10,000 Poles killed by the Soviets in the Katyn massacre.
Died:Oskar Schlemmer, 54, German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school
April 14, 1943 (Wednesday)
The Commander of the 8th Japanese fleet broadcast a coded message concerning a tour of the fleet by the Naval Commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to begin on April 18, probably in the high security code JN25 which Allied cryptanalysts had broken.
U.S. Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri appeared as a speaker in Chicago at the "United Rally to Demand the Rescue of Doomed Jews", calling for the United States to respond directly to the Holocaust.
The Soviet Union reorganized its intelligence gathering system, setting up the People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB, later the MGB) as a separate agency from the NKVD (later the KGB). Lavrentiy Beria remained in control of the NKVD, while Beria's assistant, Vsevolod Merkulov was named as the Director of the NKGB. Both Beria and Merkulov, along with four other Beria loyalists, would be executed on December 23, 1953, nine months after the death of Joseph Stalin.
Four inmates of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary attempted to escape from the prison, making it to the water when the tower guards opened fire on them. Two were killed and one hid until he was found three days later, but the body of the fourth, James Boarman, was never found.
April 15, 1943 (Thursday)
The U.S. Army established its first overseas "V-Mail" station in order to use the "Victory Mail" process to get letters to and from servicemen. The facility, based in Casablanca, Morocco, used the process of photographing, on microfilm, pre-screened letters to the United States so that mail could be transported to the U.S. with a minimum of space. V-Mail letters from the U.S. to servicemen were also put on microfilm, and enlarged prior to delivery.
The State Bank of Ethiopia was created as the new central bank in the African nation, which had recently been liberated from Italian control. The State Bank also had the authority to print banknotes and mint coins. It would be replaced in 1964 by the National Bank of Ethiopia.
The Fountainhead, a novel by Ayn Rand, was released by Bobbs-Merrill and would go on to become her first bestseller.
The Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Agreement was signed between the United States and the Republic of China, creating the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO).
At the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, biochemist Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested the drug LSD for the first time in history, and recorded the details of his experience.
The Battle of the Cigno Convoy was fought southeast of Marettimo island in the Mediterranean Sea. The result was an Italian victory as the British destroyer Pakenham was sunk while the Italians lost one torpedo boat in return.
In Mexico, Ramón Mercader, a.k.a. Jacques Monard, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assassinating Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940.
The United States War Manpower Commission, headed by Paul V. McNutt, issued an order that prevented 27,000,000 civilian employees from changing jobs. Basically, an employee in an "essential activity" could not be hired to a job that was not essential to the war effort, unless he or she remained unemployed for at least 30 days. Likewise, a vital employer could not offer a higher wage rate to lure a worker from another vital employer without 30 days between jobs. Business owners and employees who violated the regulation were subject to a fine of up to $1,000 per violation and a year in prison. The manpower "freeze" was to remain in effect until the end of the war.
A fleet of 117 B-17 bombers of the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force raided Bremen.
Horthy and Hitler in 1938
At a meeting in Salzburg with German Führer Adolf Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent and Head of State for the Kingdom of Hungary, refused a personal request by Germany to deliver 800,000 Hungarian Jews to the Nazis, despite the alliance between the two as Axis powers.
The German submarine U-175 was depth charged and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by the American coast guard cutter Spencer.
Luftwaffe dive bombers raided the North African port of Algiers. Fifteen Catholic Religious Sisters perished at their prayers as the bombs demolished an orphanage. The fifteen who died and three sisters who were severely wounded remained behind to pray when the raid started while other sisters led sixty orphans from the building to the safety of an air raid shelter. Among the victims was Mother Superior Marie Duval, who had been at the convent for 31 years. General Henri Honore Giraud, civil and military commander-in-chief of French North and West Africa, awarded Duval the French Legion of Honor posthumously, stating: "On April 17, 1943, she was a victim of German barbarism, as were fourteen of her sisters."
April 18, 1943 (Sunday)
Isoroku Yamamoto
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Navy and the architect of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, was killed when the plane that he was on was shot down by U.S. Army fighter pilot Thomas Lanphier, Jr. American naval intelligence had intercepted and decoded a Japanese message that included the itinerary for an inspection tour that Yamamoto was making of the Solomon Islands. The body of Yamamoto, who was mortally wounded by Bougainville Island, was found the next day by a Japanese search party.
Fourteen German citizens associated with the White Roseanti-Nazi resistance group are found guilty and promptly executed for crimes against the Nazi regime.
At 8:00 am, SS Polizeifuhrer Jürgen Stroop commenced the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and breaking of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with German SS troops fighting the Jewish resistance. The operation would not be completed until May 16. The Jewish defenders would kill 16 Germans and wound 85.
Biochemist Albert Hofmann followed up his accidental experience of three days earlier by intentionally ingesting 250 μg of lysergic acid diethylamide in an attempt to bioassay the substance.
Winston Churchill announced in the House of Commons that restrictions on the ringing of church bells throughout Britain would be lifted now that the threat of German invasion had passed.
In Tunisia, Bernard Montgomery approved an uncharacteristically aggressive series of small attacks against strongly defended Axis positions at Enfidha. Heavy Allied casualties resulted.
The RAF marked Hitler's 54th birthday by bombing Berlin and three other cities. Hitler himself passed the day quietly at the Berghof.
The bombing of Aberdeen killed 98 civilians and 27 servicemen. The attack was the worst of 34 separate German air raids on the Scottish city.
Admiral Mineichi Koga became the new Commander of the Japanese Navy, succeeding the late Admiral Yamamoto.
Captain Frederick M. Trapnell became the first U.S. Navy aviator to fly a jet airplane, when he took up the Bell P-59 from the Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) in California. Colonel Laurence C. Craigie of the U.S. Army had flown the P-59 on October 2, 1942.
The American submarine Grenadier was bombed by Japanese aircraft in the Strait of Malacca and scuttled the next day.
The British submarine Splendid was shelled and damaged off Corsica by German destroyer Hermes and was scuttled to prevent capture.
The German submarines U-189 and U-191 were both lost to enemy action in the Atlantic Ocean, while U-602 went missing on patrol in the Mediterranean Sea.
"Fighting Harada" (Masahiko Harada), Japanese professional boxer, world bantamweight champion 1965–1968, in Tokyo
Hervé Villechaize, French television actor who portrayed "Tattoo" on Fantasy Island, in Paris (committed suicide 1993)
April 24, 1943 (Saturday)
The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) responded to a fire on the munitions ship El Estero that threatened to destroy the port. The ship had been loading torpedoes at a pier used by the U.S. Army, caught fire, and began drifting after burning through the lines that tied it to the dock. The FDNY fireboat, Fire Fighter spent seven harrowing hours towing the ship away and then inundating it with enough water to sink it. An explosion of the ship could have set off a chain reaction that would have blown up other ammunition ships, tanks of natural gas, gasoline and oil on the shore, and "the largest ammunition dump in the U.S.", located on the New Jersey shore. Twelve years later, an author would describe the event as "the night New York City almost blew up".
The Battle of Hill 609 began between American and German forces in Tunisia.
Because of German labor needs occasioned by World War II, Heinrich Himmler directed concentration camps to avoid murdering those persons who were able to work, and to make it a priority to execute "the mentally ill who could not work".
SS Kamakura Maru, a Japanese troop ship that had been converted from the ocean liner Chichibu Maru, was torpedoed and sunk in the Pacific Ocean by the American submarine USS Gudgeon, with the loss of 2,035 of the 2,500 people on board.
The Allied shipping Convoy ONS 5 of 42 ships strong with 7 escorts, was attacked by over 40 German U-boats. Over the days, the convoy lost 13 ships totaling 63,000 tons, the escorts had inflicted the loss of 7 U-boats. This period is considered a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic (known as Black May).
The American freighter SS McKeesport was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine, leading to a sea battle that continued over the next several weeks, during which 47 German U-boats were sunk.
The German submarine U-332 was depth charged and sunk in the Bay of Biscay by a B-23 of No. 224 Squadron RAF.
Died: Canadian soldier August Sangret, 29, was hanged in London's Wandsworth Prison, after being convicted of killing his girlfriend Joan Wolfe, in what was called "The Wigwam Murder".
April 30, 1943 (Friday)
The British submarine HMS Seraph surfaced off of the coast of Spain, near Huelva, and dumped the body of "Major Martin" into the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Operation Mincemeat, to deceive German intelligence on plans for an Allied invasion of the continent.
^ Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, 1939–1945 (Penguin, 2010)
"Chinese Steward Used Bent Nail To Fish During 131 Days Adrift", Gallup (NM) Independent, May 25, 1943, p1; "Torpedo Victim Spends 131 Days Alone on a Raft", Milwaukee Journal, May 25, 1943, p3
Mario Martinez, Lady's Men: The Story of World War II's Mystery Bomber and Her Crew (Naval Institute Press, 1999); "Bodies of War Plane Crew Discovered in African Desert", Oakland Tribune, February 13, 1960, p1
Eugene P. Boyt David L. Burch, Bataan: A Survivor's Story (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004) p xii
Roger Manley and Mark Moran, Weird Carolinas: Your Travel Guide to the Carolinas' Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Sterling Publishing Company, 2007) p237
"Blum, Others Held in Reich", Milwaukee Journal, April 5, 1943, p1
John H. Waller, The Unseen War in Europe: Espionage and Conspiracy in the Second World War (I.B.Tauris, 1996) pp 308–309
Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945 (Penguin, 2014) p418
"Katyn Forest, Massacre in ", Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide, Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood, eds., (Infobase Publishing, 2009) p261
Simon Berthon and Joanna Potts, Warlords: An Extraordinary Re-Creation of World War II Through the Eyes and Minds of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, And Stalin (Da Capo Press, 2006) p181
Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996) pp 181–182; "Jefferson Shrine Dedicated By FDR", Miami Dalily News, April 13, 1943, p1
David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1996) p595
Robert C. Ehrhart, et al., Piercing the Fog: Intelligence and Army Air Forces Operations in World War II (Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996) pp 270–271
Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Simon and Schuster, 2000) pp 319–320
Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel (University of California Press, 1990) pp 36–37
David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA Vs. KGB in the Cold War (Yale University Press, 1997) p29
John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004) p141; Jan Dirk Blom and Iris E.C. Sommer, Hallucinations: Research and Practice (Springer, 2011) p308
"FREEZE 27 MILLION TO JOBS", Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 18, 1943, p1
Moshe Arens, Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Gefen Publishing House, 2011) p318; Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Indiana University Press, 1989) pp 364–365
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (HarperCollins, 1988) p509
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