World War II Chronicle: October 2, 1941

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A Stunt Gone Wrong

On page four we see that former Royal Air Force parachute instructor-turned daredevil George Hopkins is stuck on top of Devil’s Tower. Hopkins landed, but his sledgehammer, his anchor, and the rope all missed.

Landing on top of the monument was impressive considering that parachute techniques and equipment were relatively primitive. But you have to wonder where they went wrong with the gear. The top of Devil’s Tower is roughly an acre, which wouldn’t be too difficult to hit, unless they didn’t take into account the “negative lead” required when dropping from a moving platform since your rope bag is already has forward velocity as it leaves the plane.

They flew in food and a second rope the next day, but it tied itself into Gordian Knot after leaving the plane, and his efforts to untie the tangled mess was foiled when snow and sleet froze the rope overnight. Even if things had gone according to plan, the ropes were too short. Stranded a quarter-mile above Wyoming and exposed to the elements, it will be several days before a team of rescuers can climb up and rescue Hopkins. Stay tuned for more.

Bellamy Salute

For the past few decades Americans have been giving a stiff-armed salute while reciting the pledge, which resembles the Fascist salute used in Germany and Italy.  Page four also mentions that American schoolchildren will abandon the Bellamy Salute, named after Pledge author Francis Bellamy, in favor of a traditional military salute to honor the flag. The Bellamy Salute predates the “Hitlergruß” by three decades.

Technically the Pledge of Allegiance isn’t formally adopted until 1942. The words “under God” aren’t added until 1954, but God was in our first pledge. Five years before Bellamy penned his pledge in 1892, Union Civil War veteran Capt. George C. Balch wrote “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!”  which some Americans were still using in 1941. On Dec. 22, 1942 Congress will amend the Flag Code to instruct Americans to place their hand over their heart during the Pledge.

Speaking of religion, critics are frustrated at the Roosevelt Administrations soft-soaping of the Soviet Union’s religious oppression (see the front page). Saying “Complete freedom may be definitely on the way” sounds like the nonsense coming from the current White House. The Soviet Union was just as bad as Nazi Germany, but Pres. Roosevelt had to walk a fine line with Stalin given that his forces were fighting the Germans.

Roosevelt wants to point to a document that supposedly guarantees religious freedom for Soviets, but Socialists don’t allow constitutions to come between them and absolute control. If Stalin’s hands were tied, why was the administration having to defend itself? On that note, the Moscow Conference just ended and we were about to send $1 billion to Stalin (over $18 billion in 2021 dollars).

Holocaust

Consider this for a moment: religious suppression in the Soviet Union got Americans this riled up, which was not as severe as Hitler’s goal of entirely eliminating the Jewish people, it makes you wonder if things would have gone differently if news organizations like the New York Times hadn’t covered up the Holocaust.

This day marked Yom Kippur in 1941, and Nazi death squads executed some 2,146 Jews in the Lithuanian town of Žagarė alone. That massacre follows what was the worst mass execution of the war to date. From Sept. 29-30 German SS troops murdered well over 33,000 Jews, Ukranians, and Roma at the Babi Yar ravine in Kyev, Ukraine. Those who survived the gunshots were buried alive among the piles of corpses.

It is truly unfathomable to imagine what it must have been like to be rounded up on that day, the brutality they endured. How do we even begin to wrap our minds around evil on this scale?

And weeks later, the Nazis thought it would be best to remove the evidence, so they ordered Soviet prisoners of war to dig up the corpses and cremate the bodies. Once the Soviets had reached the end of the bodies, they had to build one more funeral pile for themselves. Socialism was still a relatively new concept, but thanks to Stalin and Hitler, the political ideology’s death toll in 1941 was increasing so rapidly that socialism would soon trail only natural causes and disease as a cause of death for human beings.

Outside of Lublin, Poland, the Majdanek concentration camp is established on this date. Disease and harsh conditions kill all of the original Jewish laborers and Red Army prisoners serving as the construction crew. As for how many people the Germans murdered at Majdanek, only God knows; all we have are estimates of the Nazis cruelty, which runs in the tens to the hundreds of thousands of exterminations at the camp.

Considering the logistics behind the massacres and concentration camps, I find myself wondering if things would have looked differently if the Germans focused on conquering first and ethnic cleansing afterwards. The SS forces at Žagarė and Babi Yar all required food, water, medicine, uniforms, bullets, vehicles, gasoline… a substantial amount of preciously scarce resources that wouldn’t reach the front lines.

Meanwhile, Hitler just today ordered the launch of Operation Typhoon — the Battle of Moscow has begun.

Hitler needed a quick victory over Moscow (it was now becoming obvious that the Germans would be spending the winter in the Soviet Union) and that meant no time to stop for maintenance. Not only had the primitive Russian and Ukrainian roads been churned into knee-deep mud, what vehicles they started out with were falling apart. The Wehrmacht was often having to resort to stealing Russian horse-drawn wagons. The German transportation network, such as it was, is now stretched across hundreds of miles of enemy territory, on multiple fronts. Every mile the armies drive closer towards Moscow, Leningrad, and the Crimea requires more security, more fuel, more everything. The men of the Eastern Front needed a pipeline to supply them and all they had was a biodegradable straw. Their uniforms were literally rotting off their bodies. The sick and wounded couldn’t get evacuated and had to march along with the healthy. They had no winter clothes because warfighting supplies like ammunition had a higher priority than coats and blankets.

Soldiers have been appropriating items since armies were invented; SS troops slaughtering civilians hundreds of miles away from the front lines have access to supplies headed east, like blankets and winter clothing, dooming an infantryman on the front to a frozen fate. The Führer’s strategic objectives, crazy as they were appearing to be at this point of the war, would have been far better served if those sub-machine guns were pointed at the Red Army and not at old women’s necks.

On page 5, American Naval aircraft will now have names: The Douglas SBD dive bomber will be named “Dauntless,” for example… Maj. G. Fielding Eliot’s column is on page 15… Sports on page 54