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April 1943

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The following events occurred in April 1943:

April 1, 1943 (Thursday)

  • SIGSALY, referred to as the X System vocoder or "Green Hornet", went into operation for use in secure phone conversations between U.S. President Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister 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.[1] The terminals for transatlantic calls were at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and in the basement of Selfridges department store in London.

April 2, 1943 (Friday)

  • 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.[2]
  • Born: Larry Coryell, American jazz fusion guitarist, in Galveston, Texas

April 3, 1943 (Saturday)

  • 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 Ben Lomond, which had been torpedoed on November 29, 1942.[3]
  • Born: Richard Manuel, Canadian born pop musician for The Band; in Stratford, Ontario (committed suicide 1986)
  • Died: Conrad Veidt, 50, German-born film actor (Casablanca); and Mike H. Thomas, 77, American cotton entrepreneur who went making 50 cents per week as a shepherd, to becoming a multimillionaire.

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.[4]
  • 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.[5]
  • 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.[6]
  • German radio announced that three former French leaders had been removed to Germany in order to stop "establishment of a countergovernment". Former Prime Ministers Édouard Daladier and Léon Blum, along with the former French Army commander in chief, General Maurice Gamelin, were reportedly placed in an undisclosed German prison.[7]
  • 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)

  • 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.[8] 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.
  • Born: Max Gail, American actor (Wojo Wojciehowicz, on Barney Miller); in Detroit

April 6, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • 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 be disappear the next year after his airplane was shot down in combat.[9]
  • 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.[10]

April 7, 1943 (Wednesday)

April 8, 1943 (Thursday)

April 9, 1943 (Friday)

  • Liquidation of the Jews in the Zborow ghetto in German-occupied Ukraine began, with the shooting of about 2,300 people on the first day.[13]

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 Parimaribo and was able to rejoin his unit.[14]
  • North African Campaign: The Tunisian port of Sfax was captured from the Axis powers by the British Army, led by General Bernard Montgomery. Sfax would then become the base for the Allied invasion of Sicily as the first stage of the Italian Campaign.[15]
  • Born: Margaret Pemberton, British romance and mystery author, as Margaret Hudson in Bradford

April 11, 1943 (Sunday)

  • 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.[16]
  • Born: Harley Race, American pro wrestling star, in Quitman, Missouri
  • Died: Rufus Leonoir Patterson, 70, inventor and developer of tobacco manufacturing machinery
  • Died: James Hatsuaki Wakasa, 63, former chef from San Francisco and an internee at the Topaz War Relocation Center near Topaz, Utah. Wakasa, a Japanese-born American citizen, had been relocated to Utah as part of the Japanese American internment. He was shot and killed by a military policeman, Private Gerald B. Philpott, after venturing too close to the fence surrounding the camp. Philpott was acquitted of any wrongdoing after a courtmartial.[17]

April 12, 1943 (Monday)

  • Martin Bormann appointed as Secretary to the Führer, the second highest office in Nazi Germany.[18]
  • 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".[19]
  • Eight days after he and his crewmates were lost in the Libyan desert in the crash of Lady Be Good, co-pilot 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.[20]

April 13, 1943 (Tuesday)

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.[24][25][26]
  • 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.[27]
  • 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.[28] 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.

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.[29]
  • 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.[30]
  • The Fountainhead, a novel by Ayn Rand, was released by Bobbs-Merrill and would go on to become her first bestseller.[31]
  • 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).[32]

April 16, 1943 (Friday)

  • At the Sandoz laboratores in Basel, Switzerland, biochemist Albert Hofmann accidentally ingeted the drug LSD for the first time in history, and recorded the details of his experience.[33]

April 17, 1943 (Saturday)

  • At a meeting in Salzburg with German Fuehrer 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.[2]

April 18, 1943 (Sunday)

  • Operation Vengeance: 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 Rex T. Barber. 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.[34]

April 19, 1943 (Monday)

  • 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.[35] The Jewish defenders would kill 16 Germans and wound 85.[36]

April 20, 1943 (Tuesday)

April 21, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • 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.[38]
  • Admiral Mineichi Koga became the new Commander of the Japanese Navy, succeeding the late Admiral Yamamoto.[39]
  • 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.[40]

April 22, 1943 (Thursday)

  • The final Allied attack on Tunisia began.[41]
  • Born: Louise Glück, American poet laureate, 2003-2004, in New York City

April 23, 1943 (Friday)

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 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".[43]
  • Died: Kenneth Whiting, 61, U.S. Navy Commander described as the "father of the aircraft carrier"; of a heart attack while hospitalized for pneumonia.

April 25, 1943 (Sunday)

April 26, 1943 (Monday)

April 27, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • Because of German labor needs occasioned by World War II, Heinrich Himmler directed concentration camps to avoid killing those persons who were able to work, and to make it a priority to put to death "the mentally ill who could not work".[45]

April 28, 1943 (Wednesday)

April 29, 1943 (Thursday)

  • 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.[47]
  • 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".[48]

April 30, 1943 (Friday)

References

  1. ^ Manfred R. Schroeder, Computer Speech: Recognition, Compression, Synthesis (Springer, 2004) p108
  2. ^ a b c Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945 (Penguin, 2010)
  3. ^ "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
  4. ^ 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
  5. ^ Eugene P. Boyt David L. Burch, Bataan: A Survivor's Story (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004) p xii
  6. ^ Roger Manley and Mark Moran, Weird Carolinas: Your Travel Guide to the Carolinas' Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Sterling Publishing Company, 2007) p237
  7. ^ "Blum, Others Held in Reich", Milwaukee Journal, April 5, 1943, p1
  8. ^ John H. Waller, The Unseen War in Europe: Espionage and Conspiracy in the Second World War (I.B.Tauris, 1996) pp308-309
  9. ^ Anita Silvey, Children's Book-a-Day Almanac (Macmillan, 2012) p96
  10. ^ "Fliers, Stranded Five Months, Rescued by Heroic Efforts", Milwaukee Journal, May 4, 1943, p2
  11. ^ "Bolivia Joins War on Axis", Milwaukee Journal, April 7, 1943, p4
  12. ^ "Wings Capture Stanley Cup — Mowers Shuts out Bruins Again, 2-0, to Clinch Playoff", Montreal Gazette, April 9, 1943, p16
  13. ^ "Zborow", in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, Geoffrey P. Megargee, ed. (Indiana University Press, May 4, 2012) p849
  14. ^ Bruce Madej, et al., Michigan: Champions of the West (Sports Publishing LLC, 1997) p97
  15. ^ "Sfax", in Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia Michael Richard, et al., eds. (ABC-CLIO, 2007) p333
  16. ^ Walter J. Boyne, How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare (Pelican Publishing, 2011) p48, p86
  17. ^ "Sentry Shoots Japanese At Utah Center", Salt Lake Tribune, April 13, 1943, p12; Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz, by Sandra C. Taylor (University of California Press, 1993)
  18. ^ Jacques Delarue, The Gestapo: A History of Horror (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008) p337
  19. ^ Norman Longmate, Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009) p63
  20. ^ "Desert Gives Up Its Secret", LIFE Magazine, March 7, 1960
  21. ^ "Katyn Forest, Massacre in ", Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide, Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood, eds., (Infobase Publishing, 2009) p261
  22. ^ 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
  23. ^ Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996) pp181-182; "Jefferson Shrine Dedicated By FDR", Miami Dalily News, April 13, 1943, p1
  24. ^ David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1996) p595
  25. ^ 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) pp270-271
  26. ^ Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Simon and Schuster, 2000) pp319-320
  27. ^ Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel (University of California Press, 1990) pp36-37
  28. ^ David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA Vs. KGB in the Cold War (Yale University Press, 1997) p29
  29. ^ "V-Mail", in 'Military Communications: From Ancient Times to the 21st Century Christopher H. Sterling, ed (ABC-CLIO, 2008) p489
  30. ^ "Banking", in Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia David H. Shinn and Thomas P. Ofcansky, eds. (Scarecrow Press, 2004) pp 59-60
  31. ^ "The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel", by Shoshana Milgram, in Essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (Lexington Books, 2007) p3
  32. ^ "Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO)", China at War: An Encyclopedia, Xiaobing Li, ed. (ABC-CLIO, 2012) p395
  33. ^ 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
  34. ^ Patrick Degan, Flattop Fighting in World War II: The Battles Between American and Japanese Aircraft Carriers (McFarland, 2003) pp140-142
  35. ^ 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) pp364-365
  36. ^ Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (HarperCollins, 1988) p509
  37. ^ Carl Boyd, Hitler's Japanese confidant: General Ōshima Hiroshi and MAGIC intelligence, 1941-1945 (University Press of Kansas, 1993) p77
  38. ^ "Aberdeen photographs show World War 2 destruction", by Rita Brown, Aberdeen Evening Express, January 29, 2010
  39. ^ "The 'Z Plan' Story: Japan's 1944 Naval Battle Strategy Drifts into U.S. Hands", by Greg Bradsher, Prologue Magazine (Fall 2005)
  40. ^ "Gallery of Classics", by Jeffrey P. Rhodes, Air Force Magazine (February 1997) p12
  41. ^ Alexander G. Clifford, The Conquest of North Africa 1940-1943 (Little, Brown and Company, 1943; reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005) p425
  42. ^ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010) p290
  43. ^ "Disaster's Near Miss Designed This Fireboat", by Gardner Soule, Popular Science (September 1955) p181
  44. ^ Chris Bishop and Chris Chant, Aircraft Carriers: The World's Greatest Naval Vessels and Their Aircraft (Zenith Imprint, 2004) p38
  45. ^ Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Random House Digital, 2009) p369
  46. ^ Mike Ostlund, Find 'Em, Chase 'Em, Sink 'Em: The Mysterious Loss of the WWII Submarine USS Gudgeon (Globe Pequot, 2011)
  47. ^ "Sen. Brewster Observes 68th Anniversary of the Sinking of the S.S. McKeesport"
  48. ^ "The Wigwam Murder", by Jason Yao, Crime In Canada
  49. ^ Tom Cutler, The Gentleman's Bedside Companion: A Compendium of Manly Information for the Last Fifteen Minutes of the Day (Penguin, 2011)
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