Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

October 1943

Month of 1943 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

October 1943
Remove ads

The following events occurred in October 1943:

More information Su, Mo ...
Thumb
October 14, 1943: Death camp inmate Leon Feldhendler leads uprising and mass escape from Sobibor
Thumb
October 5, 1943: Josh Gibson and Homestead Grays win Negro World Series
Thumb
October 22, 1943: Bombing of Kassel kills 10,000
Thumb
October 11, 1943: Bill Dickey and New York Yankees win MLB World Series
Remove ads

October 1, 1943 (Friday)

Remove ads

October 2, 1943 (Saturday)

Remove ads

October 3, 1943 (Sunday)

  • An experimental television program, The Bureau of Missing Persons, premiered on the DuMont Television Network. A forerunner of the 1990 premiere of America's Most Wanted, the show, hosted by NYPD Captain John J. Cronin, showed photographs of missing persons and invited the few television set owners, in New York City, to call the local police for any clues in identification.[8]
  • After General Henri Giraud stepped aside as a co-director, General Charles de Gaulle became the sole leader of France's Committee for National Liberation, which would form the basis of the nation's post-war government.[9]
  • SS General Dr. Werner Best declared Denmark to be judenfrei, although most of the nation's Jews had learned of the impending mass arrests and were in hiding, awaiting the chance to flee to Sweden.[10]
  • The United States agreed to loan Saudi Arabia two million dollars worth of silver in order for the Saudis to create a stable currency.[11]
  • British Commandos began Operation Devon, an amphibious landing at the town of Termoli on the Adriatic coast of Italy.
  • The Battle of Kos began for the island of Kos in the Aegean Sea.
  • Nazi Wehrmacht forces committed the Lyngiades massacre in northwest Greece as an arbitrary reprisal against Greek partisan guerrillas.
  • The American destroyer USS Henley was torpedoed and sunk at Finschhaven, New Guinea by the Japanese submarine Ro-108.
  • The British destroyer Usurper was sunk in the Gulf of Genoa by the German anti-submarine vessel UJ 2208.
  • Born:

October 4, 1943 (Monday)

Thumb
Himmler
Thumb
Crosby
  • Heinrich Himmler delivered the first of the two Posen speeches to assembled SS officers and German administrators in the German city of Posen (now Poznań in Poland). "What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me," he said. "Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture." He added, "We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals...I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race...."[12][13][14][15][16]
  • In an attack by 406 bombers of the Royal Air Force on the city center of Frankfurt, a children's hospital on Gagernstrasse suffered a direct hit on its air-raid shelter. There were 529 civilian deaths, including 90 children, 14 nurses and a doctor.[17]
  • The Battle of Kos ended when the German Army conquered the Greek island of Kos, took the 4,423 Italian and British troops there prisoner, then carried out Adolf Hitler's order to execute any Italian officers who had switched allegiance from the Axis to the Allies. Colonel Felice Leggio and 100 of his fellow officers were shot in groups of ten, then buried.[18]
  • The island of Corsica, seized by Italy and Germany from France in the 1940 conquest, was liberated by the Allies after a battle of 25 days.[19]
  • The Battle of Dumpu ended in Allied victory.
  • The Battle of Drashovica ended in victory for the Albanian resistance fighters.
  • American carrier-based aircraft carried out Operation Leader, an attack on German shipping along the coast of Norway.
  • The German submarines U-279, U-389, U-422 and U-460 were all depth charged and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by Allied aircraft.
  • Bing Crosby first recorded his second-most famous Christmas song, "I'll Be Home for Christmas", parenthetically titled "(if only in my dreams)".[20]
  • Born:
Remove ads

October 5, 1943 (Tuesday)

Remove ads

October 6, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • American and Japanese ships fought the naval Battle of Vella Lavella, after nine Japanese destroyers arrived to evacuate troops from New Georgia island. Six U.S. Navy destroyers intercepted the Japanese, and the battle lasted two days, with the loss of one ship on each side. The evacuation of the Japanese was completed by October 8, and the recapture of the island ended the second phase of Operation Cartwheel.[25]
  • Heinrich Himmler gave the second of his two Posen Speeches, outlining the carrying out of the Holocaust to the assembled SS officers. The text of the speech would not be published until 1974. In his address, Himmler said, "The question will be asked: 'What about women and children?' I did not consider myself entitled to exterminate the men, to kill them or have them killed, and then allow their children to grow up to revenge themselves on our own sons and grandsons. The painful decision had to be taken, to remove this people from the face of the earth..."[26]
  • British Commandos completed Operation Devon successfully.
Remove ads

October 7, 1943 (Thursday)

  • In the aftermath of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, 1,313 Jews arrested at Białystok, nearly all of them children, were murdered shortly after arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Auschwitz camp log for that day states that "1,260 Jewish children and 53 Czech chaperones arrived from Theresienstadt in a transport arranged by the Reich Main Security Office. They were killed in gas chambers on the day of their arrival..."[27]
  • More than 100 people, most of them Italian civilians, were killed in the explosion of a time bomb at the main post office in Naples. The explosive had been planted more than a week earlier by agents of the German occupation forces as they retreated from the Allied advance.[28]
  • Two days after the American bombardment of Wake Island, the remaining 97 American civilians there were executed on orders of Japan's Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara. Under the direction of Lieutenant Torashi Ito, Japanese soldiers marched the blindfolded prisoners to a beach on the northeast side of the island, shot them with machine guns, then buried their bodies in a mass grave.[29]
  • The American submarine USS S-44 was shelled and sunk off Uomi Saki, Kuril Islands by the Japanese escort ship Ishigaki.
  • The New Georgia Campaign ended in Allied victory.
  • The children's film Lassie Come Home, the first in a series of seven MGM movies starring the fictional Rough Collie dog Lassie, was released. A young Roddy McDowall played Lassie's companion.
  • Born: Oliver North, U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel, National Security Council staffer during Iran-Contra affair, and military historian; in San Antonio, Texas
Remove ads

October 8, 1943 (Friday)

  • The last Jewish residents of the Liepaja Ghetto, in German-occupied Latvia, were deported and sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp. Before the 1941 invasion, there had been more than 7,000 Jewish residents of Liepaja. Only 832 remained by mid-1942, when the order went out to confine them to a small area of the city.[30]
  • The German submarines U-419, U-610 and U-643 were all depth charged and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by Allied aircraft.
  • Polish destroyer Orkan was sunk in the North Atlantic by German submarine U-378.
  • Born:
Remove ads

October 9, 1943 (Saturday)

  • Three days after sending a request to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to allow the 8,000 Jews of occupied Rome to be used in construction projects rather than being deported to Germany, SS representative Herbert Kappler was told that their removal was being ordered directly on instructions from Adolf Hitler. The arrests would be made one week later, although all but 1,259 of the 8,000 would actually be caught in that night's roundup.[31][32]
  • The Land Battle of Vella Lavella ended in Allied victory.
  • The Jesselton Revolt began in British Borneo by guerrilla forces against Japanese occupying troops.
  • The American destroyer USS Buck was torpedoed and sunk in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Salerno by German submarine U-616.
  • British destroyer HMS Panther was bombed and sunk in the Scarpento Channel by German Junkers Ju 87 aircraft.
  • Died: Pieter Zeeman, 78, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate

October 10, 1943 (Sunday)

Remove ads

October 11, 1943 (Monday)

Thumb
Morton
Thumb
Pavelić
Remove ads

October 12, 1943 (Tuesday)

October 13, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • Thirty-five days after it had been fighting as a member of the Axis powers against the Allies, Italy declared war on Germany, with a broadcast by Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio at 3:00 pm local time. Italy had entered the war on June 10, 1940, with a declaration of war against France and the United Kingdom.[42]
  • The two-day Battle of John's Knoll–Trevor's Ridge ended in Allied victory.
  • The two-day Battle of Lenino ended in Soviet-Polish offensive failure.
  • The American destroyer Bristol was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean Sea off Algiers by German submarine U-371.
  • The German submarine U-402 was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by an American Grumman TBF Avenger from the escort carrier USS Card.

October 14, 1943 (Thursday)

  • Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland launched an uprising against their German captors. The attack, co-ordinated by Leon Feldhendler and Captain Alexander Pechersky (a Soviet prisoner of war), was partially successful. Eleven German SS men and several Ukrainian guards were killed, and about 300 of the 700 inmates were able to escape. Many of the escapees died when they fled through the minefields that surrounded the death camp, and others were recaptured and killed, but about 50 were able to survive. Those prisoners who had elected not to escape were killed and the camp was closed.[31][43][44][45]
  • In the second raid on the German industrial city of Schweinfurt, the U.S. Eighth Air Force sent 291 B-17 bombers to attack Germany's ball bearing factories, which were met by several hundred German fighters. Sixty of the bombers were shot down, and another 133 were heavily damaged, while the Germans lost 35 fighters. It took four months for the Eighth Air Force to return to full capacity.[46]
Thumb
President Laurel

October 15, 1943 (Friday)

October 16, 1943 (Saturday)

Thumb
Teia Maru
Thumb
MS Gripsholm
  • With 3,000 people being released to their home countries in one of the largest repatriations during the war between the United States and Japan, the Swedish "repatriation liner" MS Gripsholm docked alongside the Japanese liner Teia Maru, at the Portuguese Indian port of Mormugao. The Gripsholm was carrying 1,500 Japanese nationals, while the Teia Maru had 1,503 citizens from the United States, United Kingdom and France.[51]
  • German police in occupied Rome arrested 1,259 Jews, though 252 were subsequently released after being deemed to be children of mixed marriages. Many others had gotten word of the order of October 9, and fled from their homes to find sanctuary with Gentile friends or in Roman Catholic churches or institutions.[31]
  • The German submarines U-470, U-533, U-844 and U-964 were all lost to enemy action.
  • Born: Paul Rose, Canadian Quebec nationalist and assassin, in 1970, of Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte; in Montreal (d. 2013)

October 17, 1943 (Sunday)

October 18, 1943 (Monday)

  • Two days after the roundup of Jews in Rome, 1,007 were sent directly to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they would arrive on October 23 for extermination.[54]
  • Count Carlo Sforza, the former Foreign Minister of Italy, returned to his homeland after an exile of fifteen years.[55]
  • Four provinces of Japanese-occupied British Malaya (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu) were transferred by Japan to the Kingdom of Thailand, pursuant to a treaty signed between the two monarchies on to be made part of Thailand. Thai administration would begin on August 20.[56]
  • Perry Mason, based on the novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, was first broadcast as a 15-minute-long daytime radio show on the CBS Radio Network. The show would run on radio until December 20, 1955.[57]

October 19, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • The antibiotic Streptomycin was first isolated in a laboratory, by Albert Schatz, a 23-year-old student at Rutgers University. Schatz was working for Professor Selman Waksman, who gave the new medicine, developed from a culture of the bacteria Actinomyces griseus, which was able to kill certain bacteria that could not be treated with penicillin. Treatment for human patients would be approved in 1946.[58]
  • The first exchange of prisoners of war, between the United Kingdom and Germany, began in Sweden at the port of Goteborg. A group of 4,340 POWs from Allied nations, released because of illness and injuries, arrived by trains and on hospital ships from Germany; most had been imprisoned for more than three years, including 17 Americans. Later in the day, 835 German prisoners arrived on two British liners, with more due to arrive later in the week. The exchange was supervised by the Swedish Red Cross.[59]
  • Allied aircraft sank the German-controlled cargo ship MS Sinfra in the Mediterranean, killing over 2,000 people, mostly Italian military internees.
  • African-American actor Paul Robeson made his Broadway theater debut, portraying the title character in a revival of Shakespeare's Othello.
  • Died: Camille Claudel, 78, French sculptor

October 20, 1943 (Wednesday)

October 21, 1943 (Thursday)

Thumb
Flag of "Free India"
Thumb
Bose meeting Adolf Hitler
  • "The Provisional Government of Azad Hind" (literally, "Free India") was proclaimed, with Subhas Chandra Bose as President, in those territories of British India that had been captured by Japan. The Japanese government provided the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the new state.[64] At the same time, Bose announced that Azad Hind was joining Japan in the war against the U.S. and the U.K.[65]
  • German forces, retreating from the Byelorussian SSR, began the liquidation of the Minsk Ghetto. Over a period of 12 days, more than 2,000 Jewish residents were deported to the Maly Trostenets extermination camp outside of the city.[66]
  • As Japan began the drafting of high school and university students into its armed forces, the first parade of newly drafted shutsujin was held. A group of 25,000 students, from 77 schools, marched past the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, with Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and Education Minister Nagakage Okabe reviewing the new recruits.[67]
  • The British Royal Air Force delivered a highly destructive airstrike on the German industrial and population center of Kassel.[68]
  • After 18 months, the 140,000 Jews of French Algeria were restored to French citizenship. General Henri Giraud had revoked the group's historic standing on March 17, 1942, placing the Algerian Jews under the same restriction that had existed for Algerian Arabs since the French conquest of Algeria. The Arab residents of Algeria were still required to file an application if they wished to become citizens of France.[69][70]
  • The American destroyer USS Murphy collided with the British tanker Bulkoil off the coast of New Jersey and was severely damaged. The stern section was repaired and she was returned to service in time to participate in Operation Overlord.
  • The German submarine U-431 was depth charged and sunk off Algiers by a Vickers Wellington of No. 179 Squadron RAF.
  • Born: Tariq Ali, Pakistani filmmaker and journalist; in Lahore, British India
  • Died: Sir Dudley Pound, 66, British Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, died 16 days after his resignation for illness.[71][72]

October 22, 1943 (Friday)

  • Ten thousand residents, mostly German civilians, were killed as the city of Kassel was leveled by ten squadrons of the Royal Air Force, with 569 planes, dropped 416,000 incendiary bombs on the older section of town during extremely dry weather, fires swept the city center within 15 minutes, and became a firestorm that peaked after 45 minutes. Although more people had died in the July 27 and 28 attack on Hamburg, a higher percentage of the population (4.42%, more than one in 25 people) died in the attack.[17]
  • As part of the bombing of Kassel, the RAF launched Operation Corona, an attempt to confuse German night-fighters by having native German speakers impersonate German Air Defence officers.
  • Thirteen of the 15 people aboard a Swedish airliner were killed after the plane was shot down by "an unidentified warplane". The airliner came under fire for ten minutes and crashed on the island of Holloe.[73]
  • The British destroyer Hurworth struck a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea.
  • German-American circus performer Aloysius Peters, billed as "The Great Peters" and "The Man With the Iron Neck", was killed when his signature stunt went wrong at the Fireman's Wild West Rodeo and Thrill Circus in St. Louis, Missouri. Peters' act involved leaping from a trapeze bar with a noose around his neck made from an elastic rope. The rope Peters used at his final performance was of inferior wartime quality, affecting his timing, and his neck was broken.[74][75]
  • The Battle of Sept-Îles was fought over the night of October 22–23 near the French coast in the English Channel between British and German naval forces. The result was a German victory as the British cruiser Charybdis was torpedoed and sunk in the Bay of Biscay by German torpedo boats.
  • The German submarine U-537 arrived at Martin Bay on the Labrador Peninsula to set up an automatic weather station - Weather Station Kurt. This was the only armed German military operation on land in North America in World War II.
  • Born: Catherine Deneuve, French film actress; as Catherine Dorleac in Paris
  • Died: Sir William Reginald Hall, 73, British Admiral and Director of the Naval Intelligence Division

October 23, 1943 (Saturday)

October 24, 1943 (Sunday)

Thumb
October 24, 1943: Beheading of Leonard George Siffleet.

October 25, 1943 (Monday)

October 26, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • U.S. President Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation 2597, extending draft registration beyond the 48 states. Thereafter, all American men aged 18–44, living in the territories of Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico, were required to register before the end of the year.[82]
  • The German Dornier Do 335 heavy fighter had its first flight.
  • Died: Aurel Stein, 80, Hungarian-born British archaeologist

October 27, 1943 (Wednesday)

Thumb
Stainless steel Conestoga airplane

October 28, 1943 (Thursday)

Thumb
"Teleported" or "invisible" USS Eldridge
  • In the "Philadelphia Experiment", a story widely believed to be a hoax, the destroyer escort USS Eldridge (DE-173) was supposedly rendered invisible to human observers for a brief period, and (in some versions of the story) even teleported from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to the U.S. Navy shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia and back, with the result that several of the people on board were seriously injured, went insane, or killed.[85][86] The story would be popularized by the bestselling 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz, and the U.S. Navy began receiving regular inquiries.[87] In 1979, Berlitz and William L. Moore would write a more detailed account in The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, by which time the Navy would have a standard response: "As for the Philadelphia Experiment, the ONR (Office of Naval Research) has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time. In view of present scientific knowledge, our scientists do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction."[88]
  • The Allied Raid on Choiseul in the Solomons began.
  • The German submarine U-220 was depth charged and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by U.S. aircraft from the escort carrier Block Island.

October 29, 1943 (Friday)

  • Robert Dorsay, 39, German character actor and comedian, was executed in Germany after being convicted of "ongoing activity hostile to the Reich and serious undermining of the German defense effort". In March, Dorsay had been overheard by a Gestapo informer, while joking about the government. When his mail and home was searched, an unsent letter was found in which Dorsay made fun of the Nazi Party and described the continued German war effort as "idiotic".[89]
  • The German submarine U-282 was depth charged and sunk in the North Atlantic by British warships.

October 30, 1943 (Saturday)

Thumb
Axis China Chairman Wang Jingwei
  • The Japanese-controlled Chinese Republic, with its capital at Nanjing, signed a treaty with the Empire of Japan. Wang Jingwei, the Chairman of the puppet state, signed an agreement in Tokyo with Japan's Foreign Minister, Shigenori Tōgō, that provided that Japan would withdraw all of its troops from China at the end of World War II.[91]
  • Gus Bodnar scored a goal only 15 seconds after starting his National Hockey League career, setting a league record that still stands for fastest goal by a rookie. Bodnar, playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, was playing against the New York Rangers.[92]
  • "Pistol Packin' Mama" by Al Dexter topped the Billboard singles chart.
  • Died: Max Reinhardt, 70, Austrian-born American stage and film director

October 31, 1943 (Sunday)

  • The Red Army cut the Germans' rail link to the Crimea by capturing Chaplynka.[93]
  • The Soviet IS-2 tank was accepted for service in the Soviet Army.[94]
  • The German submarines U-306, U-584 and U-732 were all lost to enemy action in the Atlantic Ocean.
  • Born: G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation and Secretary to the Department of Space, Government of India from 2003 to 2009; in Kulasekaram, Tamil Nadu

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads
Remove ads