January 1943


The following events occurred in January 1943:

January 1, 1943 (Friday)

January 2, 1943 (Saturday)

  • In the Battle of Buna–Gona, American and Australian forces, under the command of U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger, were able to capture the New Guinea beachhead at Papua New Guinea|Buna] from the Japanese, after the Australian Army had captured Gona on December 9. The Allied victory left only one remaining Japanese stronghold on New Guinea, Sanananda, which would fall two weeks later. General Douglas MacArthur had given Eichelberger the order to "Take Buna, or don't come back alive", which one biographer would describe later as "the absolute nadir of generalship."
  • The Battle of Gjorm ended in decisive victory for the Albanian Resistance fighters.
  • Born: Barış Manço, Turkish singer and television personality

January 3, 1943 (Sunday)

  • The new Italian cruiser Ulpio Traiano was sunk in Palermo harbor by a British manned torpedo.
  • The 20-room Hollywood mansion of Bing Crosby was destroyed by fire after a short circuit caused a blaze to break out while the family was taking down its Christmas tree.
  • The U.S. Selective Service System warned that it would begin prosecuting draft dodgers beginning on February 1. On that date, new rules would require "all men in the 18 to 45 age groups who for six months or more have been subject to registration would have to carry their classification and registration cards with them at all times.
  • Born: General Nirmal Chander Vij, Chief of the Army Staff (India) 2003-2005, in Jammu

January 4, 1943 (Monday)

January 5, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • The first use of a VT (variable time) fuze in combat was carried out by the USS Helena, which shot down a Japanese dive bomber with the new type of shell. The "variable time" name was deliberately misleading, to conceal the actual reason that the shell would explode right as it approached its target. Rather than containing a timer, each weapon had a radar that would trigger a detonation as soon as signals indicated that it was within 60 feet of its target.
  • At the port of Rabaul on the southwest Pacific Ocean island of New Britain, American bombers under the command of U.S. Army Brigadier General Kenneth Walker scored direct hits on eight Japanese merchant ships and two destroyers. General Walker was killed during the raid when his plane was brought down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire.
  • U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard ordered manufacturers to reserve 30% of all butter produced, to be used for the U.S. Armed Forces, the first time.
  • Died:
  • *George Washington Carver, 78, African-American inventor and botanist Carver had suffered complications from injuries sustained when he had fallen down a flight of stairs.
  • *Caroline O'Day, 73, U.S. Representative for New York since 1935

January 6, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • German Grand Admiral Erich Raeder tendered his resignation after a stormy meeting with Adolf Hitler.
  • The German submarine U-164 was sunk off Pernambuco, Brazil by an American Consolidated PBY Catalina.
  • The United States Office of Price Administration banned pleasure driving in 17 states in the Eastern U.S., beginning at noon on Thursday, and lowered the limit of fuel oil that could be used by "schools, churches, stores theaters and other non-residential establishments".
  • A fire at the bowling alley in the Southside Beverly Recreation Hall in Chicago killed six people and left 35 hospitalized. The flames quickly moved across bowling lanes that had flammable shellac on them.
  • Born: Terry Venables, English football manager
  • Died: A. Lawrence Lowell, 86, former President of Harvard University, who had "presided during the years of its greatest expansion".

January 7, 1943 (Thursday)

  • U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the annual State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress, revealing that there were seven million men in the armed services, of which 1.5 million were overseas. and stated that "I am confident that though the fighting will be tough, when the final Allied assault is made, the last vestige of Axis power will be driven from the south shores of the Mediterranean." Roosevelt said also that the bombing of Germany and Italy would continue to increase during 1943, adding, "Yes- the Nazis and Fascists have asked for it- and they are going to get it."
  • The musical Something for the Boys, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, began a successful run on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre. It ran for one year, with 422 performances, and then had another successful run on London's West End at the Coliseum Theatre in 1944.
  • Born: Sadako Sasaki, Japanese atomic bomb sickness victim. She would survive the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, uninjured, despite being only slightly more than a mile from the blast. After her diagnosis with leukemia in 1954, she attracted the nation's attention with her mission to fold origami paper cranes as a symbol of peace, and a monument would be erected to her in 1958 as a symbol of innocent victims of war.
  • Died:
  • *Nikola Tesla, 86, Serbian-American engineer and inventor. Tesla spent his declining years in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel. Due to Tesla's pre-war claims he had invented a "death ray", the United States government removed his files and research notes two days after his death to see whether there was any security risk but the investigator in charge stated they "did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results."
  • *Dr. George Washington Crile, 78, co-founder of the Cleveland Clinic and surgeon who had performed the first direct blood transfusion.

January 8, 1943 (Friday)

  • With Germany's Sixth Army completely encircled in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Red Army commander, General Konstantin Rokossovsky, sent an ultimatum to the German commander, General Friedrich Paulus. Rokossovsky gave Paulus until 10:00 the next morning to surrender; if the Germans gave up, Rokossovsky said, they would be provided food and medical assistance. If 10:00 arrived without a surrender, the final attack would begin and the Germans would be destroyed. General Paulus was able to contact Adolf Hitler by radio, but Hitler refused the option to accept the terms. Paulus, who had been skeptical of the Soviet offer, let the ultimatum expire with no reply, and the attack would begin on Sunday.
  • Died: Richard Hillary, 23, Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot, author of The Last Enemy; after crashing in England during a training flight

January 9, 1943 (Saturday)

January 10, 1943 (Sunday)

January 11, 1943 (Monday)

  • The United States and the United Kingdom signed separate treaties with China, renouncing extraterritoriality privileges that the two nations had held for decades. "The relevant treaties", one historian would observe later, "meant that when China was liberated, there would be no longer British and American enclaves in her territory, that no foreign soldiers would control her seaports, that no British or American warships would be in Chinese waters and that the laws of China and her customs regulations would be drawn up by China and not by Britain, and above all, that there would be no boards with this notice on them: 'Chinese forbidden'."
  • Germany and Romania concluded a secret agreement providing for Germany to pay Romania thirty tons of gold and 43,000,000 Swiss francs in return for use of Romanian territory for German bases.
  • In the annual budget message to Congress, U.S. president Roosevelt said that new sacrifices and $16 billion in new taxes or "compulsory loans" would be needed to meet spending needs of $100 billion for the war effort, and $9 billion for other purposes.
  • With war news delayed by censors, the U.S. Navy revealed the names of ships that were lost in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, including the aircraft carrier, which had been sunk by a kamikaze pilot. Named also were three battle cruisers and seven destroyers.
  • British intelligence intercepted and decrypted the Höfle Telegram, a report sent by SS Major Hermann Höfle to his superior, Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, regarding the previous year's accomplishments in "Operation Reinhard" the extermination of Polish Jews. The report summed up that, in 1942, the death camps at Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka had killed 1,274,166 Jews. The telegram would not be declassified until 2000.
  • SS Major General Heinrich Müller began the deportation of 45,000 Polish Jews to German munitions factories. Over a period of 19 days, 30,000 were taken from Bialystok in Poland, 10,000 from Theresienstadt, 3,000 from the Netherlands and 2,000 from Berlin.
  • Born:
  • *Jim Hightower, American radio host and author, in Denison, Texas
  • *Jill Churchill, American mystery writer, as Janice Young Brooks in Kansas City, Missouri
  • Died:
  • *Agustín Pedro Justo, 66, President of Argentina from 1932 to 1938
  • *Carlo Tresca, 63, Italian-American labor leader, in a drive-by shooting in Manhattan

January 12, 1943 (Tuesday)

  • Operation Iskra began at 9:30 am, as the Soviet 67th Army began its final assault on the German occupation of Leningrad.
  • The parents of the "Sullivan brothers", five men from Waterloo, Iowa, who had served together on the, were informed that their sons had been listed as "missing in action" since the sinking of that ship in November. The loss of George, Francis, Joseph, Madison and Albert Sullivan was reported as "the heaviest blow suffered by any single family since Pearl Harbor, and probably in American naval history".
  • Pierre Laval, the Chief of Government in Nazi-occupied Vichy France, concluded a deal to cede the Departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais to Germany, as well as pledging the services of 400,000 skilled French workers for German use. The ten-point agreement also legitimized existing German control of industry, finance and agriculture within the occupation zone, while Laval was given authority over the police. Finally, Germany was to receive five destroyers and two large tugs, the remainder of the French fleet at Toulon.
  • The American destroyer USS Worden was abandoned after being driven onto rocks at Constantine Harbor on the Alaskan island of Amchitka.
  • British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was flown from England to Morocco, where he would make war plans with President Roosevelt. The news was not released until January 27, after his return.
  • A group of about 3,000 American troops reclaimed the Alaskan island of Amchitka from Japanese control, and made plans to reclaim Kiska by May.
  • Died: Jan Campert, 40, Dutch journalist and writer, died in the Neuengamme concentration camp.

January 13, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • Adolf Hitler issued a follow-up to a decree originally issued on December 18, 1942, titled "Führer decree on the full employment of men and women in the defence of the Reich". The new order required all male factory workers, except for those essential for the war effort to be replaced by women, and expanded the conscription of women to all females between the ages of 17 and 50. Together, the decrees of December 18 and January 13 mobilized a large number of women into the German workforce and freed up more men to serve in the military.
  • The removal of the Jewish population from the Polish city of Radom was completed. Prior to the German invasion in 1939, Radom had 30,000 Jewish residents, one-third of the total population. A census taken at the end of 1945, after World War II ended, counted only 299 remaining Jews out of a population of 79,000.
  • The Soviet Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh offensive begins, the first sub-operation of the larger Voronezh–Kharkov Offensive conducted by the Voronezh Front. Seeking to capitalize on the success of Operation Little Saturn, the Soviet 6th Army and 3rd Guards Tank Army strike westward across the upper Don River, aiming to encircle and destroy the Hungarian 2nd Army and the Italian Alpini Corps, a remnant of the Italian 8th Army.
  • The German submarine U-224 was depth charged, rammed and sunk west of Algiers by the Canadian corvette Ville de Quebec, and the U-507 was sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by an American PBY Catalina.
  • Born: Richard Moll, American television actor known for playing Bull Shannon on Night Court; in Pasadena, California

January 14, 1943 (Thursday)

January 15, 1943 (Friday)

  • USAAF B-24 Liberators bombed a Japanese convoy off the coast of Burma and sank the cargo ship Nichimei Maru. Unbeknownst to the American pilots, the ship was transporting 1,000 Dutch prisoners of war, of whom approximately 37 perished immediately. 16 more, amongst them 5 Australian POW, succumbed to their injuries in the days after on board of the Moji Maru, the second ship in the convoy, which was damaged but still afloat, and in Moulmein.
  • The Pentagon, now headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, was dedicated in Arlington, Virginia, only 16 months after construction had started on September 11, 1941. Each of its five sides is 921 feet long and 77 feet high, and the building covers 29 acres.
  • Born: Margaret Beckett, British politician
  • Died:
  • *Jarvis Roosevelt Catoe, 36, American serial killer who strangled ten women between 1935 and 1941, was executed in the electric chair in New York
  • *Eric Knight, 45, the English-born American author of Lassie, was killed in an airplane crash

January 16, 1943 (Saturday)

January 17, 1943 (Sunday)

January 18, 1943 (Monday)

  • The first Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on the day that Nazi German soldiers began their second deportation from Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. At 7:00 am, 200 SS troops and another 800 auxiliaries arrived at the ghetto and began the roundup of people to be taken to the Treblinka concentration camp. Members of the Jewish resistance organization Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, armed with pistols, worked their way into the crowd of about 1,000 deportees, and, at a pre-arranged signal, emerged and began fighting the Germans. After four days of fighting, the deportations would halt, temporarily.
  • The Red Army of the Soviet Union broke the German Wehrmacht's 515-day siege of Leningrad. The Germans had besieged Leningrad since August 21, 1941. That day, General Georgy Zhukov became the first field commander of World War II to be promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Suvorov in recognition of "successfully carrying out the general leadership of the counteroffensive at Stalingrad".
  • "War Food Order No. 1" went into effect in the United States, requiring for the first time that white bread be enriched with the nutrients niacin, riboflavin, thiamin and iron. Although the federal order expired at the end of World War II, most of the states of the U.S. would continue the requirement after the war by legislation.
  • Born: Kay Granger, U.S. Representative since 1997, in Greenville, Texas
  • Died: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, 79, American labor leader and founder of the Women's Trade Union League

January 19, 1943 (Tuesday)

January 20, 1943 (Wednesday)

  • Germany's daytime bombardment of the Sandhurst Road School killed 41 schoolchildren, ranging in age from 6 to 14 years old, along with six teachers. The school was located in the London suburb of Catford and the German Luftwaffe bombers arrived with little warning.
  • Born: Mel Hague, English singer and author
  • Died: Attila Petschauer, 38, Hungarian Olympic fencer, gold medalist in 1928 and 1932, in the Davidovka concentration camp in Ukraine, where he and other Hungarian Jews had been deported by the German SS.

January 21, 1943 (Thursday)

January 22, 1943 (Friday)

  • Papua "became the first complete geographical unit to be won back from the Japanese", as Allied forces drove out the last pockets of Japan's resistance following the capture of Sanananda. Australia lost 2,000 men, the United States, 600, and the Japanese 13,000 men, with only 1,200 surviving from the occupation of Papua. "For the first time in World War II", one author would note, "the Allies had defeated the Japanese in a land operation."
  • In one of the fastest weather-related increases in temperature on record, the Weather Bureau in Spearfish, South Dakota noted an increase from -4 °F at 7:30 am, to 45 °F two minutes later at 7:32 am, which an investigator concluded was "the result of the wavering motion of a pronounced quasistationary front separating Continental Arctic air from Maritime Polar air", possibly contributed to by a chinook wind. After peaking at 54 °F at 9:00 am, the temperature was back at 4 below zero by 9:27. At Rapid City, temperatures rose from 5° to 54° in twenty minutes, so rapidly "that buildings were exprinecing winter on one side and spring around the corner".
  • The Germans lost their last airfield at Stalingrad when Gumrak was taken.
  • Margaret Bourke-White became the first woman to ever fly along on a United States Army Air Force bombing mission, accompanying the 97th Bomb Group on a B-17 bomber, the Little Bill, which was attacking a German held airfield in Tunis.
  • The Round up of Marseille began with the detention of over 4,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Marseille as part of "Action Tiger", before being transported to extermination camps in Poland.
  • U.S. President Roosevelt and Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco dined together at Anfa in a meeting that one author says "changed history". According to the President's son, Elliot Roosevelt, FDR said, "Why does Morocco, inhabited by Moroccans, belong to France? Anything must be better than to live under French colonial rule," and added "When we've won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France's imperialistic ambitions."

January 23, 1943 (Saturday)

January 24, 1943 (Sunday)

  • The Casablanca Declaration was issued at the close of the Casablanca Conference in Morocco. U.S. President Roosevelt announced, to the few correspondents permitted to go along on the secret trip, that he and U.K. Prime Minister Churchill had agreed that the Allies would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers. "It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan," Roosevelt said, "but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people." The news would not be released until both leaders returned home from Morocco.
  • For the first time since World War Two began, Germany's newspapers began printing pessimistic reports "apparently preparing the Germans for news of a disastrous defeat on the Eastern Front". The Völkischer Beobachter and the Börsen Zeitung were among those that carried the commentary from Karl Megerle, who wrote that "For the first time in this war, Germany faces reverses of a certain importance." At the same time, the Berlin correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that German radio had started playing "mourning music" between its news reports "instead of the usual lively tunes."
  • The destroyer became the first ship to shoot down a plane without ever seeing it, relying solely on radar to spot an approaching Japanese aircraft at Guadalcanal.
  • Died:
  • *John Burns, 84, British politician who became the first person to rise from manual labor to becoming a British government minister; and Joe Choynski, 74, American boxer

January 25, 1943 (Monday)

  • Five days before the 1939-1943 session of Germany's parliament, the Reichstag, was scheduled to end, Adolf Hitler issued the decree that "The tenure of the presently existing Reichstag is extended until January 30, 1947." The new decree superseded one that Hitler had issued in 1939, requiring a new election to be held "within sixty days" after the Reichstag's four-year tenure had terminated, hence eliminating the need for elections before March 30.
  • The two separate thrusts of Soviet troops met in the center of Stalingrad, cutting the remaining German forces into two small pockets.
  • Born: Tobe Hooper, American film director, in Austin, Texas
  • Died: Jay Pierrepont Moffat, 47, U.S. ambassador to Canada since 1940, died of complications from surgery for phlebitis.

January 26, 1943 (Tuesday)

January 27, 1943 (Wednesday)

January 28, 1943 (Thursday)

  • U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced that the War Department would "ease restrictions on Americans of Japanese ancestry and employ loyal ones in war work", with the formation of a Japanese-American army unit. "It is the inherent right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the nation's battle," Stimson said, at a time when most Japanese-Americans had been confined to internment camps.
  • Japanese submarine I-65 shelled the Western Australian town of Port Gregory, but did no damage.
  • Born: John Beck, American film and TV actor; in Chicago
  • Died: Glyndwr Michael, 34, Welsh homeless man whose body would be used for Britain's Operation Mincemeat to deceive Axis intelligence into expecting an attack on Italy to start from Sardinia rather than Sicily. On April 30, with papers identifying him as Major William Martin, and a set of "top secret" invasion plans, Michael would be dumped into the sea in a successful disinformation campaign. Michael's true identity would be revealed 55 years later.

January 29, 1943 (Friday)

January 30, 1943 (Saturday)

January 31, 1943 (Sunday)

  • At 7:35 in the morning in Stalingrad, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered 90,000 German troops to Soviet Army Lt. Fyodor Ilchenko. Of the 250,000 German troops that had invaded the Soviet Union, less than 5,000 would ever return home.
  • President Roosevelt returned to the White House after having been away for 23 days in conferences in Morocco, Liberia and Brazil.
  • The Battle of Wau ended in decisive Allied victory.
  • A fire at the Lake Forest Sanitarium for invalids near Seattle killed at least 28 people.