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August 24th, 1939 (THURSDAY)

UNITED KINGDOM:
Parliament reconvenes and passes the Emergency Powers Act, Royal Assent is given today.
The Royal Navy is ordered to war stations.

Western Approaches Command opens at Plymouth.

Kent County Cricket club secretary, G de L. Hough, suggests to the touring West Indian cricket team, that their match scheduled for the 30th might have to be cancelled because of the deepening crisis. (72)

Destroyer HMS Juno commissioned.

Minesweeper HMS Britomart commissioned.

Lord Lovat is mobilised as a Captain in the Lovat Scouts, Territorial Army. (Daniel Ross)

NETHERLANDS: Sloop HNLMS Van Kinsbergen commissioned.

GERMANY:
Hitler predicts that the Chamberlain government will fail.
Göring  meets with Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman and proposes that Dahlerus, who has good connections, should act as a go-between with Great Britain.
Ambassador Henderson urges that Poland and Germany re-establish contact, saying that it is the 'last hope, if any, of peace: if there is a last hope'.

Sidney Cotton and his secretly modified Lockheed Electra fly the last British civilian flight out of Berlin. He had flown to Berlin to pick up Hermann Göring and fly him to England for a last ditch meeting with Chamberlain in an effort to avert war. Given an exact route to follow for his departure, Cotton still managed to photograph the German naval fleet at Wilhelmshaven from 60 miles away on the way out.  With the start of the war, Cotton became the head of the RAF's Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU), but quickly antagonized top RAF brass and was tossed out.  Cotton's biography is titled "Aviator Extraordinary".  More recently, fellow Australian Jeff Watson has filmed a one hour documentary about Cotton's exploits and penned a book about him.  Both are titled "Last Plane Out of Berlin", with the book coming out in October 2002. (Dennis Sparks)

FREE CITY OF DANZIG:
The Gauleiter Albert Forster becomes head of state.

U.S.S.R.:
Marshal Voroshilov goes duck shooting.

U.S.A.

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt sends a telegram to Adolf Hitler in which he says, "I appeal to you in the name of the people of the United States, and I believe in the name of peace-loving men and women everywhere, to agree to the solution of the controversies existing between your Government and that of Poland through the adoption of one of the alternative methods I have proposed."

- Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, the leader of "Murder, Incorporated," a squad of hit men employed by Mafia bosses  and Jewish gang leaders, gives himself up to newspaper columnist Walter Winchell in New York City. Winchell turns the underworld leader over to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. (Jack McKillop & Keith Allen)

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