19 November 1939

MANCHURIA: Japan occupies Tsitsihar claiming it is a "purely defensive" action "aimed. at striking a decisive blow against the Ma Chan-shan army."

UNITED STATES: Despite a ground swell of support for an economic boycott of Japan in the country, Secretary of State Henry Stimson informs the British that the U.S. would not participate in a League of Nations economic sanction against the Japanese. President Herbert Hoover's administration is not willing to go to war with Japan over Manchuria, a step which helps undermine the effectiveness of international sanctions against an aggressor state.

CHINA: Japanese military authorities demand Chinese authorities at Peiping accept the autonomy program under threat of Japanese military occupation.

CANADA: The RCAF gains parity with the RCN and the Canadian Army when the senior air force officer came to report directly to the Minister of National Defence.

EGYPT: In response to international tensions, the Egyptian government initiates a major armament program which includes the expansion of the kingdom's air force and navy and the construction of munitions plants.

FRANCE: France recognizes the Italian Empire as a token of appreciation of the part played by Premier Benito Mussolini during the Czechoslovakian crisis.

GERMANY: Polish Ambassador Jozef Lipski meets with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Berlin and informs him that, "any tendency to incorporate the Free City (Danzig) into the Reich will inevitably lead to conflict" between Poland and Germany.

GERMANY: Berlin: The most feared man in Germany and occupied Poland is a mild mannered former poultry farmer with a yen for astrology and violence. Heinrich Himmler has been at Hitler's side from the earliest days of the Nazi Party. The son of a Bavarian schoolmaster, Himmler was present at the failed Munich putsch of 1923 and took over the SS in 1928. In the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives" he provided the firing squads for the killing of Ernst Rohm and other Brownshirts who were becoming a nuisance to Hitler. He organised the concentration camps and planned massacres of Jews and Poles in eastern Europe.

Himmler controls the Gestapo and the Security Service as well as the regular criminal police. As Reichsfuhrer-SS he commands the regimes notorious Schutzstaffel, or SS, for which he has drawn up a rigid code of conduct. A member can marry only after the Gestapo has investigated the would-be bride. Himmler plans to send the SS to Britain after the German invasion. If this happened, British Jews and socialists, first among the many targets for Nazi brutality, would have no illusions about their fate: the SS has been responsible for carrying out most of the Nazi's atrocities in occupied western Poland.

The Heinkel He 177 V1 prototype makes its first flight that lasts just 12 minutes because of engine overheating.

U-13 sank SS Bowling.

U-41 sank SS Darino.

U-49 sank SS Pensiva.

U-57 sank SS Stanbrook.

U-41 took on 11 survivors from the sunken Darino at 0200hrs. These survivors were transferred approximately ten hours later to an Italian steamer.