November 13th, 1940 (WEDNESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM:The Minister of Home Security reports that 6,334 civilians have been killed and 8,965 injured in the October air raids.
Telegram from Churchill to AOC-in-C, MIDDLE EAST:
I am trying every day to speed up deliveries of Hurricanes etc to your command.
I was astonished to find that you have nearly 1,000 aircraft and pilots with 16,000 personnel in the Middle East. ...surely out of this establishment you ought to be able to produce a substantially larger number of modern aircraft operationally fit?
Submarine HMS Shakespeare laid down.
FRANCE: During the night of 13/14 November, two aircraft of the RAF Wireless Intelligence and Development Unit make the first direct attack on German Ruffian navigational radar installations on the Cherbourg Peninsula by homing in on their transmission.
VICHY FRANCE: Pierre Dupuy leaves for Vichy. Dupuy, a French-Canadian who had lived and worked in France since 1919 in the office of the Canadian High Commission in Paris, is being used as an intermediary between Britain and the Vichy government. He has had at least two meetings with Halifax, although the minutes of Cabinet meeting on the 12th suggest that Dupuy's brief extended no further than to cultivate good relations with Vichy and report any promising openings.
GERMANY: Berlin: Hitler orders Göring to prepare the Luftwaffe for an invasion of Russia next May.
Molotov again meets with von Ribbentrop. He presses him on the purpose of the German troops present in Finland. Ribbentrop replies that the troops are merely in transit to northern Norway and that the whole matter is a "misunderstanding". Hitler also evaded the question when he met later with Molotov instead launching into a speech on the dissolution of the British Empire and it's subsequent carving up between the Axis powers (and the Soviet Union at this point). Molotov also presses Hitler on the recent German-Italian guarantees to Romania which work against Soviet interests. Hitler evades the question.
That evening Molotov gives a banquet in the Russian Embassy in Unter den Linden and entertains von Ribbentrop. The banquet is interrupted by an air-raid [We had heard of the conference beforehand, says Churchill, and though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.] carrying on their conversation in an air-raid shelter Ribbentrop talks of the need to divide up the British Empire now that England is so decisively beaten. "If England is so beaten, why are we sitting in this shelter?" retorts Molotov.
U-149 commissioned.
MEDITERRANEAN SEA: At 0120 hours local, the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney (D 48) and the British destroyer HMS Mohawk (G 31) attack an Italian convoy consisting of four merchant vessels escorted by two destroyers in the Straits of Oranto between Italy and Albania. All four merchant ships are sunk.
NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES: The Dutch East Indies agrees to supply Japan with nearly two million tons of oil a year.
AUSTRALIA: Minesweeper HMAS Warrnambool laid down.
U.S.A.:
Washington: Telegram from Roosevelt to Churchill:
I ... have sent instructions to the American Charge d'Affaires in Vichy to confirm or deny the report that Jean Bart and Richelieu are to be transferred to the Mediterranean.
If the report is confirmed, the Charge d'Affaires will convey to Petain an expression of the grave concern of this Government that the ships will be moved to places subject to a control inconsistent with the ultimate interests of the US.
This would seriously prejudice Franco-American relations.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Three powder plants blow up in less than an hour. At least 14 are dead and 23 seriously injured.
New York: The liner Queen Elizabeth, which has lain at dock since
March, left port last night.
Walt Disney's animated musical "Fantasia" opens at the Broadway
Theater in New York City. This was the first film with stereophonic sound.
As a result of the film, Mickey Mouse regains the position of the favourite
Disney character, a position he has lost to Donald Duck over the last
several years.
Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles, on the strength of a report that French battleships Richelieu (then at Dakar, French West Africa) and Jean Bart (then at Casablanca, French Morocco) are to be moved, perhaps to Toulon, France (within the German sphere of influence), requests the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires ad interim in Spain, H. Freeman Matthews, to let the appropriate French authorities know that the U.S. government would be prepared to contemplate purchase of both capital ships if the French government is willing to dispose of them with the agreement that they would not be used in the present war.
The first Willys-Overland Jeep prototype is completed, and submitted to the U.S. Army for approval. To the Army, the Jeep was known as a "Truck, 1/4-ton, 4x4."
ATLANTIC OCEAN: U-28 met an enemy submarine in the North Atlantic. Two detonations astern were heard, as the enemy sub apparently made an unsuccessful attack.
U-137 sank SS Cape St Andrew in Convoy OB-240.