September 16th, 1941 (TUESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: Corvette FS Commandant Detroyat (ex HMS Coriander) commissioned.
FRANCE: Paris: Hauptmann
(Captain) Scheben is shot dead on the
boulevard de Strasbourg, 12 hostages are shot in consequence.
Attacks on German military property result in another ten French hostages
being executed.
GERMANY: Hamburg: The city suffered a heavy RAF attack last night.
U-306, U-417 and U-666 laid down.
U.S.S.R.: The Kiev pocket begins to collapse as Soviet forces begin to withdraw. General Semen Timoshenko, commander of the Soviet High Command (STAVKA), authorizes the withdrawal. However, Premier Joseph Stalin would not confirm the orders for 48 critical hours.
German forces capture the town of Pushkin, a suburb of Leningrad. The Germans capture several trams filled with workers returning home from factories in Leningrad before the service is shut down. This would mark the “high water” mark for German advances toward Leningrad. They would get no closer.
General Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, in response to the growing threat of partisan bands attacking his lines of communications establishes standing orders that for every German soldier killed by "bandits", 100 civilians are to be executed.
During the month of September, 1941, German Action Group A, consisting of around 800 men, and commanded by SS General Otto Ohlendorf, is operating on the Russian southern front. In the period, 16 to 30 September, in the area around Nikolaev, and including the town of Cherson , they rounded up and massacred 35,782 Soviet citizens, mostly Jews. This is the figure reported to Hitler from the SD office, dated 2 October 1942.
IRAN: The Allies decide
to occupy Teheran.
This comes after the current Shah of Iran, Reza Khan Pahlevi, has not done enough to expel Axis
nationals from the country. The Shah will abdicate in favor of the Crown Prince,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his pliable 22 year old son, who will flee his country in 1979.
With Soviet and British armies threatening Tehran, he has little choice.
For two weeks since the armistice following the Anglo-Russian invasion, the shah
had refused Allied demands to expel Germany's legation, to hand over Iran's
German community for internment, and to facilitate Allied rail links from the
Persian Gulf to the USSR.
The government breaks diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Romania.
SYRIA: Damascus: Free French forces, with British backing, terminate the French mandate and agree to guarantee Syria's independence.
THE NEW YORK TIMES states that "Free France acting in
agreement with her ally, Great Britain, has undertaken to terminate the mandate
and grant Syria the status of an independent sovereign State and to guarantee
the new State by treaty."
CANADA: Nova Scotia: Convoy
HX-150, the first to be escorted by the US Navy, leaves for Europe.
Leaving Halifax the convoy will be escorted by the Canadian Navy up to a point
south of Newfoundland, where US navy destroyers will take over, giving formal
protection. They will take the convoy to a mid-ocean meeting point where the
escort will be handed over to the British Western Approaches Command. This is
intended to be the pattern for all fast convoys of the HX type in future. The
Canadians will continue to escort the slower SC convoys all the way to the
mid-ocean meeting point.
The east bound convoys are bringing war supplies and many foodstuffs which the British are beginning to accept as their daily diet, such as condensed milk, powdered egg, spam and baked beans.
The escort support from the US will mean that the Royal Navy will be able to divert three escort groups from the North Atlantic to cover Gibraltar and Sierra Leone convoys, US Navy Catalinas, operating, from bases in Iceland, and US Army Flying Fortresses, based in Argenta, are also expected to take on convoy duties.
July and August have already seen a dramatic decrease in the number of merchant ships sunk in the Atlantic. During the first half of the year monthly losses averaged 400,000 tons; it has now dropped to little over 100,000 tons per month. There are several reasons for this. For a start, Bletchley Park is now able to read a significant part of the U-boat Enigma traffic.
The information from this is passed to the Admiralty's submarine tracking room which can then identify U-boat concentrations. It passes details of these to HQ Western Approaches, the naval command responsible for the BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC, which can then re-route convoys.
Located with the Western Approaches HQ, and under its operational control, is No. 15 Group RAF Coastal Command. Its aircraft range far and wide over the north-east Atlantic from their bases in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Iceland. The north-west Atlantic is covered by the Royal Canadian Air Force. Both forces still suffer from a lack of very long-range aircraft, which means that the mid-Atlantic, south of Greenland, does not have air cover. Known as the "Black Pit" or "Black Gap", it presents the most dangerous area for convoys. Despite this, improved methods of detecting U-boats, with more and better-trained escort vessels, are helping to reduce losses.
Convoy SC-42 makes harbour having lost 15 ships for a total of 65,776 tons out of a 65-ship convoy.
U-98 sank SS Jedmoor in Convoy SC-42.
Corvettes HMCS Dunvegan and Morden arrived Halifax from builders in Sorel and Montreal, Province of Quebec respectively
U.S.A.: CBS radio debuted "The Arkansas Traveler." The program is later renamed "The Bob Burns Show." Burns played a very strange musical instrument called the "bazooka". The U.S. Army chose the name to identify its rocket launcher, because it looked so much like Burns' bazooka, believe it or not...
Destroyers USS Butler and Gherardi laid down.
ICELAND: A Danish first officer, Henrik Bjerregaard of the Sessa, has recently recovered sufficiently from an ordeal of 19 days adrift in Artic waters to tell his story.
The Sessa, a former Danish ship flying the Panamanian flag, was transporting provisions from New York to the American ships in Iceland when she was torpedoed by a U-boat. She sank in two minutes. Bjerregaard remembers: "I had no lifebelt, but I grabbed a pole as I was thrown into the water. A seaman joined me, and we hung on for two hours. Then we floated to a lifeboat which was upside down.... we stayed on the lifeboat all night ... Next day a raft from the ship drifted alongside, and as we could not right the boat we jumped on the raft ... After seeing we had a drum of water and tin of biscuits, I cut a sliver off the raft and started to keep a log."
"Every day at sunrise I made a notch to mark another day. After the tenth day one man died, and on the 13th two more died ...On the 17th day all our water went ...on the 19th day, as I lay utterly exhausted, I heard a ship's siren and raised myself to see the Stars and Stripes of an American destroyer."
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES:
The 24th Pursuit Group (Interceptor) is
formed, effective October 1, 1941, the Bombers remained within the 4th
Composite Group. (Marc Small)