September 24th, 1945 (MONDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: Submarine HMS Ambush launched.
JAPAN: Tokyo: Hirohito says that he did not want war, and blames Tojo for Pearl Harbor.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: The commander of the US 86th Infantry Division Artillery is directed to dispatch two field artillery battalions to Manila for the purpose of military police and guard duties. The division moves to Canluban. (Drew Philip Halévy)
CANADA:
Frigate HMCS Port Colborne completed
tropicalization refit at Liverpool, Nova Scotia
Minesweepers HMCS Canso and Bayfield paid
off and returned to the Royal Navy at Sheerness.
U.S.A.: Chuck Baisden is discharged from the USAAF as a MSGT. (Chuck Baisden)
1948: (FRIDAY)
UNITED STATES: Mildred Gillars, accused of being Nazi wartime radio propagandist ''Axis Sally,'' pleads innocent in Washington, D.C., to charges of treason. Gillars, born in Portland, Maine in 1900, was an aspiring actress who ended up in Greenwich Village, New York City, in the late 1920s, hoping to crash the stage. When she failed to do so, she picked up again and moved to Europe to pursue a political attache with whom she'd had a casual affair. By 1934, she had settled in Berlin, where she eked out a living as a translator and dabbled at bit parts in German films. In 1940, she landed a job at the "Bremensender," a German radio station, where she worked as a staff announcer. She became increasingly embittered during these years -- and refused to return to the United States when the government began urging civilian US citizens to leave Germany in 1941. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she swore an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich. It was at this time that she crossed paths with a fellow broadcaster and another American expatriate. Max Otto Koischwitz who had taught at Hunter College in New York City but resigned in 1940 and moved to Germany. Koischwitz and Gillars became lovers and before long, Koischwitz was working her into his political broadcasts. They began a joint series, the "Home Sweet Home Hour," beamed to Allied troops in North Africa. Gillars was known in these programs as "Midge," and it was under that name that she did all of her propaganda programming. There was never an actual German broadcaster who used the "Axis Sally" name: this was a slang name given Gillars by GI listeners. She is taken into custody after the war and is convicted of treason, but is considered a something of a small fry by the prosecution and is sentenced to only 12-years imprisonment. She is released in 1961, and quietly lived out her remaining years as a language teacher at a Catholic girls school in Ohio. She died in 1988.