September 1943

September 1, 1943 (Wednesday)

• Amon Göth, the Nazi commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, decreed that the Jewish prisoners would no longer be allowed to work in the factories in neighboring Płaszów, including the one operated by Oskar Schindler. Thereafter, Jews were required to remain inside the camp at all times, although non-Jewish Poles could continue to work.
• Minami-Tori-shima, a Japanese coral atoll that included an airstrip, located approximately from Tokyo, was attacked by the United States in the first successful strike of the new Fast Carrier Task Force. Rear Admiral Charles Pownall commanded Task Force 15, with three carriers and several support ships, that attacked the atoll.
• The Japanese submarine I-182 was depth charged and sunk in the Coral Sea by the destroyer USS Wadsworth.

  September 2, 1943 (Thursday)

• Seweryn Klajnman, an 18-year-old Jewish inmate at the Treblinka extermination camp, led an escape of 13 of his fellow prisoners. The group killed the Ukrainian SS guard, who was overseeing their work detail, with a crowbar. Klajnman then changed into the guard's uniform, and with rifle in hand and shouting orders, marched his group out of the camp's gates as if going to a new assignment.

• The ocean liner MS Gripsholm, operated by neutral Sweden to make exchanges of civilians between the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers, departed from Jersey City, New Jersey toward Mormugao in Portuguese India with 1,330 Japanese diplomats and their families residing in the United States on board. By agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the Japanese ship Teia Maru would bring American civilians to Mormugao, where an exchange would take place on October 15.
• Born: Glen Sather, Canadian ice hockey player, coach and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee; in High River, Alberta

  September 3, 1943 (Friday)

• The Italian mainland was invaded by the Allies for the first time during World War II, as the British commanding General, Sir Bernard Montgomery, sent the first British and Canadian troops across the Messina Strait, from Sicily to the southern tip of Italy. The British Eighth Army, 5th Division, and the Canadian 1st Division began Operation Baytown at 0430 GMT and encountered little resistance after going ashore at Reggio di Calabria.
• At the same time, General Giuseppe Castellano, acting with the authorization of the Italian government, secretly met with Allied officials at the village of Cassibile in Sicily to sign the Armistice of Cassibile, Italy's unconditional surrender, to "come into force at a moment most favorable to the Allies". U.S. Army General Walter Bedell Smith signed on behalf of the Allies.
• The Nazi German SS began the arrest of thousands of Jews in Belgium, with two days of raids on the cities of Brussels and Antwerp. The first of ten deportations by railroad would begin on September 20.
• The Japanese submarine I-25 was sunk off Espiritu Santo by the destroyer USS Ellet, with the loss of all 94 crew.
• Born: Valerie Perrine, American film actress and model; in Galveston, Texas
• Died: Leon Moisseiff, 70, American engineer and suspension bridge designer

  September 4, 1943 (Saturday)

• Soviet Union premier Joseph Stalin hosted Sergei Izvekov, and two other metropolitans, and offered to allow the Church to hold worship services, in return for the Church's acknowledging "the legitimacy of the Soviet state" and refraining from criticism of the government's policies. The assembled clerics agreed, and the announcement of the end of restrictions was made the next day.
• British troops, under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, captured the Italian ports of Reggio Calabria and San Giovanni di Gerace.
• Major General George Wootten's Australian 9th Division and the 2nd Engineer Special brigade became the first Allied troops to land at New Guinea since the capture of the island by Japanese troops, coming ashore near Lae. With the Australian 7th Division, commanded by Major General George Alan Vasey, arriving soon afterward, Lae would be captured on September 16.

  September 5, 1943 (Sunday)

• U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Alex Doster became the first person to test the paratrooper pick-up system that had been designed by All American Aviation Company. Designed to rescue downed fliers who were stranded in terrain that could not be reached from the air, the All American system used the same principle that had been applied to the picking up of mail sacks from the air. Lt. Doster volunteered for the test, wearing a special harness that minimized the g-force that resulted from being picked up from the ground at a speed of, and, within three minutes, climbed aboard a Stinson aircraft piloted by Norm Rintoul.
• In what General Douglas MacArthur described as "the first major parachute jump in the Pacific War", the U.S. Army 503rd Parachute Regiment landed and seized the Japanese held airport at Nadzab, just east of the port city of Lae in northeastern Papua New Guinea.
• Born: Dolores Prida, Cuban-born American advice columnist; in Caibarién
• Died: Aleš Hrdlička, 74, Czech anthropologist

  September 6, 1943 (Monday)

• In the U.S., a train crash killed 79 people and 116 injured 116 others. The Congressional Limited Express, operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad at Philadelphia, had been en route from Washington to New York City, with 541 passengers. At 6:08 pm, nine of the 16 cars on the train derailed, after an axle on the seventh one had caught fire, causing a chain reaction that sent the cars crashing into each other.
• The important railway junction of Konotop fell to the Soviet 60th Army.
• The struck a mine and sank in the Bay of Biscay with the loss of all 52 crew.
• Born:
• *Richard J. Roberts, British molecular biologist and winner of 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine; in Derby
• *Roger Waters, English rock musician ; in Great Bookham, Surrey
• Died: Reginald McKenna, 80, British Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer

  September 7, 1943 (Tuesday)

• As the German Army retreated from the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union, Heinrich Himmler issued his "scorched earth" order, with the goal to be "not one person remains, no cattle, no wheat, no railroad track ... neither a house nor a mine which would not be destroyed for years ... no well which would not be poisoned.
• A fire at the Gulf Hotel in Houston killed 55 men, most of them elderly residents. The blaze broke out shortly after midnight at the three-story building.
• The Italian submarine was torpedoed and sunk off Salerno by the British submarine Shakespeare, with the loss of all 46 crew.
• Born: Gloria Gaynor, American singer, known for "I Will Survive"; as Gloria Fowles, in Newark, New Jersey

  September 8, 1943 (Wednesday)

• Italy surrendered to the Allied forces after more than three years as a member of the alliance of the Axis powers. At 7:30 in the evening local time, radio listeners in Italy were stunned to hear their Prime Minister, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, read the statement that "The Italian Government, recognizing the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against the overwhelming power of the enemy, and with the object of avoiding further and more grievous harm to the nation, has requested an armistice from General Eisenhower ... This request has been granted. The Italian forces will, therefore, cease all acts of hostility against the Anglo-American forces wherever they may be met ..." U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower released the news of the unconditional surrender, "effective this instant", at the same time in a broadcast from Allied Headquarters in North Africa.
• Half of the 70,000 Allied prisoners of war in Italy were able to escape in a single day, walking out of the camps when their prison guards deserted. German troops had moved into northern Italy, where the 35,000 member Jewish population was concentrated, during the 45 days since the overthrow of Benito Mussolini.
• U.S. warplanes conducted the Frascati air raid, killing 485 civilians.
• In his first public statement since March 22, Germany's Adolf Hitler delivered a radio address from Berlin to talk about the recent withdrawal of Italy from the war. Saying that "I see the time has come to speak again to the German people," Hitler said that the loss of Italy was not "due to lack of German assistance", but, rather, "failure or ill will of those elements which by systematic sabotage have caused capitulations."
• Allied forces began the Dodecanese Campaign, an attempt to capture the Italian-held Dodecanese islands of Greece.
• The Soviet 5th Shock Army entered Stalino.
• Germany ordered the removal of 5,006 Jewish residents of Theresienstadt, which had been set aside by the Nazis as a city where Jewish intellectuals could be relocated to live without interference. The group was sent to Birkenau, near the extermination camp in Auschwitz, with orders that they receive Sonderbehandlung for six months. In March 1944, the order would expire and the residents would be executed.
• The first classes commenced at the Grace Bible Institute in Omaha, Nebraska, with 23 students. The college would be renamed Grace University in 1995 and close in 2018.
• Born: Negasso Gidada, President of Ethiopia from 1995 until 2001; in Dembidolo
• Died: Julius Fučík, 40, Czech resistance leader, was executed

  September 9, 1943 (Thursday)

• The Italian battleship Roma was attacked by German Nazi bombers and sunk by the new guided bomb, the Fritz X. The ship went down between Corsica and Sardinia and took with it 1,253 of its crew of 1,849 including the Commander of the Italian Navy, Admiral Carlo Bergamini. The wreckage would remain undiscovered for more than 68 years; on June 28, 2012, the government of Italy would announce that the Roma had been located.
• The second phase of the Allied invasion of Italy, Operation Avalanche, commenced at 3:30 am, as the U.S. Army VI Corps and the British Army X Corps stormed the beaches at the Gulf of Salerno, and encountered heavy resistance from German forces. Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark, who commanded the U.S. Fifth Army, decided not to precede the amphibious landings with an aerial bombardment of the German defenders, preserving an element of surprise at the expense of high casualties.
• British forces began Operation Slapstick, a landing at the crucial Italian port of Taranto, with the goal of drawing German forces away from the main Allied landings at Salerno on the same day. The operation forced Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III and Prime Minister Badoglio to flee from Rome.
• The Action off Bastia was fought as a naval battle off of the coast of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. In their first action since the September 3 Armistice with the Allies and Italy's departure from the Axis, the Italian Navy sank two German submarine chasers and five naval ferry barges. Eight German ships were sunk with the loss of 160 men while the Italian forces under Carlo Fecia di Cossato lost 70 people.
• The three-day Battle of Rhodes began between German and Italian forces for the Greek island of Rhodes ending with a disastrous loss of much of the 37,000 Italian armed troops to the German invaders.
• In a speech at Harvard University, Winston Churchill called for Anglo-American cooperation to continue long after the war was over.
• Iran, which had remained neutral since the outbreak of World War II, declared war against Germany, with a 73–4 vote by the Majlis to approve the decree of the reigning monarch, Reza Shah.
• The Japanese submarine I-182 was torpedoed and sunk in the Surigao Strait off Espiritu Santo by the submarine USS Trout, with the loss of all 87 crew.