Direct Action Day: Islam is the second-largest religion in India,[6] with 14.2% of the country’s population, approximately 172.2 million people,[7] identifying as adherents of Islam in the 2011 census.[8][9] It makes India the country with the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. The majority of Indian Muslims belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, while the Shia form a sizeable minority.Wikipedia
By Phil Kohn. Dedicated to the memory of his father, GM3 Walter Kohn, U.S. Navy Armed Guard, USNR, and all men and women who have answered the country’s call in time of need. Phil can be contacted at ww2remembered@yahoo.com.
August 16, 1946, is designated “Direct Action Day” in India by Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-India Muslim League, to demonstrate Muslim power in the country. A general strike by Muslims takes place as a protest calling for a separate state of “Pakistan” (“land of the pure,” in Urdu) for Indian Muslims rather than for them to remain as citizens in a Hindu-majority India upon independence from Great Britain. Riots between Muslims and Hindus break out in Calcutta in which 3,000 people are killed over the next four days. Sectarian rioting and mass killings also take place elsewhere in northern and eastern India. The communal fighting lasts for months, resulting in over 10,000 dead and 100,000 left homeless.
At the port of Haifa, British Mandatory Palestine, on August 17, a disturbance begins among 1,450 Jews gathered for deportation; one person is killed, and several are injured. In the United Kingdom, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is published. Orwell himself describes the novella as a satirical tale against Stalin. First Sgt. Lawrence Lambert of the U.S. Army Air Forces becomes the first American to test an airplane ejection seat, exiting a British Gloster Meteor Mark III jet fighter.
British troops, on August 18, use tear gas and fire hoses to force over 600 Jewish refugees onto a ship at Haifa for deportation to Cyprus. However, shortly after departure, two bombs explode in the vessel’s hold, forcing the ship to return to port. In London, the British report that captured German records show that Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini assisted the Nazi leadership for three years against British plans in the Middle East. Just after 2 p.m. in Pola, in northeastern Italy, 12 large pieces of ordnance — containing 9 tons of explosives — suddenly explode on a bathing beach. The blast kills 70 people and injures up to 100 who were attending an annual swimming event. The munitions had been swept from the water and piled up on the beach awaiting disposal.
On August 19, for the second time in 10 days, a U.S. C-47 transport plane is shot down over Slovenia. Yugoslavia claims that the plane repeatedly violated Yugoslav airspace. The airplane is a total loss and five people are killed. The U.S. reacts with outrage and demands access to its plane that had been forced down 10 days earlier, the return of its passengers and crew, and a full investigation of the circumstances.
The United Nations on August 20 completes its move from temporary quarters at Hunter College in the Bronx, New York, to a building in Lake Success, New York, on Long Island.
At Marburg, in the American Occupation Zone of Germany, the U.S. Army on August 21 reinters the bodies of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, and of his father, Frederick William I of Prussia, who ruled from 1713 to 1740. (In 1943, Hitler had ordered the bodies to be disinterred and moved to a salt mine to protect them from damage.)
After receiving an ultimatum from the U.S. on August 22 demanding action within 48 hours “or else,” Yugoslavia frees seven Americans and three Hungarians who were aboard the U.S. transport plane forced down on 9 August. A Turkish officer who had also been aboard the plane remains hospitalized from wounds he sustained during the attack. The incidents cause the U.S. to realize that its framework for international relations, heretofore focused on the Soviet Union, will have to be modified to also accommodate countries — such as Yugoslavia — that are not squarely within the sphere of either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. In Budapest, Döme Sztójay, Hungarian prime minister during the German occupation, is executed by a firing squad after being convicted of treason and crimes against humanity.
Producer-director Howard Hawks’s film noir, The Big Sleep, premieres in the United States on August 23. The movie’s convoluted plot is made even less comprehensible due to post-production re-shooting, story cuts, and editing by Warner Bros. to emphasize the chemistry between hot-item stars Bogie (Humphrey Bogart) and (Lauren) Bacall rather than the clarity of the story. The picture makes money anyway.
The lower house of the Japanese Diet on August 24 approves a new constitution that includes a prohibition against making war. (The upper house will approve the document later in the year.) Philippines communist leader Juan Feleo disappears and is presumed murdered, triggering an eight-year-long insurgency — known as the Huk Rebellion — by former soldiers of the People’s Army Against the Japanese. In Hollywood, 20-year-old actress Norma Jeanne Baker signs a contract with 20th Century-Fox. For the first time, she uses her new stage name, which she has borrowed from parts of the names of actress Marilyn Miller and her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker. And, voila! Marilyn Monroe is born.
In Italy, the recovered remains of dictator Benito Mussolini are secretly moved on August 25 from police headquarters in Milan to the cemetery of a Capuchin monastery in Cerro Maggiore, a suburb about 12 miles to the northwest. (Admirers of Il Duce had stolen his body from its previous gravesite.) In Germany, the body of Paul von Hindenburg, former president of Germany who died in 1934, is re-buried in Marburg, in the American Occupation Zone. Hitler, in 1944, had had the body disinterred from the Tannenberg Memorial in Poland and hidden in a salt mine to prevent its desecration by the approaching Soviets. (The Memorial was a monument to victorious German soldiers at the Battle of Tannenberg [near what is now Olsztyn, Poland] in 1914. The body of Hindenberg — the German commander at the battle — was entombed in the Memorial in 1934.)
The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on August 26 issues the resolution “On the Repertoire of Dramatic Theatres and Measures for Improving It.” It is an attack on Soviet theatre as part of the government’s ongoing official assault on the arts.
France signs a treaty with Laos on August 27, establishing a protectorate and recognizing Sisavang Vong as monarch with limited autonomy. Owners of American and National League major-league baseball teams meet in secret and vote 15-1 to retain the unwritten ban on African American players. The argument is that integrating the majors would hurt the Negro Leagues. The one nay-sayer: Branch Rickey, president, general manager and co-owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, soldiers of the Sudanese Defense Force get into an argument and then an all-out brawl with a group of Eritrean civilians on August 28. (The Sudanese have been part of the British occupying force since the Italians were driven out of Eritrea in 1941.) One Sudanese soldier dies of injuries. When word gets back to their barracks, 70 armed Sudanese arrive on the scene and engage in a two-hour-long shooting spree that kills 46 unarmed Eritrean civilians and wounds 70 more. Three Sudanese soldiers are killed in related violence, and 13 are injured. The incident does much to incite anti-British fervor in the country and increase tensions between the Muslim Sudanese and mostly Christian Eritreans.
Chinese Nationalist forces on August 29 capture Chengde, in Hebei Province northeast of Peking, China. Meanwhile, Communists take Tatung, 325 miles to the southwest, in Shanxi Province, after a siege of 25 days. In the Netherlands, Jacob Eduard Feenstra, a lieutenant-colonel in the Wehrmacht-controlled Dutch military police (Marechaussee), is executed for collaboration with the Nazis and for torturing captured Dutch resistance fighters.
