A Luftwaffe FW 190, one of the German single-engine fighters targeted by Pointblank. For more information click this link. Click photo to enlarge.
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.
As part of “Operation Point Blank,” the U.S. Eighth Air Force on June 11, 1943, raids the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven with 200 B-17s during the day, while the RAF attacks the cities of Münster and Düsseldorf at night. In the Mediterranean, Axis forces on the Italian island of Pantelleria surrender after 11 days of round-the-clock air and naval bombardment. The garrison of 11,000 is taken prisoner. Because Italian propaganda had (falsely) hailed the island — 62 miles southwest of Sicily — as “an impregnable fortress,” the Allies decided that it had had to be taken, considering it an obstacle blocking their planned invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland. In the U.S., coalmine workers — heeding a call for a walkout by United Mine Workers union president John L. Lewis — walk off their jobs for the second time in two months. As the federal government has been overseeing the coal mines since the first walkout, President Roosevelt halts the work stoppage by threatening to draft the miners into federal service.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on June 12 orders the liquidation of all Jewish ghettos in Poland and the deportation of the residents to the various concentration camps. Great Britain’s King George VI lands in Morocco on his second visit of the war to British overseas forces. Düsseldorf, Germany, undergoes its heaviest air raid thus far, as 693 Allied bombers drop 2,000 tons of bombs in 45 minutes. The Italian garrison on Lampedusa — Italy’s southernmost island, 70 miles from Tunisia and 127 miles from Sicily — surrenders to a Royal Navy lieutenant from the British destroyer HMS Lookout accompanied by 95 men of the Coldstream Guards. The Italians had run out of water on the arid island that has no water source other than rainfall.
Wing Commander John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham, Royal Air Force night-fighter ace, brings down his 16th Luftwaffe victim over southern England on June 13. U.S. Army Air Forces Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest III is killed when the bomber in which he is riding as an observer is shot down during an air raid on Kiel, Germany. He is the great-grandson of the Confederate Army general of the U.S. Civil War. In Los Angeles, the Zoot Suit Riots finally come to an end. Although there are numerous personal injuries and considerable property damages, no deaths are reported.
In Washington, D.C., the U.S. Supreme Court on June 14 reverses an earlier decision in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, and rules 6-3 that, under the Bill of Rights, schoolchildren cannot be compelled to salute the flag if the ceremony conflicts with their religious beliefs. Elsewhere in D.C., an American scientist — code-named “Quantum” by the KGB (the Soviet security agency) — at a secret meeting at the Soviet embassy, provides classified information about the separation of bomb-grade uranium-235 from uranium, part of the work being done by the Manhattan Project. (Although the FBI and the National Security Agency learn of the meeting — and what transpires at it — from cables sent by the embassy that are intercepted and decrypted, the agencies are unable to identify the scientist.)
The German raider SS Michel sinks two Allied ships off the west coast of Australia on June 15. The Nazis begin an attempt to cover up their atrocities: Jewish slave laborers are brought to mass-killing sites near Lviv, Ukraine (formerly Lwów, Poland), and ordered to dig up bodies buried in mass graves and burn them.
The Japanese launch a massive air attack against Allied shipping around Guadalcanal on June 16. However, 93 of the 94 Japanese aircraft involved are destroyed by the Allies. In Tokyo, Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose meets with Japanese premier Hideki Tojo, who promises Japan’s help in India’s attempt to gain independence from the United Kingdom. In Beaumont, Texas, martial law is declared after race riots there kill two people and injure 11. By the time the violence ends the next day, three are dead, over 50 are injured and more than 200 are arrested.
The British battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite are ordered to move on June 17 from their base at Scapa Flow, in Scotland, to Oran, Algeria, and Alexandria, Egypt, in preparation for “Operation Husky,” the Allied invasion of Sicily. In the Mediterranean, the British troopship SS Yoma is torpedoed by German sub U-81 off Derna, Libya. Of the 1,961 aboard Yoma, 484 are killed.
