Photo of the Day

No. 470

It’s January 19, 1943.

…a Tuesday night.

Colgate Tooth Powder Presents is on the radio.

Entertainer Al Jolson is the show’s host, and he urges listeners to dig deep in their pockets to buy war bonds.

‘Support our boys…’

It is a dark time.

The Casablanca Conference.

President Franklin Roosevelt is in Morocco, attending the Casablanca Conference alongside Winston Churchill.

The city center of Stalingrad after liberation from the German occupation.

Stalin had declined to attend the conference, citing the need to remain in the Soviet Union as the Battle of Stalingrad ground to a successful, but costly, close.

A British special ops force returns after a three-month patrol in North Africa.

The Royal Air Force had begun a bombing blitz over Berlin two days earlier.

Meanwhile, British ground troops pressed an assault against German positions in Tripoli, Libya.

The third man from the left is SS commander Juergen Stroop. He directed the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April-May 1943.

The day before the radio broadcast, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had begun the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a magnificent, if futile, act of collective resistence to the German occupation of Poland.

Marines survey the bodies of Japanese troops after a battle on Guadalcanal, August 1942.

The Battle of Guadalcanal was in its final days.

The Allied victory there would signal the switch from defense to offense in the war against Imperial Japan.

Gen. Patton is standing on the left. Gen. Eisenhower and FDR sit in the jeep. Sicily 1943.

Within weeks, shoe rationing would begin in the US and Dwight Eisenhower would be appointed to command all Allied forces in Europe.

The war would go on for another two-and-one-half years.

Office of War Information propaganda poster.

As Jolson closed the radio show, he urged Americans to fight for their rights as a free people.

Al Jolson sings in a radio performance.

“Listen, Americans,

‘You’ve got the right to say what you wanna say, you’re entitled to it.

“You’ve got the right to pray the way you wanna pray, and you’re entitled to it.

“You’ve got the right to live beneath a peaceful sky above.

“You’ve got the right to work and play and sing and laugh and love, and you’re entitled to it.

“But today, there are those who would take those rights away.

“Today the world is threatened by human beasts of prey.

“Today we gotta unite,

“and fight,

“to defend each person’s right,

“from the forces of destruction.”

Al Jolson entertains Allied troops in Europe during WWII.

The dark time has come again, but this time, the threat is coming from inside the house.

******************************

I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda

Banner image: The Glomar Explorer, a vessel built by the Howard Hughes company for the CIA which retrieved portions of a lost Soviet nuclear submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in 1974.