Photo of the Day

Soviet prisoners at a German transit camp in Smolensk. The man on the right is a captured Soviet lieutenant.

The Soviet army is in retreat as German forces, spearheaded by mechanized columns, press their offensive east towards Moscow and Leningrad.

Left: Soviet women harvest wheat in a field near Smolensk, in western Russia. July 1941. Right: German workers in a MOBILE SAUSAGE-MAKING FACTORY handle hogs as they prepare to make sausages for German troops fighting the Soviet army near Smolensk. July 1941.

The Germans have held Smolensk, 230 miles west of Moscow, for four days, and have repulsed fierce Red Army counter-attacks.

There are large numbers of casualties on both sides.

First responders search through the wreckage of a bombed community air raid shelter where many Hull residents were killed on the night of July 18, 1941. Nearly all of the buildings in Hull were damaged or destroyed during the war and 1,200 residents were killed.

The German air force struck the city of Hull, on England’s northeast coast, yesterday, inflicting heavy damage in residential areas.

The RAF bombed German industrial sites in Cologne and naval assets in Dunkerque, Rotterdam and St. Nazaire.

Officers on the bridge of a US destroyer on Atlantic convoy duty, October 1941. On the right, FDR delivers his Fourth of July radio address from his home in Hyde Park, New York.

President Roosevelt has ordered the Navy to counter any threats to open sea lanes between the US and Iceland, Newfoundland and Bermuda.

Camp Wheeler, in Macon, Georgia, 1941. Military training camps were located across the country, but most were in the South where the weather permitted year-round training.

FDR told reporters he intends to ask Congress for legislation to extend the twelve-month service term of draftees to the duration of the national emergency which he declared in May.

Women in Detroit protest US involvement in the war outside an event featuring Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the US.

And finally…

Yesterday, an elderly woman dressed in black approached the British ambassador as he left the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where he was meeting with US military officials.

She carried a sign which read, “Remember 1776.”

[The Lend-Lease Act which authorized the US to send supplies to Britain was enumerated Congressional Bill No. 1776.]

Lord Halifax and Prime Minister Winston Churchill address staff of the British embassy in Washington, 1943.

The ambassador asked the woman if she opposed US war aid to Britain, and she replied that she did.

‘I have nine sons and seven of them are eligible for the draft,’ she said. ‘Some have already gone. And I will give every one of my sons to defend this country, but I will not give one of them to fight a war for another nation.’

The 'mothers' movement' was a loosely organized women's protest movement which opposed the US Lend-Lease bill and American involvement in the war.

When the ambassador told her that he, too, had sons and three of them were fighting for Britain, the woman, one of four who were protesting outside the hotel, replied, ‘That’s your war.’

Agnes Waters was a leading spokesperson for the mothers' movement, which grew alongside the isolationist America First Committee. On the right, Charles Lindbergh addresses an America First rally in Indiana in October 1941.

On a later trip to Detroit, women protesters pelted Halifax with eggs and tomatoes, and the British press reacted with surprise that America still had such an abundance of food that people could spare some to make a spectacle.

British and American troops link up at Anzio, 1944.

Halifax would later tell a Detroit audience, ‘there is little hope for the future of the world after this war unless your people and my people can work side-by-side.’

It’s still true….

I’ll see you on Monday.

— Brenda

Stories from the New York Times.