October 31, 1941: The Sinking of the Reuben James

October 31, 1941: The destroyer USS Reuben James is sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland. There were 100 deaths, and only 44 survivors.

This was an act of war, as America had not yet entered World War II, but it did not move Congress to declare war on Nazi Germany, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew he couldn't ask them. Still.

Folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote "The Sinking of the Reuben James" about it:

Tell me: what were their names?
Tell me: what were their names?
Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?

Woody's guitar reads, "This machine kills fascists."

Reuben James (1776-1838) was a boatswain's mate from Delaware, famous for his heroism in saving the life of his commanding officer, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, during the Gunboat Battle of August 3, 1804, in the First Barbary War -- although there is dispute as to whether he was the sailor who saved Decatur.

On April 1, 1943, a new destroyer named Reuben James was christened. It was decommissioned only 4 years later, after the War ended. A 3rd ship with the name, a frigate, served from 1982 to 2013.

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October 31, 1941 was a Friday. It was also Halloween. This was also the day that Mount Rushmore was declared "finished." I have a separate entry for that event. Actress Sally Kirkland was born on this day.

Baseball season was over. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season didn't start until the next day. But there were 4 college football games that night:

* Penn State beat New York University, 42-0 at the Polo Grounds.

* Clemson beat George Washington University, 19-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* South Carolina beat The Citadel, 13-6 at the County Fairgrounds in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

* And the University of Miami beat Texas Tech, 6-0 at Burdine Stadium in Miami. Burdine Stadium was renamed the Orange Bowl in 1959.

October 17, 1941: The 1st U.S. Casualties of World War II

The USS Kearny

October 17, 1941: For the 1st time, American troops died in World War II. And America wasn't even in the war yet.

The USS Kearny was a Greaves-class destroyer, launched in 1940, and named for Commodore Lawrence Kearny, an early American naval officer. He served as Mayor of his hometown of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and another city in that State was named for him.

The Kearny was docked at Reykjavik, Iceland, when it was sent to assist a British convoy that had been attacked by a "wolfpack" of German U-boats (submarines). The Kearny dropped depth charges, and the Nazis returned fire, hitting the Kearny with a torpedo, killing 11 American sailors and injuring 22 others.

Though damaged, the Kearny was able to reach port, and was ready to go again on December 25 (Christmas Day), able to head back to Boston for permanent repairs.

This was hardly the 1st time American and Nazi vessels had fired on each other. Still, Congress would not grant President Franklin D. Roosevelt a Declaration of War. But Adolf Hitler would specifically cite the Kearny incident in his declaration of war on America on December 11, 1941. That declaration was a mistake he would regret.

The Kearny continued to be used as a convoy escort through the end of World War II. It was decommissioned in 1946, held in reserve in Orange, Texas, and scrapped in 1972.

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October 17, 1941 was a Friday. The baseball season ended 11 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season wouldn't start for another 14 days. There were 3 games in college football:

* Duquesne University beat St. Vincent's of Pennsylvania, 7-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The University of Miami beat Rollins College of the Orlando area, 21-0 at Burdine Stadium in Miami. The stadium would be renamed the Orange Bowl in 1959.

* And San Jose State and Hardin-Simmons played to a tie, 7-7 at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. The stadium would be renamed CEFCU Stadium in 2015. 

May 27, 1941: The Sinking of the Bismarck

May 27, 1941: Britain's Royal Navy sinks the Bismarck, Germany's biggest battleship, a rare notable victory for the Allies in World War II before America got into it.

Named for Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" who defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and united the many small German states into the German Empire -- the Second Reich -- the Kriegsmarine, the navy of Nazi Germany, the Third Reich, planned the Bismarck class of battleships to defeat France's Richelieu class battleships. But by June 1940, at which point the class ship, the Bismarck, was nearing completion, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, made dealing with the French Navy unnecessary.

But Britain's Royal Navy, now alone, and waiting for America to enter the war, would have to deal with the thing. C.S. Forester, already the author of 3 novels in the Horatio Hornblower series by 1941 (the series would eventually stretch to 17 books), published The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck in 1959. The following year, it was made into the film Sink the Bismarck!

American singer Johnny Horton co-wrote and sang an accompanying song, though it was only used in American trailers for the film, and not used in the film itself. In the song, Horton wrote, "The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea. On her deck were guns as big as steers, and shells as big as trees."

It was under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens, known as "the Black Devil," yet a man opposed to the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies. He refused to give the Nazi salute, instead giving a traditional naval salute -- even to Chancellor Adolf Hitler himself.

On May 24, 1941 -- the day that singer Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota -- the Battle of the Denmark Strait was fought. The Bismarck and its escort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, were caught by the Admiral class battlecruiser HMS Hood and the King George V class battleship HMS Prince of Wales in the Denmark Strait, between Greenland and Iceland.

(At the time, Britain had no Prince of Wales: King George VI had only daughters, no sons. The ship was named after the most recent Prince of Wales, the son of George V, who became King Edward VIII and then the Duke of Windsor -- who was seen by many as pro-Nazi.)

The song said that the Bismarck started firing from 15 miles away. That may have been dramatic license. Nevertheless, the Hood was sunk, and the Prince of Wales had to retreat. (For this role, the Hood became better known than its namesake, Admiral Samuel Hood, who commanded ships in the Wars of the American and French Revolutions.) However, the Prince of Wales managed to damage Bismarck enough that its mission was called off, and it sailed for occupied France for repairs.

The Royal Navy went after the wounded ship. The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal got close enough to send Fairey Swordfish "torpedo bombers" after it. On May 26, a hit rendered its steering gear inoperable. That night, Lütjens ordered a message radioed back to Germany: "Ship unmaneuverable. We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer."

The next morning, off the western coast of France, the Ark Royal, the King George V, and the cruiser HMS Sheffield caught up with Bismarck. Knowing that the battle damage would lead to its sinking anyway, Lütjens ordered that the ship be scuttled. Out of a crew of over 2,200 men, only 114 survived. Lütjens went down with the ship.

With the sinking of the Bismarck, the Kriegsmarine ended up building only 2 ships in that class, the other being the Tirpitz. That ship was sunk by Britain's Royal Air Force on November 12, 1944.

On August 7, 1941, HMS Prince of Wales hosted the 1st meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which produced the Atlantic Charter alliance. On December 9, 1941, 2 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and several other American and British installations, Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese off the coast of Singapore. Although some men got off alive, 327 died.

On November 13, 1941, a German U-boat got revenge on the Ark Royal, sinking her in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain, not far from the British naval base at Gibraltar. Two subsequent aircraft carriers have served the Royal Navy under the name, from 1950 to 1979, and from 1981 to 2011.

HMS Sheffield remained in Royal Navy service until being decommissioned in 1967. In 1971, a destroyer with that name was launched. In 1982, it was sunk by Argentina, becoming the most notable British loss of the Falkland Islands War.

HMS King George V remained in service until 1947. No new ship has been given the name. In 2017, a Queen Elizabeth II class aircraft carrier was launched, named HMS Prince of Wales. No new Royal Navy ships have been named Hood, although the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation showed a starship of the Excelsior class named USS Hood.

In 1956, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was permitted by NATO to form a new Bundesmarine (Federal Navy). In 1990, it took on the Volksmarine (People's Navy) of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In 1995, the Bundesmarine was renamed the Deutsche Marine (German Navy).

This Navy has never had a ship named Bismarck. But it had a ship named for the previous Bismarck's captain, the destroyer Lütjens, launched in 1967, and retired and decommissioned in 2003.

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May 27, 1941 was Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Washington Senators, 10-8 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Red Ruffing was the winning pitcher. Joe DiMaggio went 4-for-5 with a home run and 3 RBIs. Nobody noticed it yet, but it was his 12th straight game with at least 1 hit. There would be more.

* The New York Giants beat the Boston Braves, 2-1 at the Polo Grounds. Mel Ott went 2-for-4. Both Waner brothers had been traded to the Braves by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Paul went 0-for-4 in this game, but Lloyd singled as a pinch-hitter.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 6-0 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Hugh Casey, who would become better known as a reliever, pitched a 7-hit shutout.

* A doubleheader was split at Fenway Park in Boston. The Boston Red Sox won the opener, 5-2. The Philadelphia Athletics won the nightcap, 11-1. Over the 2 games, Jimmie Foxx went 0-for-6 with a walk, and Ted Williams went 2-for-6 with a home run, a walk, and 2 RBIs.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians, 9-6 at League Park in Cleveland. Bruce Campbell -- no relation to the later Evil Dead actor of the same name -- hit 2 home runs. Hank Greenberg was already serving in the U.S. Army, and unavailable for the Tigers.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Chicago White Sox, 5-2 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 3-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

* And the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds were not scheduled for this day.

May 3, 1945: The Nazi Titanic

May 3, 1945: The Nazis had their own version of the Titanic. And guess what: It sank.

Unlike the original, it wasn't just due to incompetence. It had "help."

The SS Cap Arcona was launched in 1927. It was named after Cape Arkona on Rügen, Germany's largest island, on the Baltic Sea. It weighed 27,561 tons, compared to the 46,329 of the original RMS Titanic. It was 679 feet long, compared to the original's 889 feet. Cruising speed was close, 23 miles per hour to Titanic's 24. In other words, it was big, but not as big as the Titanic, the world's largest cruise liner when it first and last sailed in 1912.

Cap Arcona was the flagship of the Hamburg-South America line, and sailed between Hamburg, Germany's 2nd-largest city and largest port, and the east coast of South America. In 1940, the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi navy, took it over. In 1943, it was "cast" in the title role in Titanic, a Nazi propaganda film, designed to show that the British were incompetent because they built the "unsinkable," ill-fated Titanic. It had 3 smokestacks, instead of the 4 that Titanic had. But it was still big enough to be plausible.

In 1945, Cap Arcona became a prison ship, as the Nazis, aware that they were losing the war, and that the Allies had begun to liberate the concentration camps, began to evacuate their camps in occupied Norway and Denmark. On May 3, 3 days after Hitler killed himself, Cap Arcona was sunk off the coast of Neustadt -- fittingly, by Britain's Air Force -- and over 5,000 prisoners were killed.

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May 3, 1945 was a Thursday. This was also the day that American poet Ezra Pound was arrested for treason in Italy. I have a separate entry for that event.

The only sport in season at the time was baseball, and no major league games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.

January 30, 1945: The Sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff

January 30, 1945: The MV Wilhelm Gustloff is sunk off the coast of Łeba, Poland. Over 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.

The ship was built as a cruise ship, and launched in 1937. The originally intended name was MV Adolf Hitler. Who decided that Hitler wasn't going to get his name on it? Surprise: Hitler himself. The Chancellor of Nazi Germany wanted to honor a martyred friend: Wilhelm Gustloff, the founder of the Nazi Party of Switzerland, who was assassinated in the Swiss city of Davos on February 4, 1936.

The ship only served as a cruise ship for 2 years, before being requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi navy. It became a hospital ship, and then a floating barracks, before being fitted with anti-aircraft guns and put into service to transport evacuees in 1945.

It was sailing in the Baltic Sea, evacuating Nazi soldiers from occupied territories in Eastern Europe, when it was sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, which sank it. There has never been a greater loss of life from a seagoing vessel.

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January 30, 1945 was a Tuesday. Native American author and activist Michael Dorris was born on this day. This was also the day of the Raid at Cabanatuan. I have a separate entry for that event.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated his birthday. Adolf Hitler gave a public speech. Nobody knew it at the time, but, in each case, it was for the last time.

Baseball and football were out of season, The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game in the NHL: The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Boston Bruins, 5-3 at the Boston Garden.