On this day
Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Brit planes bomb German troops, supply stations and bridges in all battle areas and points in Germany
press continues to hail Germany as ally
French counter-attacks in Maubeuge region results in recapture of positions
Col Lindbergh decries fears of air invasion; says plane types depend on policy; text; Repr Tinkham comments
Gen Weygand transferred to Western Front
1940Shorty Long, American singer-songwriter and producer (died 1969)[†]
Frederick Earl "Shorty" Long was an American soul singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer for Motown's Soul Records imprint. He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1980.
1940Stan Mikita, Slovak-Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster (died 2018)[†]
Stanley Mikita was a Slovak-born Canadian ice hockey player for the Chicago Black Hawks of the National Hockey League, generally regarded as the best centre of the 1960s. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players. In 1961, he became the first Slovak-born player to win the Stanley Cup.
1940Sadaharu Oh, Japanese-Taiwanese baseball player and manager[†]
Sadaharu Oh, also known as Wang Chen-chih, is a Japanese-born Taiwanese former professional baseball player and manager who is currently the chairman of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Oh's playing career spanned across four decades, during which he played for only the Yomiuri Giants. He holds the world career home run record at 868, over 100 more than MLB record holder Barry Bonds.
1940Verner von Heidenstam, Swedish author and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1859)[†]
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was a Swedish poet, novelist and laureate of the 1916 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1912. His poems and prose work are filled with a great joy of life, sometimes imbued with a love of Swedish history and scenery, particularly its physical aspects.
1940The Holocaust: The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz.[†]
The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.