January 16, 1942

1942René Angélil, Canadian singer and manager (died 2016)^[†]

René Angélil was a Canadian musical producer, talent manager and singer. He was the husband and manager of singer Celine Dion.

1942Barbara Lynn, American singer-songwriter and guitarist^[†]

Barbara Lynn is an American rhythm and blues and electric blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. She is best known for her R&B chart-topping hit, "You'll Lose a Good Thing" (1962). In 2018, Lynn received a National Heritage Fellowship.

1942Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (born 1850)^[†]

Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, was the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He served as Governor General of Canada, the tenth since Canadian Confederation and the only British prince to do so.

1942Villem Grünthal-Ridala, Estonian poet and linguist (born 1885)^[†]

Villem Grünthal-Ridala, born Wilhelm Grünthal was an Estonian poet, translator, linguist and folklorist.

1942Carole Lombard, American actress and comedian (born 1908)^[†]

Carole Lombard was an American actress, particularly noted for her energetic, often off-beat roles in screwball comedies. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Lombard 23rd on its list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

1942Ernst Scheller, German lawyer and politician, Mayor of Marburg (born 1899)^[†]

Ernst Scheller was a German Nazi Hauptmann and politician.

1942The Holocaust: Nazi Germany begins deporting Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to Chełmno extermination camp.^[†]

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.

1942Crash of TWA Flight 3, killing all 22 aboard, including film star Carole Lombard.^[†]

TWA Flight 3 was a twin-engine Douglas DC-3-382 propliner, registration NC1946, operated by Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) as a scheduled domestic passenger flight from New York, New York, to Burbank, California, in the United States, via several stopovers including Las Vegas, Nevada. On January 16, 1942, at 19:20 PST, fifteen minutes after takeoff from Las Vegas Airport bound for Burbank, the aircraft was destroyed when it crashed into a sheer cliff on Potosi Mountain, 32 miles (51 km) southwest of the airport, at an elevation of 7,770 ft (2,370 m) above sea level. All 22 people on board, including movie star Carole Lombard, her mother, Clark Gable's press agent, Otto Winkler, three crew members, and 15 U.S. Army soldiers died in the crash. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) investigated the accident and determined that the cause was a navigation error by the captain.