Same address….
Tuesday
My Darling,
Many thanks for letter just received – and for programme enclosed. I had hoped I could have written to you during the week but have been on schemes almost continually.
It’s now about seven in the evening and I’m all packed for another three day show after dinner. We’re going down as far as Hindhead which is wonderful country, and luckily I’m driving all the time. The road runs south from Aldershot, over the Hog’s Back and down to the ‘Devil’s punchbowl’, a famous venue for motorists pre-war and one of Surrey’s best known beauty spots. We’re going right through the night and are all swearing on fine weather.
Mother enclosed a letter from Brinner in her last. He’s now a Cadet at Wrotham which is only a few miles from Sevenoaks, Eric’s place. (Incidentally, I’ve never heard from him despite you’re saying he’d written. Also, no cracks about my repaying – if I had a letter from him I’d reply straight away, but I definitely wrote last …)
I managed to see Diller last week-end – she went back on Sunday. I gather she likes the life but would prefer to be in anything but the Pay Corps.
I don’t get any leave for another three weeks, I’m afraid and then only a weekend.
Theoretically I should pass out in six weeks’ time – but things are going very badly as regards Recce Corps. They’re over staffed as it is which has the annoying habit of making them very difficult to please. They cheerfully accept about five in every fifty and the unhappy remainder have to go all through an Infantry OCTU, which takes nearly another five months. The only consolation I’ve got is that I should go to Wrotham, for some weeks anyhow.
Hope you enjoyed the concert under Sargent**, whom I think is still the best conductor in the country. ‘Fraid I never get a chance to see anything these days.
As you remark, the news is good, but as usual is inclined to be taken far too optimistically. We still have the hardest fighting to do.
Must close here for dinner, as I’ve got to get my carrier started which takes me anything up to an hour….
Here’s to the Devil and his punchbowl.
love & kisses
Dicker
*Hindhead Common and the Devil’s Punch Bowl are an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty protected by the National Trust.
** Malcolm Sargeant, famous English conductor.
© Chotie Darling
15th September 1943 – Australian and US troops capture the Japanese base of Lae, on the east coast of New Guinea, north of Port Moresby.
16th September 1943 – the Danish resistance underground, Dansk Frihedsrådet, sets up the Freedom Council as a shadow administration.
18th September 1943 - German forces from Salerno withdraw towards the line of the River Volturno, north of Naples. American forces at Salerno had suffered 3,500 casualties and the British (on the exposed left flank) 5,500. (From ‘The Second World War’ by Antony Beevor, published by Weidenfield and Nicolson 2012)
20 September 1943 - the ‘Jewish Affairs Commission’, headed by Dieter Wisliceny, arrives in Athens. In Thessaloniki the Commission had been responsible for the deportation of over 46,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Athenian Jews, previously under Italian Occupation, were now threatened with a similar fate. However, two thirds escaped - many with the help of Archbishop Damaskeno and other Christians who hid them and produced false baptism certificates. Even the Chief of Police in Athens, Angelos Evert, issued Jews with false ID to protect them.
60 to 70,000 Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust – more than 80% of the Jewish Greek population. (See United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
22nd September 1943 – six British midget submarines succeed in attacking the Tirpitz (see also St Nazaire and Brighton) in a Norwegian fiord, putting the battleship out of action until March 1944.
22nd September 1943 – Soviet forces begin to cross the heavily defended Dnepr river in central Ukraine, suffering heavy losses but ultimately succeeding in advancing their front line.
On 23rd September Mussolini proclaims his return to power with the re-establishment of a fascist government, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana in northern Italy. All Italians carrying arms in German occupied areas face the death penalty.
24th September 1943 – 5,000 Italian soldiers of the Aqui Division are massacred on the Greek Ionian island of Cephalonia when they eventually surrender to the Germans. In all, more than 10,000 Italian soldiers who chose to resist the Germans died in Greece.
25th September 1943 – the British 8th Army and the US 5th Army join up a front line across Italy.
25th September 1943 – the Soviets re-take Smolensk, 200 miles west of Moscow in Russia.
27th September 1943 – in a popular uprising the people of Naples successfully drive the Germans out of the city before the Allied liberation on 1st October. (From Chronology of World War II.)
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