History Brooklyn Boro

August 24: ON THIS DAY in 1944, Nazis battle French for control of Paris

August 24, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Eagle file photo
Eagle file photo
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ON THIS DAY IN 1944, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Supreme Headquarters, A.E.F., Aug. 24 (UP) — Street fighting between French patriots and Germans flared up inside Paris today and Allied Supreme Headquarters announced that yesterday’s Fighting French communique telling of the capture of the city was premature. [Radio France at Algiers said American troops entered Paris tonight.] Headquarters revealed that the patriots, tricked by a German appeal for an armistice into believing that the enemy was leaving the capital, had flashed an urgent call for help to the American and French regulars massed outside the city. Allied forces began moving on the city yesterday against German resistance, headquarters spokesmen said. (Shortly before the announcement that Paris had not yet been freed, President [Franklin] Roosevelt issued a special statement in Washington hailing the ‘liberation’ of the former French capital as dispelling the ‘patch of gloom’ which had remained ‘through the rising tide of Allied successes.’)”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1898, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Troop C of Brooklyn will be ordered home and mustered out at once. Adjutant General Corbin so informed Postmaster Wilson of Brooklyn this morning … Troop C’s war record has been a brief but gallant one … They will no doubt be accorded a warm reception on their return home … Colonel [Theodore] Roosevelt has telegraphed asking that the Rough Riders should be mustered out and his request will in all probability be promptly complied with.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1926, the Eagle reported, “The body of the young man Rudolph Valentino will lie in state this afternoon, tomorrow and Thursday so that those who worshiped him as a marvelously great lover on the motion picture screens may be able to look upon his dead face. S. George Ullman, who had been Valentino’s personal representative in life, announced the decision to this effect at noon today and then went promptly to the Campbell Funeral Church, Broadway and 66th St., to give directions for carrying it out. Outside the funeral parlors a crowd that had started early in the morning with a handful of morbid admirers had now increased to thousands, and Ullman had to break his way through these to get in.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1939, the Eagle reported, “London, Aug. 24 (AP) – Prime Minister [Neville] Chamberlain declared in the House of Commons today that Adolf Hitler had demanded a free hand for Germany in eastern Europe and had told Britain that any country which interfered was to blame for an ensuing war. ‘God knows I have done all that is possible in efforts for peace,’ said the Prime Minister after he had declared Britain’s obligations to Poland ‘remain unaffected’ by what he called an imminent peril of war. Speaking against the background of a rapidly arming Europe, the Prime Minister asked Parliament to enact an emergency powers bill giving the government virtually dictatorial authority to deal with any emergency.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1944, the Eagle reported, “Supreme Headquarters, A.E.F., Aug. 24 (UP) – Street fighting between French patriots and Germans flared up inside Paris today and Allied Supreme Headquarters announced that yesterday’s Fighting French communique telling of the capture of the city was premature. [Radio France at Algiers said American troops entered Paris tonight.] Headquarters revealed that the patriots, tricked by a German appeal for an armistice into believing that the enemy was leaving the capital, had flashed an urgent call for help to the American and French regulars massed outside the city. Allied forces began moving on the city yesterday against German resistance, headquarters spokesmen said. (Shortly before the announcement that Paris had not yet been freed, President [Franklin] Roosevelt issued a special statement in Washington hailing the ‘liberation’ of the former French capital as dispelling the ‘patch of gloom’ which had remained ‘through the rising tide of Allied successes.’)”

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ON AUG. 25, 1875, the Eagle reported: “London, August 25 – Noon. Captain [Matthew] Webb entered the water yesterday at Dover for his second attempt to cross the Channel, and has succeeded in accomplishing the feat without the assistance of any floating or life-saving apparatus. The following dispatch has been received, announcing his arrival on the other side of the Channel: ‘Calais, August 25 – Captain Webb arrived here at 11 o’clock this morning in good health and spirits, although fatigued. The passage from Dover occupied 21 hours and 40 minutes.”

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ON AUG. 26, 1876, the Eagle reported, “Tomorrow will be the one hundredth anniversary of the battle fought by Washington and his Revolutionary troops against the combined British forces under General Howe, on the site and in the vicinity of what is now the City of Brooklyn. The battle is not in history specifically identified with Brooklyn, because Brooklyn as we know it had no existence then, and was not even foreshadowed to the most prophetic eye by the insignificant hamlet that bore its name … Where the verdant meadows and finely shaded walks of Prospect Park today invite the feet and rest the eye of our people, there was a tangled wilderness penetrated by a narrow and forbidding country road, of which the most agreeable feature was a rural tavern … Still it is proper to speak of the fight which occurred … as the Battle of Brooklyn, for the field is now practically included within the limits of the city, and is in all its historical associations the chief Revolutionary treasure of our population.”

 


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