August 21: ON THIS DAY in 1944, Paris cut off on three sides

August 21, 2019 Brooklyn Eagle History

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ON THIS DAY IN 1923, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Hempstead — With one mail plane winging its way from San Francisco to New York, another took off from Hazelhurst Field on Long Island for the Pacific Coast today, in the first of five days of tests inaugurated by the government to demonstrate the feasibility of permanent transcontinental air mail service … Pilot C. Eugene Johnson carried only 84 pounds of mail consisting of 3,444 letters from New York and a few papers and official communications. More than 26,000 special delivery letters had been received at the New York Post Office for this trip, but it was found impracticable to carry all of them. Other batches of letters will be picked up at various points along the route.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1944, the Eagle reported, “Supreme Headquarters, A.E.F., Aug. 21 (UP) — American troops poured into a rapidly expanding bridgehead on the north bank of the Seine above Paris today and drew an armored arc around the north, west and south gates of the French capital, while battered survivors of the German 7th Army fled for the lower Seine in disorderly rout under relentless attack by Allied land and air forces. With the Americans at the gates of Paris, tens of thousands of French patriots were in revolt inside the city and the Nazi high command, admitting that street fighting had broken out, clamped virtual martial law on the turbulent capital. In a lightning thrust that threatened to seal the Seine River crossings to tens of thousands of Nazis fleeing eastward from Normandy, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army troopers burst across the stream in the Mantes-Gassicourt area and established a solid bridgehead for the torrent of American tanks and artillery pounding up in their rear. The German Transocean Agency said Yank paratroops and airborne infantry won the Seine crossing after an unsuccessful attempt to force the river by boat and pontoon bridge.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1949, the Eagle reported, “Washington (UP) — Representative Walter H. Judd (R., Minn.), today accused the State Department of ignoring a 1945 ‘top secret report’ disclosing Russian guidance of the Chinese Communist movement. The report showed that the present Chinese crisis could have been prevented, Judd said. ‘It is inexcusable that it was allowed to develop,’ he added. Judd said he has had the report for four years, but never felt free to release it until the State Department came out ‘with all the secret documents which it could find to bolster its own feeble case.’ In view of the 1945 report, originally prepared for military intelligence by top military and civilian analysts, Judd said: ‘I can only say that Secretary of State Dean Acheson seems determined to make impossible a continuance of the fine bipartisan foreign policy which has been responsible for such foreign policy victories as we have won.’ He charged that Acheson has opposed a consistent policy in Asia ‘where Communism is not just a threat, as in Western Europe, but a cruel actuality.’”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1953, the Eagle reported, “Tehran (UP) — Jubilant Royalists festooned Tehran with flags and flowers today in preparation for the triumphant return of their shah in streets stained by bloody rioting only two days ago. (The Royal Dutch Air Lines announced in Amsterdam that their chartered plane taking the Shah home from Rome arrived in Bagdad, Iraq at 7:05 a.m. Brooklyn time.) Tanks and troops of new Premier Gen. Fazollah Zahedi stood guard at street corners of the capital and across the nation. But Zahedi’s authority virtually was unchallenged following the arrest late yesterday of deposed Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who was held and guarded from mobs for trial as a traitor. Cheering mobs erected triumphal arches across the city’s wide streets, where Nationalist mobs angrily smashed statues of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi and demolished pictures of him less than a week ago. Mossadegh languished in a room at the Tehran Officers Club where Zahedi was living. Zahedi told the 78-year-old former premier he would be protected until he is brought to trial for plotting against the legal government.”