Service du travail obligatoire: The Vichy French government passed a law requiring all able-bodied men age 18 to 50 and single women 21 to 35 to be subject to do any work the government deemed necessary.
Died:Zsigmond Móricz, 63, Hungarian novelist and social realist
The Soviet 24th and 66th Armies counterattacked the XIV Panzer Corps at Stalingrad, but the offensive was called off after losing 30 of 120 tanks, mostly to the Luftwaffe.[8]
Cuba signed an agreement with the United States allowing a flotilla of a dozen American-manned patrol ships to operate out of Havana under Cuban colors.[11]
Winston Churchill reviewed the course of the war in an address to the British House of Commons.[12]
The U.S. government shut down gold mines to release labor for the war effort.[7]
The characters of Pogo the Possum and Albert the Alligator made their first appearances in the story "Albert Takes the Cake" by Walt KellyinAnimal Comics issue #1.[13]
The first of the two Lookout Air Raids occurred in Oregon. A Japanese Yokosuka E14Y floatplane launched from a submarine dropped two incendiary bombs with the intention of starting a forest fire. The damage done was minor, however.
German forces of the 29th Motorized Division broke through to the Volga River on the southern side of Stalingrad. The Soviet 62nd Army was hit along the frontline, with its forces defending just 2 km from the heart of the city.
The RAF dropped 100,000 bombs on Düsseldorf in less than an hour.[3]
The Italian hospital ship Arno was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean by British aircraft.
The British troopship RMS Laconia was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of West Africa by the German submarine U-156. U-boats were then dispatched to the area to pick up survivors.
The Wehrmacht began a massive ground assault to try to take the city of Stalingrad, marking the beginning of the house-to-house fighting that most characterized the battle.[15]
The Allies launched Operation Agreement, a series of ground and amphibious operations carried out by British, Rhodesian and New Zealand forces against Axis-held Tobruk.
Near Guadalcanal the Japanese submarine I-19 fired one of the most effective torpedo salvos of the war, mortally damaging the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp and destroyer O'Brien as well as damaging the battleship North Carolina.[7] The destroyer Lansdowne was dispatched to rescue 447 crew of the Wasp and then scuttled the carrier.
Laconia incident: A controversial event occurred when a USAAF B-24 Liberator attacked the U-156 while survivors rescued from the September 12 RMS Laconia sinking stood on the foredeck. The U-156 was forced to dive and abandon the survivors. Karl Dönitz shortly thereafter issued the Laconia Order, forbidding any such rescue work in the future.
Nazi authorities killed 116 people in Paris in retaliation for increasing attacks on German officers.[3]
The British destroyer Somali was torpedoed and mortally damaged in the Greenland Sea by German submarine U-255. Somali was taken under tow by destroyer HMS Ashanti but would sink four days later.
The B&O railroad Ambassador train ran into the back of the Cleveland Express near Dickerson, Maryland, killing twelve passengers and two crewmen in the worst B&O accident since 1907.[24]
German submarines U-190 and U-641 were commissioned.
Four British de Havilland Mosquito bombers conducted the Oslo Mosquito raid, intended to boost morale of the Norwegian people. The operation failed as the Mosquito bombs failed to destroy the Gestapo HQ but caused 80 civilian casualties and one bomber was lost.
The Oslo Mosquito raid against Gestapo HQ was scheduled to coincide with a rally of Norwegian collaborators, led by Vidkun Quisling; from September 25 to 27 his Norwegian Nazi party Nasjonal Samling ('National Unity') held its 8th national convention in Oslo, Norway.
German submarine U-253 sank in the Atlantic Ocean northwest of Iceland, probably lost to a British naval mine.
Died:Douglas Albert Munro, 22, Canadian-born member of the United States Coast Guard and posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor (killed at Guadalcanal)
Hitler gave a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast informing his audience that "it will not be the Aryan peoples, but rather Jewry, that will be exterminated."[29]
^ abcdPolmar, Norman; Allen, Thomas B. (2012). World War II: the Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941–1945. Dover Publications. pp. 25–26. ISBN978-0-486-47962-0.
^ abc"1942". World War II Database. Retrieved February 1, 2016.
^Loeffel, Robert (2012). The Family Punishment in Nazi Germany: Sippenhaft, Terror and Myth. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 39. ISBN978-0-230-34305-4.
^Marley, David F. (2008). Wars of the Americas: A Chronology of Armed Conflict in the Western Hemisphere, 2nd Ed. ABC-CLIO, Inc. p. 1016. ISBN978-1-59884-100-8.
^Manning, Michael Lee (2005). The Battle 100: The Stories Behind History's Most Influential Battles. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc. p. 9. ISBN978-1-4022-2475-1.
^Van den Boogaerde, Pierre (2009). Shipwrecks of Madagascar. Strategic Book Publishing. p. 285. ISBN978-1-61204-339-5.
^Perrett, Bryan. "The End of the Beginning, El Alamein, Egypt 1942." Battlegrounds: Geography and the History of Warfare. Ed. Michael Stephenson. Simon & Schuster, 2003. p. 32. ISBN978-0-7922-3374-9.
^Holloway, David. "Barbarossa and the Bomb: Two Cases of Soviet Intelligence in World War II." Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918–1999. Ed. Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach. Stanford University Press, 2014. p. 58. ISBN978-0-8047-8891-5.
^Wistrich, Robert S. (2010). A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. New York: Random House. ISBN978-1-58836-899-7.
