21 Oct 1939
- Arthur Greiser was named the Gauleiter of Reichsgau Posen. ww2dbase [Arthur Greiser | CPC]
- Nobutake Kondo was named the deputy commander of the Navy General Staff. ww2dbase [Nobutake Kondo | CPC]
- British light cruiser HMS Orion and Canadian destroyer HMCS Saguenay located German tanker Emmy Friedrich in the Yucatán Channel, and began to move to intercept. ww2dbase [Start of the Battle of the Atlantic | Yucatán Channel, Gulf of Mexico | CPC]
- General Erich von Manstein, Chief of Staff of Army Group A, obtained a copy of Plan Yellow whilst passing through Berlin, Germany on his way to set up Army Group A Headquarters at Koblenz. He found little to admire in the plan, considering it to be too much like the strategy of 1914, and even predicting that the advance would bog down at the same place – on the Somme River in France. ww2dbase [Erich von Manstein | Berlin | AC]
- Germans began deporting Poles from Poznan to make the province "Germanic". ww2dbase [Discovery of Concentration Camps and the Holocaust | Poznan | TH]
- The Uranium Advisory Committee in the United States, headed by Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards, met for the first time. The committee had a budget of US$6,000 at this time. ww2dbase [Operation Trinity and Manhattan Project | CPC]
Timeline Section Founder: Thomas Houlihan
Contributors: Alan Chanter, C. Peter Chen, Thomas Houlihan, Hugh Martyr, David Stubblebine
Special Thanks: Rory Curtis
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