World War II Chronicle: September 2, 1941
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Red Army lieutenant pilot Viktor Vasilievich Talalikhin is pictured on page 6, having been decorated with the Gold Star Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin for ramming a German bomber. Lt. Talalikhin, a veteran of 47 combat missions during the First Soviet-Finnish War, was defending Moscow during a midnight German air raid on August 7. Behind the controls of a Polikarpov I-16 fighter, he fired his guns at a Heinkel 111 twin-engine bomber until his weapons jammed.
Instead of breaking off, Lt. Talalikhin flew towards the bomber, hoping to chew its tail off with his propeller. As he neared the Heinkel, a German machinegunner hit him in the arm, but Talalikhin still managed to ram the Heinkel, sending the bomber — and his I-16 plummeting to the ground.
While four of the Heinkel’s crew perished in the ramming, Feldwebel (equivalent to a U.S. Army staff sergeant) Rudolf Schick survived — but died of tuberculosis in 1942 while a prisoner of war. Talalikhin was able to bail out and landed safely, becoming a public hero. The Soviet hero returned to the skies and was killed in combat over Podolsk on Oct. 27, 1941. He was 23 years old…
Page nine reports that U.S. Army Air Corps aircraft have been operating on Iceland. An American P-40 pilot, Lt. George E. Meeks of the 33rd Pursuit Squadron, perished on Aug. 19 when his P-40C Warhawk collided with a radio mast before crashing into the sea, half a mile away from the air strip at under construction at Keflavik. In 1943 the military will name the facility Meeks Field in honor of the first of what will be 200 American service members to lose their lives on Iceland during World War II.
The 33rd Squadron had in fact been operating out of Iceland since early August. Departing from New York Harbor aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on July 27, the 33rd took off from the flattop on August 6 and relieved a Royal Air Force squadron…
The article on page 23 highlighting a few aspects of life on the Navy’s newest battleship, USS North Carolina, is quite interesting.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 2 September 1941. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1941-09-02/ed-1/