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WWII On This Day: August 22

What happened on August 22 during World War II? This date brings together 2 events from 1943 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1943
Children affected by famine on a Calcutta street, published by The Statesman on 22 August 1943.
Children affected by famine on a Calcutta street, published by The Statesman on 22 August 1943. The Statesman, Calcutta · public domain in India Source
The Bengal Famine

The Statesman publishes photographs of famine victims in Calcutta

On 22 August 1943 The Statesman published photographs showing children dying or close to death on a Calcutta street. The images gave newspaper readers direct visual evidence of conditions that official language and statistics had failed to convey with the same force. Independent press coverage increased pressure for a larger public response. Photographs and reporting also challenged attempts to treat the crisis as a limited problem of local scarcity or temporary distress. The surviving photograph is exact-date evidence for this marker because the archive identifies its publication in The Statesman…

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1944
Tanks and half-tracks of the French 2e Division Blindée pass the Arc de Triomphe through crowds on the Champs-Élysées, 26 August 1944.
Jack Downey, US Office of War Information · Library of Congress · Public domain · Source
The Liberation of Paris

The barricades go up

Fighting resumed and Paris began building. Paving stones came up by hand, trees came down across boulevards, and lorries, buses and furniture filled the gaps. The Musée de la Libération records nearly 600 barricades in Paris and the suburbs by 24 August. They turned every German movement into a route-finding problem and broke the city into hundreds of defended crossings. Their value was delay, cover and control of streets rather than stopping a tank head-on.

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