JANUARY 21 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JANUARY 21

1924

Lenin died from a massive stroke:  After Lenin's death, Stalin's administration established the ideology known as Marxism-Leninism, a movement that was interpreted differently by various  factions in the Communist ideology. After being forced into exile by Stalin's administration, Trotsky argued that Stalinism was a debasement of Leninism, which was dominated by bureaucratism and Stalin's own personal dictatorship. After Stalin's death,  Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov succeeded Stalin as temporary leader of the Soviet Union in 1953. His rapid ascent in Soviet leadership was due to family ties with Stalin. Malenkov was heavily involved in Stalin's purges and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev began a process of de-Stalinisation, citing Lenin's writings, including those on Stalin, to legitimize this process.  When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 and introduced the policies of glasnost and perestroika, he too cited these actions as a return to Lenin's principles.

1945

German submarine U-1199 was sunk in the English Channel by depth charges from British destroyer HMS Icarus and British corvette HMS Mignonette at 49°57′N 05°42′W..  The vessel had  forty-seven crew of which only one man, the Chief Petty Officer Navigator, survived by escaping through the conning tower as the submarine flooded.  U 1199 was attempting to enter the Channel on her second patrol when she was attacked and sunk. Following are a few excerpts from a report of the interrogation of survivors of U-1199:   ' This prisoner declared that he had never been allowed to plot their course on the chart, but took his orders from the Commanding Officer, who himself acted as navigator and gave him bearings by observing lights at periscope depth.  He remembered that the Commanding Officer had sighted the Wolf Rock lighthouse from a distance of about 5 miles, half an hour before the engagement. ....On 21st January a convoy was heard and the U-boat came to periscope depth.  The Commanding Officer sighted about sixty ships and a spread of torpedoes was fired.  The prisoner believed that they hit one 10,000 ton and one 8,000 ton ship. ....The U-boat bottomed and shortly afterwards experienced the effects of the first depth charge attack, which caused a small leak in the bow compartment, which subsequently became a large inrush of water; and the main motors were put out of action.  The attack continued for several hours, successive patterns of depth charges causing still further damage; the magnetic compass was smashed, and rotary converters dislodged.  The after control room bulkhead was closed and the prisoner was ignorant of what happened after.  In the forward compartment the water was rising rapidly, and when it had risen three feet above the floor-plates, the Commanding Officer ordered the crew to abandon ship.  The prisoner said that he put the mouthpiece of his life jacket into his mouth and ascribe that the rest of the crew to failed to do this and were suffocated by chlorine gas, which was by this time forming.  He saw men collapsing one by one.'
(Source:   http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-413INT.htm)