This Date in History: December 31

 

At Stalingrad, on December 31, 1942, the Luftwaffe airlifted 310 tons of supplies into the encirclement.  On return flights, Luftwaffe aircraft flew 982 wounded Germans from the Pitomnik Airfield to airbases outside of the encirclement.  During the period December 19 through December 31, doctors at Sixth Army conducted autopsies on 50 soldiers who died and found that 25 had died of starvation.  The 113th Infantry Division experienced the highest proportion of death by starvation, as they had cut rations even before the encirclement.  The army reported 714 total casualties for the day.  The Sixth Army headquarters was located at the Gumrak Airfield.  (Stalingrad: The Death of the German Sixth Army on the Volga, 1942-1943)

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Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch.  Peter Koch was born in South Church Town on the Island of Falster in Denmark on October 8, 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman.  He immigrated to the United States in 1865; in 1870, he traveled to the Montana settlements, nearly freezing in a snow storm.  Koch arrived in Bozeman on December 31, 1870.  He began working as a woodcutter and a clerk at Fort Ellis and later worked as a clerk for Lester Willson’s store.  In this position, he refused to sell a rope on January 31, 1873 to a group of men, as he thought it would be used in a vigilante lynching; the lynching of two men – Z. A. Triplett who had knifed and killed a man and John “Steamboat Bill” St. Cloud, who had killed a Chinese prostitute – occurred anyway.  A book-keeper and surveyor by profession, Peter Koch served as the latter for the expedition.  (Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gold and Guns: The 1874 Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition and the Battle of Lodge Grass Creek)