The German advance into the centre of Stalingrad which had been launched on the 13th resulted in some of the bitterest house-to-house fighting of the campaign, with landmarks in the city centre changing hands several times. In some places German soldiers reached all the way to the banks of the Volga but gradually the attack lost momentum as Soviet reinforcements were ferried across the river. Meanwhile in the Pacific, the light carrier USS Wasp was sunk by a Japanese submarine, and in Europe the RAF bombed Munich and Saarbrücken.
Caithness was now well into the harvest season. The John O’Groat Journal reported that in Dunbeath, “Everyone seems to be lending a hand at the bumper harvest this year, even people who have never done any manual labour in their lives before. It’s nothing now to see an auctioneer driving a tractor and binder at the corn cutting.” Whether or not manual labour was familiar to him, the head teacher of Canisbay School noted in the log book that “Donald W. Shearer got an exemption for 4 weeks for Harvest Work.”
Harvesting is traditionally a sign that summer is nearly over, and autumn seemed to be well advanced this year. The log book of Auckengill School (near Freswick) has a chilling entry for 18 September that reads, “Fires have been lit every morning as weather is getting colder.”
On 19 September Wick Incident Control reported to inverness: “At 15.30 hrs. today a locally based British Aircraft – markings V.L.D. – crashed in a field near New School, Castletown. Pilot seriously injured. Plane completely wrecked. Please inform R.A.F. maintenance unit.”
Finally this week, the Wick Harbour Trust recorded their displeasure with the conduct of Sir Archibald Sinclair over the ban on foreign fishing vessels being allowed to sell their catches at Wick. Sir Archibald, who was the sitting MP, had previously assured the Trust that the Admiralty had 
insisted on the ban for security reasons; but it now emerged that the Admiralty had no objections, and it was a question for the Ministry of Food. The minute book pulls no punches: “The Trust expressed indignation … that the present situation had been mis-represented as they had been given to understand by the Member of Parliament, that the Admiralty had imposed and insisted in a ban, when in point of fact the Admiralty did not.” Ominously, the Trust 
appointed a “special delegation” to “interview” Sir Archibald as he was currently in Caithness.
