Eighty years ago this week some of Hitler's generals lose patience

 

Hitler survived an attempt to kill him with a bomb in the conference room at the Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb was planted by a Wehrmacht officer Klaus von Stauffenberg as part of a conspiracy by a number of senior officers to remove the Nazi regime. Hitler suffered only minor injuries and was able to launch a witchhunt against anyone actively involved in the plot, even only peripherally. These included Rommel who was allowed to kill himself. Most of the Wehrmacht generals in senior command posts continued to serve the Third Reich.

 At the western flank of the Allied position in Normandy the US Army under General Omar Bradley launched Operation Cobra with massive support from heavy bombers. This was to break the stalemate that had ruled in the lodgement since soon after the D-Day landings. Bad weather had delayed the build up of forces as well as holding back offensive action. Anglo-Canadian attacks around Caen had failed to achieve a break-through but had drawn sufficient enemy forces to the East to leave the Germans unable to resist.

The Red Army's Bagration offensive advanced so rapidly that it reached the concentration and extermination camp at Majdanek in Poland before the guards were able fully to conceal the camp's activities. The surviving Jewish inmates had been removed and only 1,000 or so Russian prisoners were freed. It was the first such camp to fall into allied hands.

In the Pacific US forces landed on the island of Tinian to consolidate the successful invasion of Sapan where Japanese resistance had just come to an end. Tinian was too significant a base to be bypassed.