Eighty Years Ago This Week

  Four of the RAF's recently introduced Mosquito bombers from 105 Squadron attacked the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo. The operation was timed to disrupt a speech by Vidkun Quisling, the collaborationist national leader, and boost the morale of occupied Norwegians. Quisling supposedly took shelter whilst the raid was in progress but it failed to destroy its target. Some bombs passed clean through the building and exploded causing some eighty Norwegian civilian casualties. One Mosquito was shot down. Despite this lacklustre result, the attack was deemed worthy of extensive publicity; it was the first time that the Mosquito was mentioned publicly. The raid was the first of a number of attacks all delivered by Mosquitoes against German security forces targets.   The labour shortage in British industry was biting, above all in the coal fields the only significant domestic source of energy. It is a good register of how unattractive (and dangerous) working underground was, that the r...

  U-156 sank the British liner Laconia in the South Atlantic. Chivalrously the German captain tried to rescue the survivors, taking some onto his boat's casing and towing lifeboats. He also broadcast over an open frequency announcing that he was taking the survivors to be transferred to Vichy French ships. The Allies were more ruthless and the U-156 was bombed by a B-24 even though it was flying a Red Cross. Another U-boat that attempted to assist was also attacked. 1,700 mostly Italian PoWs were killed but 1,000 were saved. The German commander Admiral Doenitz issued a direct order that his U-boats were to refrain from such humanitarian acts. After the debacle of convoy PQ17, which had drawn direct criticism from Stalin,  the British took advantage of lengthening nights to run another convoy to the Soviets through the Arctic. There were forty merchant ships in PQ18 and an impressively strong close escort of about the same number of warships that included HMS Avenger an escor...

  The British launched a number of simultaneous but unconnected attacks on the Axis rear area in North Africa. The initiative appears to have come from special forces HQ in Cairo with the goal of causing major disruption. Progressively even military bureaucrats had been converted to the attractions of special forces operations, but this had bred exaggerrated hopes. The most ambitious was a land and sea attack on Tobruk. The land element was disguised as a convoy of prisoners under German (in reality Jewish emigres of the Special Interrogation Group) escort. The raid failed catastrophically with over one thousand killed or PoW and the sinking of a cruiser, two destroyers and a number of light craft by the Italian navy and air force. The leader Colonel Haselden was killed. Apart from a successful raid on an Italian airfield at Barce by the LRDG none of the other elements succeeded. A large-scale attack on Benghazi by the SAS was detected early and aborted. An attempt to sei...

Having struck a bargain with the Germans under which 50,000 French prisoners of war would be liberated in exchange for France supplying 150,000 workers to Germany, the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval had to find a way of delivering his end of the deal. Fewer than 100,000 workers had gone to Germany voluntarily before then. Vichy passed a law creating the service du travail obligatoire under which all able-bodied males between 18 and 50 and single women of 21 to 35 were forced to do any work that the government deemed to be necessary: in practice going to Germany as quasi-slaves. In practice the law was never applied to women because of the scale of protest it would have aroused especially from the church, but it was enforced on men and became arguably Vichy's least popular measure, a key factor in destroying whatever support the regime had enjoyed. Nineteen year old Tom Williams became the last IRA man to be hanged for murdering a (Catholic) RUC constable earlier tha...

Britain might not have been able to satisfy Stalin's demands for military assistance by invading France, but it could continue to appease him domestically. The Communist Daily Worker newspaper had been banned for its ferevently anti-war stance during the period of the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact. Obedient to Moscow, the CPGB had swung in favour of the war after Barbarossa but the ban was not lifted. The Labour Party, notably Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, detested the Communists, but finally a campaign led by naive soviet supporters such as scientist  J.B.S Haldane and the Dean of Canterbury swung the Labour Party in favour of the Daily Worker . The ban was removed. Helped by Ultra intelligence of German plans, the Eight Army under its new commander Bernard Montgomery, was able to hold off Rommel's last attempt to breakthrough into Egypt at the battle of Adam el Halfa. Montgomery deliberately lured Rommel's thrust into a gap in the south of his line but the Germans then enco...