Eighty years ago the RAF begins its war on the Gestapo with a new weapon

 

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 risk of combat was a preferable alternative to most men. Men under the age of 25 were offered the option of working as miners as an alternative to conscription into the armed forces. This was an extension of what a committee examining means of recruiting more young men for the coal mines, which had recommended giving males the choice at the age of 18 of the military or the mines.

 

Hitler sacked Franz Halder as chief of the German General Staff after their relationship had become extremely strained. Halder's position was ambiguous; he had happily taken Ludwig Beck's place when he resigned over the threat of war for the Sudetenland in 1938, but he  gave a supportive hearing to plots by other generals to remove Hitler if war broke out. He was personally contemptuous of the Fuehrer in his diary, but they did not clash over any specific issue. His dismissal was just a symptom of Hitler's instinct to blame the soldiers for not winning the unwinnable war against the Soviet Union as a way of denying his own responsbility. Hitler's greatest personal reservation about Halder was to assume - incorrectly - that as a Bavarian, he was a Catholic. He was imprisoned after the attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944 but no evidence of his earlier activities emerged and he survived.