Eighty Years Ago This Week

   The British Eight Army under the recently appointed General Montgomery launched a full-scale attack on Axis forces in Egypt in the second battle of El Alamein. The British led forces enjoyed a near two to one superiority in almost all respects. After years of fighting with mediocre or inferior quality tanks, they also had 300 of the new Sherman M-4 tanks that President Roosevelt had diverted from the US Army and which were reliable and more than the equal of most German or Italian tanks. The fight for Guadalcanal reached its most intense point with battles on both land and sea. The Japanese massed the troops for a major assault on the Americans, triggering three days of intense fighting. Their attacks came close to threatening the American perimeter but none succeeded. The desperation of the Japanese assault is obvious from the 2,000 to 3,000 killed compared to fewer than one hundred Americans. Each side had some 20,000 troops in the field: a small number compared to the fo...

  After fierce fighting the Germans occupied the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Or, more accurately, its ruins. The position had little operational significance in the battle for the city, but great propaganda resonance. Its output of tractors had been a key element in the much-touted modernisation of agriculture under the Soviets and the industrialisation of the USSR although it had been switched to tank production on the outbreak of war. It had also been named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, one of the spiritual fathers of the Soviet state, as the founder of the Cheka and the OGPU, the predecessors of the KGB and today's FSB. A large statue of Dzerzhinsky still stands on the site. The Red air force accomplished one of its occasional humanitarian missions when it evacuated thirteen monkeys from the research institute founded by Professor Ivan Pavlov in the beleaguered city of Leningrad, where they had been suffering from shortage of food in common with the city's human inhabitants, but ...

  The ghost of profiteering on war contracts that had been a great topic in the First World War resurfaced, this time intertwined with the government's campaign against political dissent. The Commons Public Accounts Committee savagely criticized the British Research and Manufacturing Company (BMARC), a subisdiary of the French Hispano-Suiza company established before the war to manufacture vitally needed 20mm cannon for the RAF. Analagous to the Holy Roman Empire, BMARC was neither Swiss, Spanish nor a research company; its sin was to have supplied weapons under fixed price contracts so lucrative that an initial profit of £1.7m had to be pared down to £90,000 on re-examination. BMARC charged £280 for weapons that cost £168 to produce. BMARC was an attractive target as its managing director, Dennis Kendall had recently been elected as an independent MP against the government candidate. Whilst most of the awkward squad MPs belonged to the extreme wings of coalition parties, Kendall w...

  After two failed attempts, the German A-4 rocket, orginally developed for the army as a form of long-range artillery, achieved an entirely successful launch. It travelled 190km from the Peenemuende test centre reaching an apogee of 85km before splashing down in the Baltic. The age of the ballistic missile had begun and, better known as the V-2 (for Vergeltung or revenge), the A-4 would soon become a major preoccupation for the British authorities as they received intelligence of its development. Hitler delivered one of his increasingly rare public speeches at the  Sportpalast to mark the opening of the year's edition of the  Winterhilfe  campaign, one of the key dates in the Nazi calendar. He gave a comprehensive and detailed account of how he saw the war was developing including his habitual sneers at Winston Churchill. He also reminded his listeners of his prophecy that the Jews, who he claimed had wanted the war, would be exterminated. The speech was extensivel...