Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The British 8th Army under General Montgomery overcame a token rearguard action by Rommel and took the Libyan capital city Tripoli. This marked the moment that the British advance westward reached far beyond the point hit by General Wavell's Compass assault on the Italians in 1941. Montgomery celebrated with a large victory parade through the city to mark the first major British land victory over the Axis of the war. It was a striking moment but the the Allies still faced strong resistance by the Germans in Tunisia; the North African campaign was far from over. In the Pacific the Australians and Americans achieved a similarly striking but ultimately hollow triumph when Australian Papua on New Guinea was liberated from the Japanese in the final stage of the Buna-Gona campaign, the first defined territory conquered by the Japanese to be won back. The heavily fortified town of Sanananda was defended to the last by Japanese forces. Organized resistance was crushed but large numbers ...

President Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic for the first time during the war for a summit meeting with Churchill at the luxurious Anfa Hotel in what came to be known as the Casablanca conference. Something of a holiday atmosphere reigned and what might otherwise have been contentious decisions were reached after remarkably little debate. Roosevelt's proposal to state as the Allies' war aim the unconditional surrender of Germany was accepted. This was both a concession to Stalin and a way of heading off any possibility of a  separate German/Soviet peace deal. In turn Roosevelt accepted the British desire for there to be an attack on Italy once Tunisia was cleared of Axis forces, rather than an early cross-Channel attack on France. For the first time since November 1941 RAF Bomber Command mounted raids on Berlin. On two successive nights about 200 Lancasters were commited to the operation, but the navigational technology they used was still old school. Berlin was beyond t...

  The Vichy state took another step downwards when the Service d'Ordre Legionnaire (SOL) was granted legal autonomous status. It had been founded by the Fascist Joseph Darnand who saw Marshal Petain as France's sole legitimate ruler  and treated any opposition or rivalry as treason. The SOL was already operating with extreme savagery to destroy any dissent. Darnand supported utmost collaboration with the Germans. The SOL  would soon be rebaptized as the Milice . The commander of the Red Army that now surrounded the Germans trapped in Stalingrad and around, offered terms for surrender to General Paulus with a deadline of 10am the following day: food and medical assistance. Paulus managed to contact Hitler, who forbade him from accepting what was manifestly a dubious proposition anyway. The Soviets duly launched an all-out offensive against the pocket from all directions. The RAF pilot Richard Hillary was killed in a  training accident. He had inisted on returning to ...

  The Kriegsmarine attacked the convoy JW51B bound for the Kola Inlet with supplies for the USSR. This was the first such convoy since the invasion of North Africa had absorbed allied shipping. The Germans fielded two heavy cruisers, Hipper and Lutzow , and six destroyers against a close escort of six Royal Navy destroyers and two corvettes with two cruisers providing distant cover. In a confused action - the Battle of the Barents Sea -  each side lost a destroyer, Hipper was damaged and HMS Onslow severely hit. The commander of the escort Captain Sherbrooke was badly wounded on Onslow and later awarded the Victoria Cross. All the merchant ships reached port safely and Hitler was left disgusted by the poor performance of his surface ships despite their superiority in material.  A US division under Lt.-General Robert Eichelberger captured the Japanese stronghold of Buna on New Guinea after a difficult and costly battle. Eichelberger had been given direct responsibilit...