Eighty Years Ago This Week

    The Soviet regime broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile because it refused to endorse the transparent Soviet fiction that the 10,000 Polish officers and other elite killed at Katyn Wood had been murdered by the Germans. The Poles sought an investigation by the Red Cross into the crime. The Germans had announced the discovery of the corpses some days beforehand. The Soviet explanation was seen as a sign of guilty conscience and a gift to German propaganda. Only in 2010 did the Russian parliament formally admit responsibility. Japan announced openly that it had carried out illegal death sentences on US aircrew from the Doolittle air raid the previous year who had fallen into their hands. Eight had been sentenced to death supposedly for intentionally attacking civilian targets, but five of these sentences were commuted.  The British Eighth Army captured Longstop Hill, the last major terrain feature protecting the Axis enclave in Tunisia. In D...

  The Japanese navy commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed when his aircraft was shot down by US Air Force P-38 fighters in a targeted operation. A combination of US code-breaking and poor Japanese security had disclosed the precise schedule of the admiral's tour of inspection. The full chain of decisions that led to the mission is unclear, but the most plausible version is that the USN commanders immediately present made the the decision and informed Washington. Yamamoto had planned the Pearl Harbor attack so revenge featured as a motivation but the killing hit Japanese morale and deprived them of a highly competent commander. Fittingly the P-38s, the only aircraft with sufficient range for the operation, had just moved to Guadalcanal safely in US hands after an epic struggle. Just as the Germans had attempted in the Stalingrad pocket, the beleaguered Axis forces in Tunisia could only be supplied by air, because the allies had achieved practical control of the Mediterranean...

  Martin Bormann was publicly given the title "Secretary of the Fuehrer" although this had long been his job. He had already used his control of access to Hitler to make himself the second most powerful man in the Reich. This had been clear to insiders for some while but had passed unnoticed amongst the allies; Bormann cultivated an image of near-invisibility and was rarely photographed. The open acknowledgement of Bormann's status was acutely felt by Goebbels who understood that his previously intimate relationship with Hitler was being diluted. Lead elements of Patton's II Corps advancing into Tunisia from the West joined with  Montgomery's 8th Army coming from the East. The junction had symbolic but little military importance; only desert lay to the south. The allies were poised for the final drive to Tunis and Montgomery could treat himself to another triumphal entry into a conquered city, the port of Sfax. The British coalition government suffered a surprise ...

  FROM EDXIT TO MEGXIT Spectres at Coronation Banquets 1937 and 2023 The abdication of Edward VIII and its aftermath and the present unhappy relationship between Prince Harry and the royal family have much in common: a deeply beloved, divorcee, American wife with a forceful personality, the abandonment of royal duties, personal estrangement from the family, extensive legal action, a pending coronation and exile from Britain. The parallels, though, are far from exact and the differences might tell us more than the similarities. Only two kings of England have left the throne voluntarily, by the official account at least, Richard II in 1399 and Edward VIII in 1936. Richard’s cousin who succeeded him as Henry IV suffered only minimal embarrassment from his predecessor, whom he imprisoned and quite probably starved to death within a few months of losing the kingship. For various reasons these expedients were not available to George VI when he and his advisers weighed how to deal w...

    The RAF celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation in an atmosphere of patriotic self-congratulation. The king spoke of the 'imperishable renown' that the service had won and  announced a plan to award standards to operational squadrons for length of service or achievements in combat. Winston Churchill was awarded honorary RAF wings - a distinction usually reserved for royalty - to complement the honorary rank of air commodore awarded in 1939. The chief of the Air Staff laid a solitary wreath at the Cenotaph. Britain and the US had managed to keep their differences over military strategy quiet but were not so successful in the field of post-war economy planning. Experts on each side - John Maynard Keynes on the British and Dexter White on the American - had been working on  international schemes for monetary cooperation to avoid the debacles of the 1930s without reaching agreement. Keynes's idea was further reaching and would have attempted to neut...