Eighty Years Ago This Week

  RAF Bomber Command mounted its largest raid of the war by weight of bombs, dropping 2,000 tons on the city of Dortmund as the campaign that came to be called the Battle of the Ruhr got under way. Its previous record was 1,500 tons a few weeks before. The  Command's destructive power had grown because the 1938 Scheme M programme of migrating to an entirely heavy bomber force was finally becoming a reality. Twin-engine Vickers Wellingtons still featured largely in its arsenal, but four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes were taking over. The first Chindit operation, Operation Longcloth,  behind Japanese lines in Burma was announced publicly. The tale of bravery and inventiveness served as a counterweight to the embarrassing news of the failure of the Arakan offensive. Militarily it achieved almost nothing against the Japanese and only half of the 3,000 troops committed had survived in fit state for future combat. The Chindits and their visionary commander, Orde Wingate, fit...

    The last pockets of Axis troops in Tunisia were overrun and the commanding generals von Arnim and Messe were taken prisoner. All told some 200,000 Germans and Italians became prisoners of war. Church bells were rung throughout England to celebrate the victory, the seond occasion that this had happened in the Second World War; the first had been for el Alamein. The RAF carried out an operation that had been under consideration since the early days of the war: attacking the Ruhr dams by bombers. At the cost of eight out of 19 aircraft despatched the newly formed 617 Squadron destroyed two of the four dams attacked. Hydroelectric production was severely disrupted but no attempt was was to interfere with the rebuilding of the dams. Of the 1,600 fatal casualties on the ground, about two-thirds were Soviet prisoners and slave labourers. SS General Juergen Stroop presonally triggered the explosion that destroyed Warsaw's great synagogue to mark what he presented as the final supp...

    Within minutes of each other the British Eight Army and the US II Corps respectively took the major Tunisian cities of Tunis and Bizerte. Three German  divisional  commanders were amongst the tens of thousands of prisoners taken. Only  a small Axis redoubt on the Cape Bon peninsula held out. Militarily the North African campaign was practically over. In Burma the British put an end to the sorry fiasco of the Arakan offensive. The attack had been premature and ill-planned. General Irwin, the front commander,  wanted to hold on on to the small port of Maungdaw as a token gain to mask the debacle, but General Slim, on whom Irwin had dumped the conduct of the campaign once his initial strategy had failed, told him firmly that the town was indefensible and of no strategic value. Slim prevailed and the British retreated into India. Churchill who had just arrived in Washington for a conference with Roosevelt was furious at another British failure, which seeme...

  The battle of convoy ONS 5 marked a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic. Admiral Doenitz was able to field about forty U-Boats to attack the slow, westbound convoy of 42 merchantmen. The British, though, had intelligence of all his moves and had sufficient warships to  deploy 15 escorts albeit not all simultaneously. Atrocious weather prevented refuelling warships at sea. The U-Boats sank no less than 13 of the merchantmen but lost seven of their number, with a further seven badly damaged. It was not a sustainable rate of exchange. In a hard-fought battle the US 43 Division, which a few weeks before had been classed as unfit for combat, dislodged the Germans from Hill 609, the last significant terrain feature protecting their enclave around Tunis. The operation had been intended as a minor holding action but now opened the way for the final elimination  of the Axis from North Africa. It also showed that the US Army had come of age operationally although the perc...