Eighty years ago this week, British church bells ring for victory in Tunisia and a legend is born

 

 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 suppression of the ghetto uprising. He declared that the Jewish quarter no longer existed. In reality sporadic resistance continued but ultimately the entire population was killed or deported to extermination camps.