Eighty years ago this week the Allies hold Germany on the back foot in the Bay of Biscay and Ukraine

 

The Quebec conference between Roosevelt and Churchill shaped allied strategy. They would seek the unconditional surrender of Italy and, in line with Churchill's wishes, agreed to extending the campaign in the Mediterranean to a full invasion of Italy. Churchill did though accept May 1 1944 as the date for Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of France although he nursed hopes for an attack on Norway. No-one else on the allied side supported the Norway scheme although Hitler, whose grasp of psychology was better than his strategy, remained alert to the danger. The British conceded primacy in the development of nuclear weapons to the US, in practice conceding that they simply did not have the economic resources left to conduct serious activities of their own.

The British Cabinet sent a formal message of thanks to RAF Coastal Command. This chiefly reflected the success of the Command's patrols against U-boats transitting through the Bay of Biscay to operate in the Atlantic which had sunk twenty U-boats in three months. The Germans had first tried remaining on the surface and fighting it out with the aircaft and, when this failed, adopted the wearing expedient of sailing close inshore through Spanish territorial waters until Coastal Command patrols blocked this. Perhaps even more important than the sinkings was that the the U-boats were forced to stay underwater for longer, reducing their offensive patrol time. The Cabinet's message was a welcome acknowledgement of the work a branch of the service that was generally overshadowed by the Air Staff's focus on bombing Germany.

The city of Kharkov had been at the centre of fierce battles  since the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It had been recaptured by the Red Army in February 1943 in the wake of Stalingrad but it fell to a German counter-offensive the following month under Manstein, possibly their best commander. By the summer though the Germans were no longer able to fend off a fresh Soviet attack in August. The city was almost surrounded and Hitler wanted it held despite the risk of another Stalingrad, but it was abandoned. From then the Soviet offensive petered out but nonentheless this marked a decisive swing against the Germans on the battlefield.

Heinrich Himmler was promoted to interior minister in place of Wilhelm Frick, who had only been a nominal boss anyway. The move was good for Himmler's ego but had little practical effect. Hitler's motive was probably to signal that Himmler's internal security machinery would be deployed even more ruthlessly against dissent. Remarkably enough Himmler proceded to acquiesce in the opening of informal contacts with the Allies in Switzerland to discuss a negotiated peace. The removal of Hitler was the unspoken but crucial component of any such deal.