Eighty Years Ago This Week

   Dozens of V-1s were air-launched from Heinkel He-111 bombers over the North Sea. They were targeted on Manchester but the most lethal strike was in Oldham where 27 people died. Elsewhere another 17 lost their lives. In military terms the Germans had doubled down on the already wasteful strategy of investing in flying bombs capable of no more than random and barely significant damage by commiting conventional aircraft desperately needed to support the gound campaign. The British government leapt on the success of the German Ardennes offensive to announce a fresh injection of 250,000 front line soldiers into the army ahead of the invasion of Germany. The Labour ministers were bullied into accepting an extension of civilian call-up. Other men would be transferred from the Navy and RAF and support personnel would be combed out in the Army itself. The German Ardennes offensive reach a high-water mark when it surrounded the US 101st Airborne Division at the important road junctio...

    The German launched a counter-attack in the Ardennes with 13 infantry and 7 armoured divisions with around one thousand tanks and assault guns. These were almost the last reserves available. The strategic goal was unclear; Hitler imagined that it would be possible to recapture Antwerp; von Rundstedt and the other generals knew this was too ambitious. Ultimately the rationale did not go far beyond hoping that a major breakthrough would somehow seriously compromise the Allied offensive. The Germans achieved complete tactical surprise, mainly because poor weather had stopped allied aerial reconaissance. The human intelligence on German dispositions which had been plentiful during the advance through France and the Low Countries had also disappeared now that the Germans were operating from their homeland. The allies did not expect an attack in the sector whose terrain favoured the defenders and it was manned by tired or inexperienced US units.  V-2 rockets were being targ...

  The last vestige of serious air raid precautions, which had disrupted everyone's life in Britain since the outbreak of war, was removed. The obligation to go to full black-out conditions with no light showing when the air raid alert was sounded was lifted. The Luftwaffe had become a negligible danger although V weapons were still falling on London. The US introduced five star rank for senior military officers: Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur and Arnold became Generals of the Army; Leahy, King and Nimitz became Fleet Admirals. In part this was an expedient to remove the anomaly by which Americans commanded notionally higher ranking British officers, notably Field Marshal Montgomery. The move was also emblematic of the unprecedented scale of US commitment to the Second World War. Admiral Halsey and General Bradley attained the rank but these were the last so recognised. The Canadian government decisively won the no-confidence vote by 143 to 70  which concluded the bitter debat...

    Britain's Home Guard was formally stood down after more than four years in existence. This was marked by a parade of 8,000 members through London. German invasion had ceased to be a threat long before and with the dwindling of the V-1 offensive, the Guard's anti-aircraft role was insignificant. In a neat contrast, Germany had just set up the Volksturm , broadly equivalent to the Home Guard as a defence force for men too old or too young for full military service. Princess Elizabeth launched HMS Vanguard onto the Clyde. She was to be to be Britain's largest ever and, as it proved, last battleship. She also acquired the debatable reputation as the only Royal Navy battleship never to fire its guns in anger. True or not, she embodied the big gun big ship strategy to which the Royal Navy had remained wedded to for too long. She had no real future. Even had Japan fought on for longer, the aircraft carrier had become the dominant class of warship and the decisive weapon in...

French units liberated Strasbourg, which had been in German hands since France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. It was thus of great symbolic value. An extemporized tricolor marked with the name of the unit which made it was flown from the cathedral. Fighting was minimal fighting; morale collapsed amongst the German defenders and the local authorities were intent on saving their skin.   The long running and agonized conflict over military service in Canada reached a crisis. There was immense opposition (especially amongst Francophones) to sending any of the large number of men conscripted to fight abroad; approximately half of men called up refused to sign up for foreign service and were derisively known as "zombies". The Canadian corps serving in Europe were desperately short of men after the heavy casualties of the Scheldt and Gothic Lines campaigns. The government finally announced a once-off despatch overeseas of 16,000 conscripts subject to par...

  Churchill's son-in-law Edwin Duncan Sandys became the youngest member of the Cabinet when he was promoted to Minister of Works. He moved on from organizing the defence against V weapons to planning post war reconstruction. The black-out was ended for central districts of London where it had been in force since 1939. V weapons were still striking the capital but they were unguided. A White paper set out proposals for the recruitment of civil servants during what was now being called the reconstruction period after the imminent end to the war in Europe. A proportion of job vacancies would be reserved for those whose war service had deprived them of the chance of beginning their working lives at the civil service: three quarters at top level,  two-thirds of mid-ranking posts and half of clerical jobs. It was recognised that this would skew recruitment towards men, so a number of the remaining jobs would be held for women.  The city of Metz fell to American forces und...

    RAF Lancasters of 9 and 617 Squadrons finally sank the battleship Tirpitz in Tromso fjord at their third attempt. The British were unaware that she was no longer capable of sea action and had been moved south to act as a floating battery to repel an allied invasion that never came. Two 12,000lb Tallboy bombs scored direct hits and she capsized killing some 1,000 crew members. A film crew was aboard one of the aircraft and the footage of the attack was swiftly released to maximize the propaganda value of the achievement. Tirpitz's positive contribution to the German war effort had been minimal: one abortive attack on a  Murmansk convoy and the bombardment of the island of Spitzbergen, but she had tied down huge British resources for at least three years. Usually AM "Bert" Harris objected to using RAF resources other than in bombing cities, but here he could show that his aircraft could do something that the Royal Navy had failed to do. German propaganda anno...

    Canadian and Royal Marine forces stormed the island of Walcheren with the island's capital, Middelburg, falling to an audacious thrust by amphibious Buffalo personnel carriers. Because the ground was almost completed inundated it would not have been possible to use tanks. This ended  Battle of the Scheldt and finally opened access to the port of Antwerp. 40,000 Germans were taken prisoner but the attackers had suffered over 20,000 casualties of which the bulk fell on Canadians. F. D. Roosevelt was reelected for an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States. He beat Thomas Dewey, his Republican opponent by a comfortable margin, winning 36 states giving him 432 votes in the electoral college, well above the 266 needed to win. Dewey took only twelve states. In the popular vote Roosevelt obtained 53.4% to Dewey's 45.9%. Concerns about Roosevelt's health and the conduct of the war were strong and vocal, but far less than support for him.  Church...

    The USN won a decisive victory over the IJN in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest sea battle of all time. The Japanese lost four carriers and three battleships including the Musashi , the second of the gigantic Yamato class, the largest ever built. The battle saw the first use of kamikaze suicide attacks by Japanese aircraft. The IJN failed to impede the US landings on the Philippines and the losses it suffered marked the end of its time as a strategic force. 24 Mosquitos of the RAF's 2 Bomber Group attacked the Gestapo headquarters at Aarhus in Denmark in response to a plea from local resistance leaders whose organisations had suffered from German intelligence successes. The attack was one of a number of 2 Group strikes against German security forces and was personally led by the Group commander Air Vice Marshal Basil Embry, whose knowledge of D-Day plans had prevented him leading the attack on Amiens jail, an operation which the BBC persists in falsely presenting as ...

  As part of his campaign for the Presidential election F. D.  Roosevelt drove 51 miles through New York hatless and coatless in an open limousine at the head of a large motorcade despite torrential rain.  He delivered a speech at the Ebbets Field baseball ground without leaving his car so as to conceal his need for a wheelchair. He was hoping to quieten widespread - and accurate - stories of his poor health The US landings on the Philippines triggered an immense Japanese response. Almost all the IJN's badly diminished assets was commited to a series of interlocking attacks on the US invasion force. The initial thrust caught the USN unprepared with two powerful fleet carrier groups detached from the main body. It was possible to recall one, albeit with a delay but the other  remained unavailable so the USN was deprived of 40% of its carrier strength. A light carrier USS Princeton was sent to the bottom by Japanese aircraft. The allies recognised General de Gaulle's ...

US forces landed on the Philippines near Leyte in the southern component of the overall Pacific strategy. The northern, island hopping  component was aimed more directly at the Japanese home islands and was of arguably greater strategic value. The invasion was led by General MacArthur, who had commanded in Manila when the Japanese had conquered the islands in 1942; he had famously promised that he would return and the landings made good on that promise. The Philippines President Osmena came ashore with him. He had hoped to land dry-shod and was furious when the beach master forced him to use a deep draught vessel so he had to wade the last yards to the beach. This translated to a look of grim determination on his face captured on the publicity photographs which were so powerful that he was reconciled to the inconvenience. The Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, attempted to bring his country over to the allied side even though German forces had occupied Hungary in March  but ...

    Churchill visited Moscow for a summit conference. There he  signed the "naughty document" with Stalin setting out the control GB and USSR would each have over Balkan countries, which was contrived to emphasise Britain's indepen dent standing as member of the "big three." The US was excluded from this manifestly imperialistic scheme. Joint control over Hungary and Yugoslavia ultimately did not materialise as anticipated but the issue of Greece swiftly took concrete form. With Rumania and its oil fields now lost the Germans had little reason to continue their occupation of Greece and began to withdraw their troops. The Greek resistance movements did not need any assistance but Churchill was acutely aware of the need to prevent the Communist ELAS from taking over. British ground forces in brigade strength were despatched to occupy strategic locations. The days of the coalition government in Britain were drawing to a close. The Labour Party announced that it wou...

  The uprising in Warsaw by the Polish Home Army came to an end when German military pressure forced its commanders to accept terms. The failure of the Red Army to continue its advance towards the city allowed the Germans to concentrate their ground forces with heavy weapons on suppressing the Poles. The Germans conceded the status of prisoners of war to the fighters who surrendered which was largely respected. Stalin's goal of eliminating a large force under the control of the Polish government-in-exile had been achieved. The town of Calais and the associated positions at Cap Gris Nez fell to Canadian troops after little fighting. It had been declared a "fortress" but the garrison was demoralised and consisted of poor quality troops. The German long range artillery based there had inflicted some damage and, more important, prevented the use of the port of Boulogne. The port of Calais itself had been so badly damaged by Allied bombing and German demolitions that it was to...

The Germans overran the British pocket east of the Rhine at Arnhem with a few survivors escaping across the river. With the US Army embroiled in a brutal battle for the Huertgen Forest to the South and a  Canadian force fighting for the right bank of the Scheldt,  the hopes of easy and early victory had evaporated. In his enthusiasm for Market Garden Montgomery had not made the Scheldt a priority although without command of the river, the port of Antwerp was nearly useless. The British high command in the Middle East straddled military and home affairs in an ill-conceived scheme to grant compassionate home leave to married men with three years service in the theatre who wished to start a family. This attracted a flood of applications leading to a suicidally stupid and offensive revision in the scheme designed to hold back numbers: it would apply only to men of 35 years of age who had no children and could show "good reason" why they hadn't; moreover both husbands and wiv...

  The allies launched Operation Market Garden, a combined air and ground drive to secure the three bridges across the lower Rhine with the goal of facilitating an early  invasion of German from the north. Following the speedy expulsion of the the Germans from France and then Belgium it was dangerously easy to imagine the German armies were broken and would not offer serious resistance. US airborne divisions seized the two westerly bridges and an Anglo-Polish force took the easterly bridge at Arnhem which lay some one hundred kilometers behind German lines. General Horrock's British XXX Corps opened a drive to force a narrow corrridor to link the bridges with the main body of the allied armies.  Further south the US army attacked the city of Aachen, the first major objective in Germany. At first the local commander General von Schwerin proposed to surrender the city, which had not been bombed, but Wehrmacht high command decided to make a fight of it. The city was within th...