Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The allied air forces launched Operation Argument , a series of maximum effort air raids on Germany, better know by its American nickname "Big Week". The damage from the bombing was of debatable value but the operation inflicted grievous casualties on the Luftwaffe. P-51 fighters now available had sufficient range to escort bombers to the heart of Germany and back. The Germans lost at least 100 pilots and perhaps 300 aircraft. The USAAF lost 226 heavy bombers and 28 fighters, with over 2,000 personnel. The Americans could afford the losses but the Germans could not. Big Week was a turning point in the battle for air superiority vital to undertaking the invasion of Europe. A USN  task force of five fleet and four light carriers delivered a series of massive attacks on the major  Japanese base of Truk in the Caroline Islands. For the loss of 25 aircraft the Americans destroyed ten times as many Japanese aircraft and sank six warships and around thirty other vessels includ...

  Speaking in the House of Lords Dr George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, attacked the RAF's strategy. He accepted that civilians would inevitably be killed in attacks on military objectives but that it was not legitimate to obliterate towns as an objective in itself. He also bemoaned the destruction of ancient buildings. Bell was broadly left-wing but his views were supported by Cosmo Lang, the deeply conservative former Archbishop of Canterbury, who deplored the popular exultation inspired by bombing Germany. For the government Lord Cranborne claimed that there was a difference between the supposedly pure terror raids practised by the Germans and the British raids. He appeared unaware of AM Harris's belief that German morale could be broken by air attack. The mediaeval Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino was bombed to rubble by the allies as ground forces struggled to take the hill on which it stood with a commanding position over the surrounding country. There were no German...

      Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of the great Victorian architect, presented his plans for a new cathedral in Coventry to replace the one destroyed by German bombs in 1940, It retained the original spire which had survived as a free-standing bell tower but its liturgical design was radical. It had four separate pulpits one at each corner of a central space allowing speakers to proclaim the gospel in different directions. The altar was designed to rotate so that services could be addressed to smaller congregations in just one portion of the cathedral. It provoked uproar from both traditionalists - one of whom labelled it "Surrey vernacular" - and modernists for whom it was too traditional. The capture of the Marshall Islands, part of pre-war Japanese territory, proceeded smoothly with the conquest of Kwajalein, the first major objective. The US Marines had learned from the bloody lessons of Tarawa and deployed the full range of tracked LVT landing craft which could ...

    Churchill enlivened what had been a soporific campaign in the Brighton by-election by describing the platform of the anti-government candidate as a "swindle." His claim to be standing as the "National Independent" candidate in favour of the "National Government" rang entirely hollow, but he was a Brighton man and the brother of the mayor of Brighton which hinted at discontent with how the local Conservative machine was operating. Coming after  a series of government by-election losses, Churchill's intervention signaled arrogance and weakness, not statesmanship. General de Gaulle unilaterally baptized all resistance groups in France as "Forces Francaises de l'Interieur." This asserted his supposed authority over them and implied that they were part of his own military arm; resistance fighters were duly embodied in the regular French army after the Liberation. In the case of the Communist "Franc Tireurs Partisans" this authori...