Eighty years ago this week the Luftwaffe makes a huge and pointless sacrifice

 

On New Year's Day the Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte (floorplate), a series of attacks mainly by fighter aircraft on allied airfields.  The operation had originally been planned for December 16th to gain air superiority for the Ardennes offensive. Bodenplatte achieved tactical surprise and perhaps 400 allied aircraft were destroyed or damaged. However as these were on the ground, aircrew casualties were light. The allies were able to replace the lost machines rapidly whilst the 200 odd German losses were nearly irreplaceable. Worse, the pilots lost with them certainly could not be replaced. The ground offensive had already come to a halt so whatever operational value there might have been had evaporated. Bodenplatte was a marginal tactical victory for the Germans, but a strategic calamity. In the words of fighter commander Adolf Galland, "We sacrificed out last substance."

The Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest trapping two German SS divisions and a similar number of Hungarian troops, obedient to the Arrow Cross regime installed by the Germans to continue the war on their side, together with 800,000 civilians, much of the city's population. Thus began a hard fought siege. Budapest had little strategic but considerable political significance as the capital of Hungary. Hitler designated Budapest as a fortress city and Stalin wanted to display the Soviet military capacity to conquer territory ahead of the Yalta conference with Roosevelt and Churchill.

Following the conference called in Athens at Churchill's instigation during his dramatic visit to Greece, a regency under the primate Cardinal Damaskinos  was installed to fill the political void which threatened to lead to all-out civil war. The regency was accepted both by King George II (once he knew that Britain would leave him no alternative) and by  the EAM Communist group. EAM maintained its demands for the dissolution of all armed forces not under their own control and a majority in the national government. The regency postponed only briefly the intensification of conflict.

Admiral Bertram Ramsay was killed in an aircraft accident taking off from France. He was a supreme organizer and had master-minded both the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 and the naval components of the invasion of Sicily and D-Day landings.