Eighty Years Ago This Week

  David Lloyd George died at the age of 82. In December 1916 he had succeeded Herbert Asquith as prime minister and added much-needed resolve and determination to Britain's war effort, prefiguring Churchill's ascension in place of Neville Chamberlain in 1940 as a true war leader. His practical contribution to victory was less certain and he dissipated much of his standing in the devious and corrupt manoeuvrings of his post-war coalition government. Nonetheless Churchill would have brought him into government as an old ally, but Lloyd George saw a better chance to return to power as the head of government once Hitler had triumphed. In September 1936 Lloyd George had paid a high profile visit to Hitler, whom he praised extravagantly, in a move to establish himself as the British statesman who could build a friendly relationship with Nazi Germany. He had remained an MP almost to the last but his criticisms had dwindled into a minor irritant. Montgomery launched Operation Plunder ,...

    Hitler made his last public appearance in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery when he presented Iron Crosses to twenty members of the Hitler Youth who had shown bravery on the battlefield. This featured in the newsreel Wochenschau . He has especially taken with the story of Willi Huebner, a sixteen year old who had been a battlefield messenger just as he himself had been during the First World War. Churchill set out in outline his goals for the general election which would follow the defeat of Germany. He wanted to form a government of all men of goodwill, but was no more specific. In practice this was taken to mean that he would be happy to rule with members of the National Liberals, by then a negligible force, even though a number of members were serving as senior ministers. By implication he ruled out  any continuance of the wartime coalition with Labour. In practice the election was going to be a straight fight between Conservative and Labour with Churchill rever...

    The US air force took full advantage of its newly conquered bases in the Marianas islands. 334 B-29s were despatched to bomb Tokyo carrying mainly incendiary bombs in the knowledge that the city's wood and paper housing was especially vulnerable. The resulting conflagration destroyed some 4,000 hectares of housing and killed rather fewer than 100,000. Perhaps 1.5m people lost their homes. It was the most lethal and destructive air raid of all time. Only 27 of the attacking aircraft were lost. The Japanese launched a coup against the French authorities in Indochina to forestall any local assistance to an allied invasion of the country. The French colonial forces mounted localised resistance but all were overwhelmed with heavy casualties. Most of the survivors and other colonialists were imprisoned under harsh conditions, although some escaped into Thailand. A puppet empire in Vietnam and two puppet kingdoms, in Cambodia and Luang Prabang,  were established. SS General ...

  Just before her nineteenth birthday, the heir to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth was finally allowed to join the ATS, women's branch of the British Army, the first British female royal to serve in uniform. Moreover, it was the uncomfortable battledress, which was seen as proletaraian. To begin with at least her contact with comrades was strictly limited;  she was taken to lunch every day at a nearby officers' mess and was chauffered to and from Windsor Castle to sleep. She finally succeeded in talking to her comrades over mugs of tea and did learn to drive and basic vehicle maintenance. The two largest cities in neutral Switzerland were bombed by US B-24s, eight on Basel; six on Zurich. They were part of a much larger force tasked with bombing central Germany but which had encountered adverse weather and had sought targets of opportunity. There were no fatalities in Basel (100 were injured) but six died in Zurich. The pilot and navigator in the Zurich incident w...

   The Yalta agreement was debated in the House of Commons. A group of mostly right-wing Conservative MPs tabled a motion protesting at Poland being forced to cede territory to the Soviet Union and being prevented from forming its own government without outside interference. 25 MPs voted in favour but 396 supported the government. As the defeat of Germany came ever closer, a steady dribble of hitherto neutral countries declared war against the Axis. These included Turkey ( most notably),   Latin American countries and Egypt, dominated by Britain but formally an independent country. Its King Farouk had just met Churchill. The declaration was made in a statement to Egypt's lower house of parliament by the prime minister, Ahmad Pasha. As he left the chamber to go to the upper house he was immediately shot dead by a young, radical lawyer. Britain's coal mine owners attempted to pre-empt the almost inevitable retention of wartime controls over the industry by themselves propos...