Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The Red Army launched Operation Uranus : two thrusts in each direction along a straight axis north-west to south-east. Within days the two thrusts met after each advancing approximately 250km, cutting off the German forces still fighting in Stalingrad. The speed with which Uranus succeeded demonstrates just how thinly spread Axis forces had become as the advance on Stalingrad dominated their operations. The Germans had finally paid the penalty of strategic over-reach; the Soviets had  used their enormously superior strength to transform the German Case Blue from a supposedly decisive offensive into a fight for survival. The 200,000 or so men trapped in the pocket were doomed. The Allied victories in North Africa brought a strategic dividend when the Operation Stoneage convoy ran from Alexandria to Malta  almost unscathed, apart from severe damage to a cruisier of its escort. This was a dramatic reversal of the position in August when Axis forces around the Mediterranea...

  The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal also goes by other names but it was the decisive sea battle of the campaign. The Japanese were attempting to run a convoy carrying 7,000 or so reinforcement troops to the island with a large escort; other vessels were also to shell the US positions around Henderson Field. US intelligence alerted the navy. The Japanese had the better of the first of two night engagements  but they were still forced to postpone the bombardment by one day. More important the Japanese convoy was badly mauled by aircraft from Henderson and the carrier USS Enterprise , which was not fully repaired from its last battle but was the USN's only available carrier. Damaged Japanese transports had to be beached and only 2,000 troops made it ashore. In the second surface battle the Americans forced the Japanese to withdraw. The other register of American success is that they brought a similar sized convoy to land with minimal loss. The forces were roughly equal in strength...

  Axis resistance to General Montgomery's attack at El Alamein collapsed completely in the face of massive superiority of the British led forces and Rommel went into full retreat. Montgomery proved to be the 'lucky general' who reaped the rewards of the allies vastly greater economic resources, whilst the reputations of his predecessors who had far less to work with were flayed by Churchill. Montgomery was knighted immediately in recognition of the victory. Churchill saw a turning point but knew that there was still much to do, "Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." President Franklin Roosevelt had always recognized that it was the European war that demanded the higher priority than the Pacific War and this strategy became a public fact when massive American forces invaded Vichy France's North African territories in the Torch landings. They encountered some military opposition but this was ...

  In the Mediterranean the U-559 was hunted down by British ships and aircraft. She was fatally damaged and abandoned by her crew. They neither scuttled her properly nor destroyed her confidential material. Three men from the destroyer HMS Petard boarded her and retrieved documents including the current Enigma setting sheets, which were passed to a whaler from Petard . This provided crucial material to advance GCHQ's work in breaking the cypher, which had resisted their efforts for ten months. By some measures this marked the turning point in the intelligence battle against the U-boats. Two of the boarding party were caught on the submarine when she sank and drowned. They were awarded George Crosses; by some accounts awards of Victoria Crosses were rejected because these might have drawn too much attention to the value of their sacrifce. The award citations were bland and unspecific. A public meeting at the Albert Hall led by senior British churchmen protested against Nazi persecu...

   The British Eight Army under the recently appointed General Montgomery launched a full-scale attack on Axis forces in Egypt in the second battle of El Alamein. The British led forces enjoyed a near two to one superiority in almost all respects. After years of fighting with mediocre or inferior quality tanks, they also had 300 of the new Sherman M-4 tanks that President Roosevelt had diverted from the US Army and which were reliable and more than the equal of most German or Italian tanks. The fight for Guadalcanal reached its most intense point with battles on both land and sea. The Japanese massed the troops for a major assault on the Americans, triggering three days of intense fighting. Their attacks came close to threatening the American perimeter but none succeeded. The desperation of the Japanese assault is obvious from the 2,000 to 3,000 killed compared to fewer than one hundred Americans. Each side had some 20,000 troops in the field: a small number compared to the fo...

  After fierce fighting the Germans occupied the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Or, more accurately, its ruins. The position had little operational significance in the battle for the city, but great propaganda resonance. Its output of tractors had been a key element in the much-touted modernisation of agriculture under the Soviets and the industrialisation of the USSR although it had been switched to tank production on the outbreak of war. It had also been named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, one of the spiritual fathers of the Soviet state, as the founder of the Cheka and the OGPU, the predecessors of the KGB and today's FSB. A large statue of Dzerzhinsky still stands on the site. The Red air force accomplished one of its occasional humanitarian missions when it evacuated thirteen monkeys from the research institute founded by Professor Ivan Pavlov in the beleaguered city of Leningrad, where they had been suffering from shortage of food in common with the city's human inhabitants, but ...

  The ghost of profiteering on war contracts that had been a great topic in the First World War resurfaced, this time intertwined with the government's campaign against political dissent. The Commons Public Accounts Committee savagely criticized the British Research and Manufacturing Company (BMARC), a subisdiary of the French Hispano-Suiza company established before the war to manufacture vitally needed 20mm cannon for the RAF. Analagous to the Holy Roman Empire, BMARC was neither Swiss, Spanish nor a research company; its sin was to have supplied weapons under fixed price contracts so lucrative that an initial profit of £1.7m had to be pared down to £90,000 on re-examination. BMARC charged £280 for weapons that cost £168 to produce. BMARC was an attractive target as its managing director, Dennis Kendall had recently been elected as an independent MP against the government candidate. Whilst most of the awkward squad MPs belonged to the extreme wings of coalition parties, Kendall w...