Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The British 8th Army under General Montgomery overcame a token rearguard action by Rommel and took the Libyan capital city Tripoli. This marked the moment that the British advance westward reached far beyond the point hit by General Wavell's Compass assault on the Italians in 1941. Montgomery celebrated with a large victory parade through the city to mark the first major British land victory over the Axis of the war. It was a striking moment but the the Allies still faced strong resistance by the Germans in Tunisia; the North African campaign was far from over. In the Pacific the Australians and Americans achieved a similarly striking but ultimately hollow triumph when Australian Papua on New Guinea was liberated from the Japanese in the final stage of the Buna-Gona campaign, the first defined territory conquered by the Japanese to be won back. The heavily fortified town of Sanananda was defended to the last by Japanese forces. Organized resistance was crushed but large numbers ...

President Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic for the first time during the war for a summit meeting with Churchill at the luxurious Anfa Hotel in what came to be known as the Casablanca conference. Something of a holiday atmosphere reigned and what might otherwise have been contentious decisions were reached after remarkably little debate. Roosevelt's proposal to state as the Allies' war aim the unconditional surrender of Germany was accepted. This was both a concession to Stalin and a way of heading off any possibility of a  separate German/Soviet peace deal. In turn Roosevelt accepted the British desire for there to be an attack on Italy once Tunisia was cleared of Axis forces, rather than an early cross-Channel attack on France. For the first time since November 1941 RAF Bomber Command mounted raids on Berlin. On two successive nights about 200 Lancasters were commited to the operation, but the navigational technology they used was still old school. Berlin was beyond t...

  The Vichy state took another step downwards when the Service d'Ordre Legionnaire (SOL) was granted legal autonomous status. It had been founded by the Fascist Joseph Darnand who saw Marshal Petain as France's sole legitimate ruler  and treated any opposition or rivalry as treason. The SOL was already operating with extreme savagery to destroy any dissent. Darnand supported utmost collaboration with the Germans. The SOL  would soon be rebaptized as the Milice . The commander of the Red Army that now surrounded the Germans trapped in Stalingrad and around, offered terms for surrender to General Paulus with a deadline of 10am the following day: food and medical assistance. Paulus managed to contact Hitler, who forbade him from accepting what was manifestly a dubious proposition anyway. The Soviets duly launched an all-out offensive against the pocket from all directions. The RAF pilot Richard Hillary was killed in a  training accident. He had inisted on returning to ...

  The Kriegsmarine attacked the convoy JW51B bound for the Kola Inlet with supplies for the USSR. This was the first such convoy since the invasion of North Africa had absorbed allied shipping. The Germans fielded two heavy cruisers, Hipper and Lutzow , and six destroyers against a close escort of six Royal Navy destroyers and two corvettes with two cruisers providing distant cover. In a confused action - the Battle of the Barents Sea -  each side lost a destroyer, Hipper was damaged and HMS Onslow severely hit. The commander of the escort Captain Sherbrooke was badly wounded on Onslow and later awarded the Victoria Cross. All the merchant ships reached port safely and Hitler was left disgusted by the poor performance of his surface ships despite their superiority in material.  A US division under Lt.-General Robert Eichelberger captured the Japanese stronghold of Buna on New Guinea after a difficult and costly battle. Eichelberger had been given direct responsibilit...

    The Red Army staged an audacious deep penetration attack in corps strength aimed at the major German airfield hub at Tatinskaya over 200km from its supply base. The Soviets broke through to the airfield so rapidly that air operations were still in progress when they arrived. Approximately 200 operational aircraft were destroyed, some reportedly by being rammed by Soviet tanks. This gravely compromising the Luftwaffe's already tenuous capacity to supply the forces trapped in Stalingrad by air. The 150 or so tanks and other heavy equipment commited to the operation were lost but it was a considerable strategic success. Allied ground forces in Tunisia had reached sufficient size for their commanders to stage another push against the Germans. The Coldstream Guards led the assault with an attack on Longstop Hill against stiff German resistance. The Coldstreamers were relieved by the US 18th RCT when they took the first summit but a counter attack dislodged the Americans. The Co...

  The British government finally departed from its non-commital attitude towards the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews throughout occupied Europe. In response to a report from the Polish government-in-exile the Foreign Secretary delivered a declaration on behalf of the United Nations, chiefly Britain and the US, condemning the Nazi programme and promising punishment of those responsible. At the suggestion of Labour MP William Cluse the House stood up in silence, a gesture usually reserved to mark the death of a sovereign. British forces crossed back into Burma in what was presented as a return to the offensive after being routed by the Japanese erlier in the year. The objective was relatively unambitious: to establish a foothold on the Arakan peninsula including seizing the island of Akyab. The attack faced weak opposition but the omens were not good. The British commander Noel Irwin was on poor terms with the commander of neighbouring forces, Bill Slim, and determined to...

  The German 4th Panzer Army under Manstein launched operation Winter Storm, to try a break through the Soviet forces surrounding General von Paulus's 6th Army trapped in Stalingrad. The offensive made some gains but ran out of momentum and the Red Army counter-attacked the Axis left flank, overwhelming by the Italian 8th Army. Hitler refused Manstein's request for Paulus to try to break out of Stalingrad; Paulus himself was reluctant. The threat to disregard the Geneva Convention in respect of German and British PoWs triggered by the shackling of captives in a commando raid proved to be short-lived. The Swiss government proposed to both sides that they discontinue shackling prisoners in camps. The British and Canadian governments almost immediately announced their agreement and restraints were removed from German PoWs. Whilst Germany and Britain reverted to treating their uniformed, regular  military captives in civilized fashion, no such consideration was being shown to civi...