Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The German occupation of Italy took a long step towards the outright murderous tyranny of the occupation of other European territories, when the Communist resistance killed 28 SS security police (and two Italian civilians) and wounded many more with a bomb in a Roman street. The Germans ordered ten Italians to be killed for each German and 335 people, a combination of existing prisoners some resistants and civilians taken off the street at random, were shot in the Ardeatine Caves. The Caves are now a mausoleum for the victims. 76 Royal Air Force officer prisoners of war escaped from Stalag Luft III by tunnel. The scale of the escape enraged Hitler who ordered that officers recaptured were to be killed; 50 were shot out of hand. Only three escapers succeeded in reaching Britain. Major General Orde Wingate was killed in an accidental air crash in Burma, just as his second Chindit operation, Longcloth, was getting under way. He was succeeded by Walter Lentaigne, who had been put ...

  Mount Vesuvius, which dominates Naples, erupted seriously for the first time since 1872. It destroyed the village of San Sebastian and dozens of B-25 bombers parked on an airfield belonging to the 340th Group, which was famously fictionalised in the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller who joined the unit a few weeks later. Remarkably, fewer than thirty people died. So as to forestall Hungary making a separate peace with the USSR the Germans occupied the country. The Regent, Admiral Horthy, acquiesced and Hungarian forces continued to fight on the Axis side. Hungary's Jews could be rounded up and despatched to extermination camps. Afters a week's strike 100,000 Welsh miners returned to work with the prospect of a large increase in rates for piecework pay. Some 500,000 tons of coal production had been lost. The health Minister, Conservative Henry Willink, triggered a lively debate when he presented the proposals for a National Health Service to the House of Commons. Conservative MP...

    A military court in Algeria sentenced industrialist and collaborator Pierre Pucheux to death in the first high profile trial of a former member of the Vichy government. Pucheux had come to North Africa under a safe conduct pass issued by General Giraud but General de Gaulle chose to ignore this. Pucheux had been minister of the interior under Vichy and thus caught by an edict of the National Liberation Committee which deemed all ministers to have committed treason. Pucheux had also personally selected 89 hostages for reprisal execution and established the Police Aux Questions Juives . Ireland declined a request from the US to expel diplomats from Axis countries on the grounds of security. Britain then banned travel to Ireland  as part of precautions to preserve secrecy over the imminent Overlord landings in France. There was uproar in the House of Commons when the Conservative health minister Henry Willink made a statement on post-war housing policy. The substance was...

    The second Chindit operation ( Thursday ) in Burma began with the insertion of a brigade strength force by air behind Japanese lines. The force included John Masters, later a highly successful novelist. The precise military objectives were poorly defined; fortified bases were to be established from which raids would be conducted. However the commander Orde Wingate was still riding high in the favour of Churchill as someone bent on offensive action in a theatre that had seen a decicedly lacklustre performance by the British army. Its victory in the battle of the Admin Box was not enough to redeem its conventional commanders in the eyes of Downing Street. The Japanese launched U-Go, as it proved their last major offensive in Burma, with the goal of invading India. It was a high risk plan involving two widely separated forces. The logistics were challenging and ultimately depended on reaching and capturing British depots in India. At the insistence of Subhas Chandra Bose two ...

      The German Operation Steinbock (the 'Baby Blitz') air raids on the London area reached an intense phase with attacks on three successive nights  by rather fewer than 200 aircraft, the most intense bombing since the Blitz of 1940/1. This compares with three or four times that number delivering the attacks on Germany as part of 'Big Week'. Almost no attempt was made to hit specific, militarily valuable targets; the goal was purely retaliation. The raids did extensive damage to property, including some to Harrow School, Churchill's alma mater. The operation was, though, a strategic blunder. The Germans could not afford the inevitable attrition of aircraft and crews and did not inflict any worthwhile losses on the defenders. Steinbock was a mirror image of 'Big Week'; the damage caused by the bombs was almost irrelevant; what mattered was the degradation of the Luftwaffe's capability; in bombers through Steinbock; in fighters through 'Big 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...