Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The British government published a White Paper with details of the proposal to create an International Monetary Fund to prevent a recurrence of the financial tensions and instability which had dogged the world economy in the inter-war years. The White Paper was a victory for John Maynard Keynes, who led the British side in the negotations and took an enlightened, forward-thinking view. He had to overcome opposition from reactionaries, notably Lord Beaverbrook,  who deluded themselves that it would be possible to restore an imaginary British financial dominance of world trade. Stalin was already making his plans to dominate the Balkans. The sailors on five ships of the Greek navy staged a mutiny to press for greater representation in the government-in-exile of the Communist EAM grouping. The government recalled Admiral Voulgaris from retirement to be commander in chief of the navy and he organized the violent suppression of the mutiny. A Greek army brigade also mutinied in E...

   To protect secrecy in the run-up to D-Day the British government brought in utterly unprecedented restrictions on the diplomatic missions of  all countries other than those of the fighting allies. Diplomats were banned from leaving the country. Any communication other than uncoded wireless messages or written despatches subjected to allied censorship was blocked. This drastic curtailment of diplomatic privileges showed just how much importance was attached to the intelligence dimension to D-Day, above all preventing leakage of the location and timing of the landings. The need to manage the flow of information from Britain was all the greater as the allies were conducting an elaborate deception campaign to mislead the Germans so blocking information that might have cast doubt on the false stories being fed to the Germans was almost as important. The Japanese roadblock on the road to Kohima was broken, allowing the British forces there to be resupplied and reinforced alb...

    After the crippling coal strikes and in the midst of a strike by 20,000 Belfast shipyard workers over the imprisonment of five men, who had organised a sympathy strike of aircraft workers, the Labour Party leaders spotted the need to distance themselves from workers who put their own interests ahead of the war effort. Ernest Bevin, the minister of Labour, announced that "incitement and fomenting" strikes would be made a criminal offence under the wartime Defence Regulations. The TUC supported this fully and denounced unofficial strikes as blows, "struck in the back at their comrades in the armed forces who are now steeling themselves for a life-and-death struggle on the European Continent." The police raided the offices of Trotskyite organisations across Britain  including the Fourth International and the Revolutionary Communist Party. None represented any material threat to national security, but the operation had the double benefit of further flagging govern...

  The Royal Navy mounted another attempt to sink German battleship Tirpitz , whose presence in Norway threatened aid convoys to the Soviet Union, tying down extensive resources. Two waves of 21 Fleet Air Arm (FAA) Barracuda bombers from HMS Victorious and HMS Furious together with F-4F, F-6F and F-4U fighters attacked her; the first catching her unprotected by smokescreen. A number of bombs hit, causing extensive, but superficial damage; even special armour-piercing bombs could not penetrate her main armour. Her crew, especially anti-aircraft gunners,  suffered extensive casualties. Tirpitz was back to full operational condition within weeks. In one of its last major raids on Germany before being switched to direct support for Overlord, RAF Bomber Command suffered calamitous losses in an attack on Nuremberg, losing 95 bombers. Most casualties were suffered flying in a long, straight leg from the Dutch border to Fulda. Only minimal diversionary operations were mounted. The dis...

  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...