Eighty Years Ago This Week

The Soviets made their first move  in imposing their rule on areas that they had liberated from the Germans. They recognised the Polish National Committee (known as the Lublin Poles after the corner of Poland held by the Red Army where they were notionally based) as the national government. The committee consisted of docile Communists and was no more than a puppet of Moscow. The Polish government-in-exile in London declared publicly that the Committee was unknown to anyone in Poland. Discontent with the government found a new outlet in a futile debate over an old (and accidental) procedural omission. The wartime Fire Service regulations had not received proper Parliamentary approval and the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, was forced to apologise. There was no suggestion that  the regulations themselves had ben used for oppressive or otherwise unacceptable purposes, but the de facto freedom of the coalition government to legislate as it chose was increasingly unpo...

  Hitler survived an attempt to kill him with a bomb in the conference room at the Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb was planted by a Wehrmacht officer Klaus von Stauffenberg as part of a conspiracy by a number of senior officers to remove the Nazi regime. Hitler suffered only minor injuries and was able to launch a witchhunt against anyone actively involved in the plot, even only peripherally. These included Rommel who was allowed to kill himself. Most of the Wehrmacht generals in senior command posts continued to serve the Third Reich.   At the western flank of the Allied position in Normandy the US Army under General Omar Bradley launched Operation Cobra with massive support from heavy bombers. This was to break the stalemate that had ruled in the lodgement since soon after the D-Day landings. Bad weather had delayed the build up of forces as well as holding back offensive action. Anglo-Canadian attacks around Caen had failed to achieve a brea...