Eighty Years Ago This Week

    In the final stages of the the German occuption of Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the prominent family of Swedish industrialists, had been sent there to rescue Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps or persecution by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross party. He issued Swedish documentation to Jews and rented properties ostensibly as official Swedish premises, which were used to house Jews. It is unknown how many Jews were saved by his efforts, but it was certainly some thousands. He was detained by the Soviet security forces when the Red Army conquered Budapest and deported to Moscow under a false accusation of espionage but for reasons which remain obscure. He died, possibly murdered, in Soviet captivity. The Red Army took Warsaw with minimal fighting. The Soviet puppet Polish National Committee  was immediately installed there to anchor its claim to be the legitimate government of the country. F. D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his fourth term as US Pres...

  USN Admiral Halsey mounted Operation Gratitude in the South China Sea to eliminate the remains of the IJN Combined Fleet which might have threatened the landings on Luzon.  In the event he did not, as he had expected, find any major surface units in Cam Ranh Bay off Vietnam. Air strikes were conducted over the whole zone including Hong Kong and Taiwan. Severe storms badly hampered sea refuelling operations  but the USN sank 300,000 tons of shipping in port and in convoy including 25 tankers, which crippled Japanese logistics capability. Hitler conferred with von Rundstedt at his headquarters in the West. He authorised a major withdrawal from the Ardennes salient, marking the end of this last, disastrous offensive. He returned to Berlin, never to leave again. Supreme command would henceforth be exercised from the shadows. Adolph Galland was dismissed as the Luftwaffe fighter leader for openly criticising Goering's leadership, notably Operation Bodenplatte which had squ...

  The Bishop of London Geoffrey Fisher became Archibishop of Canterbury in succession to William Temple, who had been his patron and wanted him as the next Archbishop. Temple's early death, though, had deprived the Church of a forward-looking leader who was ready to take it into the vastly changed world after the war. By contrast Fisher was a conservative, albeit far from reactionary. Churchill selected him for his "toughness". The American psychological warfare arm launched Operation Cornflakes . The kindest thing that can be said about it is that it illustrated the vast resources that the US had at their disposal and was willing to deploy. Letters containing defeatist sentiments were forged and addressed to real Germans, complete with forged postage stamps. Sacks of the these were dropped at locations where trains had been derailed in air attacks in the hope that salvage teams would take them to be genuine and ensure the letters reached their addressees. US Navy warship...

  On New Year's Day the Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte (floorplate), a series of attacks mainly by fighter aircraft on allied airfields.  The operation had originally been planned for December 16th to gain air superiority for the Ardennes offensive.  Bodenplatte achieved tactical surprise and perhaps 400 allied aircraft were destroyed or damaged. However as these were on the ground, aircrew casualties were light. The allies were able to replace the lost machines rapidly whilst the 200 odd German losses were nearly irreplaceable. Worse, the pilots lost with them certainly could not be replaced. The ground offensive had already come to a halt so whatever operational value there might have been had evaporated.  Bodenplatte was a marginal tactical victory for the Germans, but a strategic calamity. In the words of fighter commander Adolf Galland, "We sacrificed out last substance." The Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest trapping two German SS div...

   Dozens of V-1s were air-launched from Heinkel He-111 bombers over the North Sea. They were targeted on Manchester but the most lethal strike was in Oldham where 27 people died. Elsewhere another 17 lost their lives. In military terms the Germans had doubled down on the already wasteful strategy of investing in flying bombs capable of no more than random and barely significant damage by commiting conventional aircraft desperately needed to support the gound campaign. The British government leapt on the success of the German Ardennes offensive to announce a fresh injection of 250,000 front line soldiers into the army ahead of the invasion of Germany. The Labour ministers were bullied into accepting an extension of civilian call-up. Other men would be transferred from the Navy and RAF and support personnel would be combed out in the Army itself. The German Ardennes offensive reach a high-water mark when it surrounded the US 101st Airborne Division at the important road junctio...

    The German launched a counter-attack in the Ardennes with 13 infantry and 7 armoured divisions with around one thousand tanks and assault guns. These were almost the last reserves available. The strategic goal was unclear; Hitler imagined that it would be possible to recapture Antwerp; von Rundstedt and the other generals knew this was too ambitious. Ultimately the rationale did not go far beyond hoping that a major breakthrough would somehow seriously compromise the Allied offensive. The Germans achieved complete tactical surprise, mainly because poor weather had stopped allied aerial reconaissance. The human intelligence on German dispositions which had been plentiful during the advance through France and the Low Countries had also disappeared now that the Germans were operating from their homeland. The allies did not expect an attack in the sector whose terrain favoured the defenders and it was manned by tired or inexperienced US units.  V-2 rockets were being targ...

  The last vestige of serious air raid precautions, which had disrupted everyone's life in Britain since the outbreak of war, was removed. The obligation to go to full black-out conditions with no light showing when the air raid alert was sounded was lifted. The Luftwaffe had become a negligible danger although V weapons were still falling on London. The US introduced five star rank for senior military officers: Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur and Arnold became Generals of the Army; Leahy, King and Nimitz became Fleet Admirals. In part this was an expedient to remove the anomaly by which Americans commanded notionally higher ranking British officers, notably Field Marshal Montgomery. The move was also emblematic of the unprecedented scale of US commitment to the Second World War. Admiral Halsey and General Bradley attained the rank but these were the last so recognised. The Canadian government decisively won the no-confidence vote by 143 to 70  which concluded the bitter debat...