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10 May 1940: a resignation and a commission

Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister on 10 May 1940 and advised King George VI to ask Winston Churchill to form a government. That Friday evening, Churchill received the King's commission to form a new administration.

The change of prime minister happened on the same day Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty until he accepted the commission.

Why Chamberlain could not stay

The failed Allied campaign in Norway produced the Norway Debate of 7–8 May and exposed a collapse in Chamberlain's parliamentary authority. His government won the division, but with a gravely reduced majority — a political loss of authority rather than a formal defeat.

Labour had refused to join a coalition headed by Chamberlain while agreeing to cooperate under another leader, which made his continuation in office untenable.

Viscount Halifax, the foreign secretary, had widely been expected to succeed him.

A War Cabinet of five

Churchill rapidly formed a broadly based coalition and a five-member War Cabinet containing Conservatives and Labour representatives; Clement Attlee, whose party's participation made an all-party government possible, entered it.

He presented the new government to the Commons on 13 May, three days after his appointment.

That was also when he delivered the "blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech — not on the day he took office.

11 March 1941: signed at about ten minutes to four

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed H.R. 1776, the Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, on 11 March 1941 — the same day the House concurred in the Senate's amendments, by 317–71.

Roosevelt told reporters he signed at approximately 3:50 p.m., in front of press photographers, and immediately approved the first list of material: most for Britain, a portion for Greece.

Congress had given the bill the number H.R. 1776.

What the statute authorised

The law empowered the president to procure and dispose of defense articles — by sale, transfer, exchange, lease or loan — to a government whose defense he considered vital to the defense of the United States.

"Lend" and "lease" were political shorthand: the statute authorised several forms of disposition and allowed the president to accept direct or indirect benefits on terms he deemed satisfactory.

It did not declare war or make the United States a belligerent; the country remained officially neutral.

Two months of votes behind it

John W. McCormack had introduced the bill on 10 January 1941. The House passed it 260–165 on 8 February, and the Senate passed an amended version 60–31 on 8 March.

Britain's ability to buy American war supplies under cash-and-carry was being exhausted, while Roosevelt argued that supplying countries resisting Axis aggression was itself necessary for American defense.

Congress appropriated $7 billion for the program on 27 March 1941.

The date on this entry, and the date in the archives

This entry is filed under 5 October 1941, but the institutions that document the killing place the principal massacre of Berdychiv's Jews on 15 September 1941. Yad Vashem estimates approximately 12,000 victims that day; the YIVO Encyclopedia gives more than 15,000.

Both place the main killing in September rather than October. Some summaries date the ghetto's liquidation to 5 October, while YIVO places the killing of the remaining ghetto prisoners by 3 November.

Five pits near a military airfield

On 15 September, German SS and police forces and a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police, rounded up the remaining Jews of the Berdychiv ghetto. Yad Vashem identifies Police Reserve Battalion 45 among the units involved, within the organisation of Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln.

Approximately 400 skilled workers were separated out. The other prisoners were taken about five kilometres to a military airfield near Shlemarka and shot into five pits.

What survived the day

The operation destroyed most of the ghetto's population. Roughly 400 selected workers and an uncertain number of people in hiding remained alive temporarily, and subsequent operations killed most of them by early November.

Berdychiv's Jews were murdered in a sequence of operations running from July 1941 into 1942, of which 15 September was the largest rather than the only one. Yad Vashem preserves the survivor Nahum Epelfeld's identification of that day as the most dreadful of his life.

26 November 1941: weighing anchor in the Kurils

At 6:00 a.m. Japanese time on 26 November 1941, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's carrier strike force weighed anchor at Hitokappu Bay, on Etorofu in the Kuril Islands, and departed for Hawaii.

Its six carriers were Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku and Zuikaku, accompanied by battleships, cruisers, destroyers, tankers and other support vessels, with more than 420 embarked aircraft. The National Park Service counts 33 warships and auxiliary craft.

In Japan it was already 26 November; on Washington's calendar the fleet left on the 25th.

Silent, and routed north

The force observed complete radio silence and used radio deception while taking a northern route chosen to avoid normal shipping lanes and reduce the chance of discovery.

That silence was not total across the navy: shore-based radio deception helped conceal the carriers' absence.

Planners accepted the stormy northern weather because bad weather and empty shipping lanes offered concealment.

Sailing under conditional orders

Nagumo's orders directed the force to proceed secretly to a standby point near 42° north and 170° west by the evening of 3 December — but to abort if it was discovered or if diplomacy succeeded.

Departure therefore did not mean Japan's final political decision for war had been made; the Imperial Conference took that decision on 1 December. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, was the strike's principal naval advocate and planner.

By the end of 26 November the fully assembled force was at sea on a little-travelled northern route, undetected.

12 February 1941: a drip at the Radcliffe Infirmary

On 12 February 1941, the physician Charles Fletcher began giving penicillin intravenously to Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old police officer, at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary.

Alexander had a severe staphylococcal and streptococcal facial infection that had spread despite conventional treatment. Promising animal experiments had persuaded Howard Florey's team to test whether their concentrated preparation could treat an otherwise intractable human infection.

Within approximately 24 hours, Alexander's clinical condition began to improve.

Then the supply ran out

Producing enough penicillin to treat a single sepsis case then required roughly 2,000 litres of culture fluid. The team recovered active penicillin from Alexander's urine and administered it again.

Within four to five days the available stock was exhausted, before the infection had been eradicated. Alexander relapsed and died about a month later, in mid-March; Oxford's departmental account gives 14 March, while a peer-reviewed medical history gives the 15th.

It was the limited supply, not drug toxicity, that ended the course.

First in what sense

Four later Oxford patients with less advanced infections were reported to have recovered after penicillin treatment. Norman Heatley had developed the practical extraction and production methods, and Edward Abraham had used chromatography to remove impurities before the trials.

Alexander was not the first human given penicillin. Cecil Paine had treated eye infections with it in 1930, Martin Dawson's Columbia group gave it systemically in October 1940, and Fletcher had tested the Oxford preparation's toxicity in a cancer patient, Elva Akers, on 17 January 1941.

Oxford sources describe the familiar rose-thorn origin of his infection only as something that "is said"; other research associates his facial lacerations with an air raid.

The market square

On 14 November 1941 — or possibly beginning a day earlier, on 13 November — German civil and Security Police authorities, assisted by Wehrmacht personnel and Latvian, Lithuanian and Belarusian collaborationist police, assembled approximately 10,000 Slonim Jews in the market square under the pretext of resettlement. People holding recognised work certificates were selected out and released.

Most of those retained for murder were older people, women and children. The town's Gebietskommissar, Gerhard Erren, had registered Slonim's Jews by trade and issued passes to workers his administration considered useful; burial pits had been dug in advance.

Czepielów

The victims were driven on foot and in trucks to the prepared pits near Czepielów, about five kilometres southeast of central Slonim, and shot. Yad Vashem cites a German estimate of 8,000 people murdered that day; its ghetto encyclopedia gives a broader figure of 9,000–10,000 taken to the site, most of whom were shot.

Some victims got out of the pits and returned to Slonim. Wounded survivors discovered receiving treatment in the Jewish hospital were taken back to the killing site and shot.

Which day, and what Erren reported

The date is not settled. Yad Vashem dates the principal killing to 14 November, Erren's own contemporary report calls it an SD action of 13 November, and a scholarly history of Slonim's Jews describes the massacre as spanning 13–14 November.

This was not the end of Slonim's Jewish community; further mass killings and resistance followed in 1942. Erren reported afterwards that roughly 7,000 Jews remained in the town, all assigned to labour and kept under constant threat of further murder.

20 December 1941: the gates close

German authorities officially closed the Stanisławów ghetto on 20 December 1941, after ordering Jews living elsewhere in the city to move into the designated district between 1 and 15 December.

A wooden fence roughly 2.5 to 3 metres high, topped with barbed wire, separated the ghetto from the rest of the city. Windows in perimeter buildings were barred or boarded, and three guarded gates controlled passage.

After closure, Jews could leave only for forced labour.

At least twenty thousand people, in an eighth of the city

At least 20,000 Jews were confined in the small, overcrowded district, which covered approximately one-eighth of Stanisławów. The exact population is unknown.

Some could find no housing at all and were lodged in warehouses and synagogues. Thousands reportedly had no roof over their heads even after every available warehouse and synagogue had been used as shelter.

Who guarded it, and what came before

German Schutzpolizei and Ukrainian militia guarded the outside of the gates; about 100 Jewish policemen, commanded by a former Polish Army sergeant named Zahler, guarded the inside.

The ghetto followed the murder of approximately 10,000 Jews in the city on 12 October 1941, after which German authorities finalised the boundaries. Michael Lamm chaired the Judenrat at the sealing, having replaced Israel Seibald, who disappeared after the October massacre.

Stanisławów was then a German-occupied Polish city; it is now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

9:40 p.m., 23 October 1942

At 9:40 p.m. on 23 October 1942, approximately 900 Eighth Army guns opened a coordinated bombardment of German and Italian positions at El Alamein in Egypt. Accounts variously give about 880, 900 or 908, reflecting different counting conventions.

Twenty minutes later, Allied infantry advanced under a creeping barrage while engineers began opening marked routes through the Axis minefields — an estimated half a million mines.

Four infantry divisions attacked across approximately 16 kilometres of the northern front, while secondary operations farther south were meant to distract and hold Axis formations.

The infantry got through; the armour did not

The infantry captured most of its initial objectives. Delays, congestion and incomplete mine clearance then stopped X Corps's armoured formations from exploiting those gains as planned.

By the following morning the Eighth Army had penetrated portions of the Axis defences, but its tanks remained obstructed in or behind congested minefield lanes.

The Axis line had not been decisively broken, and Operation Lightfoot became a prolonged battle of attrition.

The absent commander

Bernard Montgomery had held off after halting the Axis at Alam el Halfa, waiting until the Eighth Army had accumulated and trained a materially superior force.

When the attack began, General Georg Stumme — not Erwin Rommel — commanded Panzerarmee Afrika. Rommel was receiving medical treatment in Germany and returned on 25 October.

Stumme died the day after the offensive opened.

30 October 1942: a sinking boat in the eastern Mediterranean

British aircraft and warships located and attacked U-559 in the eastern Mediterranean on 30 October 1942, eventually forcing the damaged submarine to the surface. Its commander, Hans Heidtmann, abandoned it with his surviving crew.

Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and Tommy Brown — a 16-year-old NAAFI canteen assistant, not a Royal Navy seaman — boarded from the destroyer HMS Petard and passed secret documents out to the waiting boat.

U-559 sank while Fasson and Grazier were still below deck, killing both men. Brown escaped with the recovered material.

What came out, and what did not

The recovered documents included the German Weather Short Code Book and Short Signal Book. The Enigma machine itself was not recovered; the submarine sank before it could be brought out.

The papers reached Bletchley Park on 24 November, twenty-five days after the boarding, and were used to regain access to the four-rotor U-boat cipher known as Shark.

What the prize was actually worth

This was not the first Allied success against Enigma. Its particular importance was helping overcome the 1942 blackout in Shark.

The documents supplied codebreaking aids and likely message cribs. Possessing them did not make every German naval message automatically readable.

13 March 1943, 6 a.m.: Ghetto A surrounded

At 6 a.m. on 13 March 1943, SS, German police and Sonderdienst units under SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm von Haase surrounded section A of the Kraków Ghetto.

The inhabitants were given little time to collect essential possessions. Those selected for labour were marched under guard to the Płaszów forced-labour camp, whose commandant Amon Göth took part in the operation.

Parents sent to Płaszów were generally forbidden to bring children younger than 14; the Germans falsely promised the children would follow once a special barracks was prepared.

The second day

Some inhabitants hid in cellars and attics or tried to escape to the non-ghetto side of Kraków. A few parents smuggled children into Płaszów concealed among their belongings or by bribing guards.

On 14 March the Germans liquidated section B, murdered patients and children from the hospitals and orphanage, and deported other Jews toward Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The numbers do not agree

Institutional estimates conflict sharply over how many were transferred to Płaszów: IPN, the Płaszów Museum and a USHMM timeline give about 8,000, while Yad Vashem and another USHMM article give about 2,000.

USHMM estimates approximately 2,000 Jews murdered in the ghetto itself; IPN gives a range of 700 to 2,500. Roughly 3,000 people were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom 549 were selected for forced labour and about 2,450 murdered in gas chambers.

Afterwards the pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who ran the Eagle Pharmacy inside the ghetto, walked streets that had been crowded two days earlier and found them empty except for corpses, blood, and people signalling from hiding places.

28 November 1943: an hour alone first

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met privately at 3 p.m. on 28 November 1943, in Roosevelt's quarters inside the Soviet embassy in Tehran — their first face-to-face meeting.

Roosevelt told Stalin that he wanted to discuss how the Western Allies could draw German divisions away from the Eastern Front, naming a figure of 30 to 40.

An hour later, at 4 p.m., Roosevelt, Stalin and Winston Churchill opened their first joint plenary meeting at the embassy.

France, and when

The leaders reviewed the Pacific war, the Soviet-German front, Mediterranean operations and the proposed cross-Channel invasion. Roosevelt argued that secondary Mediterranean operations should not delay Overlord.

Stalin said an invasion through northern or southern France would offer the best direct help to the Soviet front. Churchill confirmed that Britain and the United States intended to invade France in 1944, describing a force of 35 divisions — 16 British and 19 American.

What the opening day did not settle

The 28 November session opened the conference; it did not produce the Overlord agreement. On 30 November the Anglo-American staffs agreed that Overlord would be launched during May 1944, and Stalin pledged a large Soviet offensive at about the same time. The military conclusions were initialled on 1 December.

The Tehran agreement specified May; Overlord was actually launched on 6 June, after a later postponement.

The three leaders met in an occupied capital whose own government had not been included in planning their summit — Iran had declared war on Germany on 9 September 1943.

26 June 1943: the last train out

On 26 June 1943 the SS deported the last Jewish forced labourers from the dismantled Bełżec killing centre to Sobibór.

The prisoners of SS-Sonderkommando Belzec had been forced to exhume and burn bodies and to dismantle the camp. They were told they were being transferred to a labour camp, and loaded into freight cars.

About 300 people were in that final transport.

One man got off

Chaim Hirszman escaped by jumping from the train while it was travelling to Sobibór.

He became one of only two former Bełżec prisoners who survived the war and left written accounts; the other was Rudolf Reder.

How the rest died is reported two ways

The Bełżec and Sobibór memorial museums report that the arriving prisoners resisted on the Sobibór ramp and were shot. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum instead summarises their fate as deportation to Sobibór for gassing.

By then, the Bełżec Museum says, the camp's buildings and equipment had been destroyed and the ground ploughed and planted to disguise the crime scene.