WW2
Your World War II Resource
Encyclopedia
MDSWW-- The Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War
OCWW2--The Oxford Companion to World War II
OEGWW2--The Oxford Essential Guide to World War II
RMEWW2--Rand McNally Encyclopedia of World War II
WW2AVE--World War II: A Visual Encyclopedia
WW2AW--World War II: America at War, 1941-1945
Air Transport Command
(ATC) controlled the US Army Air Forces' world-wide system of air transport. Originally known as the US Air Corps Ferrying Command, established in May 1941 to deliver Lend-Lease aircraft to the UK, it was renamed Air Transport Command in June 1942. Its aircraft (which could become troop carriers or air ambulances when not flying freight, passengers, or mail) and its organization were based on, and developed from, US civil airlines such as Pan American. Its principal aircraft were the twin-engined Douglas DC3, the Dakota, called the C47 in military parlance (C53 when a passenger plane), the four-engined DC4 (C54), and the twin-engined Curtiss C46 (Commando). Converted bombers were also used, the B24 Liberator, designated C87 (C109 when a tanker), being the most important.
Through its wing organizations overseas ATC retained control over local base troops and installations (though not over crews and their aircraft passing through). This ran counter to the principle of unified command but the theatre commander could, and sometimes did, draw on ATC transport in an emergency when his own troop carrier forces became overloaded. The basis of ATC's operations was running what amounted to a number of major airlines which spanned the world and linked the US with every theatre of war. For example, the South Atlantic route, which linked the USA with Liberia and British West Africa via the Caribbean, Brazil, and Ascension Island, fed Lend-Lease aircraft to the British and to the USSR via Persia. The 3,555 km. (2,210 mi.) north-west air route, was inaugurated to ensure reinforcement of Alaska when it appeared the Japanese might invade [the Aleutian Islands] and it later delivered Lend-Lease aircraft to the USSR.
ATC's maximum strength was 200,000 men and 3,700 aircraft. Its achievements included such vital supply operations as those which sustained the Chinese war effort over the Hump and British resistance to the Japanese Imphal offensive in March 1944. In one month alone (July 1945) it flew 275,000 passengers and 100,000 tons of cargo, and it ferried more than a quarter of a million aircraft and evacuated more than 300,000 sick and wounded personnel. ATC was a crucial part of Allied logistics which contributed a new dimension to 20th century warfare. [OCWW2]
Alam Haifa, Battle of
(See BATTLE OF ALAMEIN)
Alamein, Battle of
[El Alamein, an]Egyptian coastal town about 50 miles west of Alexandria, [guarded] a 40-mile wide bottleneck between the sea and the impassable Qattara Depression. After its defeat at Gazala in June 1942, the British 8th Army was in full retreat and vital bases in Cairo and Alexandria were threatened by [Erwin] Rommel's swift armoured advance. On 25 June, General [Sir Claude] Auchinleck -- British C-in-C Middle East -- took direct control of the 8th Army and ordered a withdrawal from planned defensive positions at Mersa Matruh to the Alamein area. The Alamein line then formed the North African front over the next four months, and three vitally important battles were fought that turned the campaign.
Rommel arrived at the Alamein line...on 30 June, and launched the first battle of Alamein the following day. British defences consisted of four fortified "boxes" stretched across the bottleneck, connected by small mobile columns. Most of their armour was only just arriving back at Alamein, but Rommel was unaware of this or of the existence of the newest fort, at Dier el Shein, a few miles south of Alamein. His main armoured thrust did not capture the position until nightfall, after which the panzers were halted by air attacks on their meagre supply lines. While panic was breaking out in Cairo, Auchinleck remained convinced of Rommel's underlying weakness, and a strong armoured counter-attack the next day prevented further advance by the Afrika Korps. On 3 July, after a converging move by an Italian division had been routed, Rommel broke off the battle. He had only 26 tanks fit for action, little fuel and his troops were exhausted. Auchinleck sought to press home his advantage by a series of armoured thrusts over the next few weeks, but these were ill-coordinated at field level and the attacks were called off as reinforcements reached Rommel at the end of the month.
Auchinleck had won an important, if partial, victory. His prime objective, to halt Rommel's advance to the Nile Delta, had been achieved and his decision to withdraw to a strong defensive position vindicated. The eventual stalemate resulting from the relative failure of his follow-up attacks gave the British time to reinforce their positions on a scale that Axis Mediterranean supply routes could not hope to match. As men and equipment poured into Alamein in August, Churchill replaced Auchinleck with General [Harold] Alexander as C-in-C and Lt. General [Bernard] Montgomery in command of the 8th Army. The new leadership maintained and strengthened Auchinleck's defensive plan for the position, which offered only one possible attack point for Rommel's next offensive at the end of August, known as the battle of Alam Haifa.
On the night of 30 August the Afrika Korps attacked to the south, between the Alam Nayil ridge and the Qattara Depression. Rommel now had 200 German tanks and 240 vulnerable Italian tanks, while Montgomery could call on 700. Many of the British tanks were American-built Grants and Shermans, which outperformed Rommel's standard Panzerkampfwagen IIIs. Rommel hoped to surprise the British by a dawn raid in their rear after a drive eastwards, but the Afrika Korps got bogged down in a deep minefield and was caught by the RAF next morning only a few miles beyond it. Abandoning his eastward advance, Rommel turned north across difficult soft ground towards the British position at Alam Haifa, guarded by the 22nd Armoured Brigade. Attacking the position, the panzer divisions were pinned down by perpetual bombing and accurate artillery, while their fuel shortages became critical. When Montgomery brought up his other two armoured brigades on 2 September, Rommel began a gradual withdrawal.
Unwilling to risk his armour in pursuit, Montgomery ordered the New Zealanders on the Alam Nayil ridge to close off the retreat, but their attack on the night of 3 September was disrupted by armoured units guarding Rommel's flank and the withdrawal was otherwise unhindered. By 6 September the Axis forces were encamped on high ground six miles east of the original front and the British command called off the battle .... Alam Haifa marked an important watershed in the Desert War. Axis forces never again came so close to material parity in North Africa and with both sides aware that Rommel could no longer hope for outright victory, the balance of moral swung permanently in the 8th Army's favour.
Despite Churchill's impatience for action, Alexander and Montgomery spent weeks meticulously planning their offensive -- Operation Lightfoot -- which opened the third and most famous battle of Alamein on the night of 23 October. By now the 8th Army had 230,000 men available against less than 80,000 Axis troops. More than 500 of the 1,200 tanks at Montgomery's disposal were Grants or Shermans, while of Rommel's 540 tanks, 280 were obsolete Italian types and only 38 were PzKpfw IVs, which could match the American tanks. Similarly outnumbered in the air, the Axis forces were short of fuel and ammunition, and the spread of sickness had claimed Rommel himself, under treatment in an Austrian hospital when the battle began. In the Mediterranean, renewed air and submarine activity from Malta had virtually paralysed [German] supply operations.
The main British attack was concentrated to the north, along a narrow front a few miles south of the coast. This punched a wedge into German positions but became bogged down by minefields and defensive fire, while a diversionary attack in the south broke down on 21 October. After two days of mutual attrition, Montgomery switched his attack north to pinch off Axis coastal forces, but Rommel -- recalled when Stumme, his replacement, died on 24 October -- had rushed his southern armoured forces to the scene. This attack (Operation Supercharge) also became bogged down in a battle of attrition, so Montgomery returned to his original, narrow line of assault on 2 November. After resisting this for the first day, Rommel with only about 30 German tanks left began a withdrawal west to Fuka that night. Ordered back onto the offensive by Hitler, Rommel's forces were split by the approaching 8th Army's armour, now with a 20 to 1 superiority in tanks. On 4 November Rommel finally retreated, avoiding Montgomery's cautious attempts to cut him off and escaping to Tripolitania when bad weather broke up the coastal plain on 6 November. Two days later the Allied Torch landings began in Northwest Africa and Axis forces found themselves squeezed between two much larger armies. {MDSWW]
Alamo Force
[T]he task force MacArthur created for Cartwheel, the operation launched in June 1943 to reduce Rabaul. Its forces comprised Lt-General Walter Krueger's Sixth US Army whose HQ and commanding general it shared. Alamo Force came directly under MacArthur's command, thus effectively removing all US troops from the operational control of MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area Allied Land Forces commander, General Blamey. Forces controlled by, or assigned to, Alamo Force landed on the Trobriand Islands, New Britain, the Admiralty Islands, and at Saidor and Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, and they also took part in liberating the Philippines. [OCWW2]
Alamogordo
A New Mexico town near the site of the explosion of the first atomic bomb. The Alamogordo Bombing and Testing Range, part of the Alamogordo air base, was being used for practice bombings by B-29 Superfortress bombers in the spring of 1945 when scientists were searching for an atomic bomb test site.
Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, in charge of the atomic bomb project, had ruled out Los Alamos, the desolate area where the bombs were being built, as a test site, because he feared that a disastrous test would threaten the work being done there .... Other desolate areas in California, Texas, and New Mexico had been considered. Alamogordo was selected for several reasons: It was far from any inhabited area; it was close enough to the laboratory at Los Alamos (about 160 miles away) so that scientists could travel between the two places; it was flat enough for widely scattered instruments to detect the blast from several directions; and it was far enough away from Los Alamos so that activities at the two sites would not be linked by inquisitive observers.
Test planners set up a camp at an 18-mile by 24-mile stretch of desert in a far corner of the range. Nearby ranchers were paid for their land and told to move out. Military policemen reportedly helped dislodge balky ranchers by puncuring water tanks and shooting stray cattle.
The test bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945. [WW2AW]
Albania, Italian Invasion of
(1939) Italy had enjoyed virtual control over Albanian military and economic affairs since the defensive alliance between the two states in 1927. At that time, King Ahmed Zogu (he changed his name to King Zog in 1928) regarded his other neighbour, Yugoslavia, as the greater threat, but on 7 April 1939 the Italians invaded. After only minimal resistance, Zog was chased into exile and a puppet government installed -- with Victor Emmanuekl III of Italy becoming king.
It was from Albanian positions that Mussolini launched attacks on Greece and Yugoslavia, and much of the Greek campaign was, in fact, fought on Albanian soil. When Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, Albanian independence was restored by Germany, and communist partisans led by Enver Hoxha controlled most of the country before the end of WW2. Hoxha's regime was recognized by the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States on 10 November 1945. [MDWW2]
Alcan Highway
Popular name for the Alaska-Canada Highway, which ran from the railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to the Richardson Highway at Big Delta, 100 miles from Fairbanks. The highway, built to aid in the defense of the Territory of Alaska and to develop a supply route to the Soviet Union, went through 1,420 miles of wilderness, mountains, and muskeg swamps.
US Army engineers and civilian workers began construction in the spring of 1942 under an agreement with Canada. The last stretch of road was completed on Oct. 25, 1942, when two bulldozers, one driven by a white engineer, the other by a black, broke through from two directions and met. Many of the highway builders were black troops, assigned as laborers in the Corps of Engineers because of segregation policies. It was officially opened on Nov. 20, 1942. [WW2AW]
Aleutian Islands Campaign
(1942-43) The Japanese Navy used the offensive against the Aleutians as a diversion for the Midway operation .... Two Japanese light carriers launched their aircraft to bomb the airfields at Unalaska, but because of poor visibility they did not do much damage. On 7 June [1942], two landing forces struck at Kiska and Attu, where they met little opposition and captured them easily. Because of the tremendous setback at Midway, Japanese propagandists built this operation up as a great success.
The Americans decided that the Aleutians would have to be recaptured before any other operation in the Central Pacific was carried out, perhaps because the islands were the only US-owned territories in North America which had fallen to the Japanese. At the beginning of August 1942 they bombarded Kiska and at the end of the month established an air base at Adak. In January 1943 they established another base at Amchitka, 90 miles east of Kiska and they decided to bypass the nearer Kiska and attack Attu first. On 11 May 1943, 7th Infantry Division invaded Attu at Holtz and Massacre Bay. The Americans numbered 11,000 but they were badly trained and badly led. Once they had been driven inland they could make little headway but managed to squeeze the Japanese garrison of 2600. On 29 May over 1000 Japanese made a desperate counterattack but were beaten back and resistance collapsed. The Japanese suffered 2350 killed and 28 captured, the US suffered 552 killed and 1140 wounded with another 500 casualties suffering because of cold conditions.
The Americans [attempted] to improve their chances of overrunning Kiska by a heavy bombardment of the island's defenses. On 15 August an invasion force of 29,000 Americans and 5300 Canadians landed to find that the Japanese had evacuated their garrison of 6000 in July. [RMEWW2]
Algeria
(Capital: Algiers, pop. 7,234,684; est. 1936) A governor-general appointed by the French government administered Algeria, which ... was considered an extension of metropolitan France. French colonists ruled the social and economic life of the country, where ... natives were contemptuously called pied-noirs, "black feet," for their shoeless poverty.
As the European war loomed, France and Italy skirmished diplomatically over Italy's desire for a wider role in North Africa, inspiring France to beef up Algeria's defenses. France stationed more than 85,000 troops in Algiers, including Foreign Legionnaires and Arab cavalry. In 1939 the French began building a large army-naval base at Oran's port of Mers el-Kebir.
The fall of France in June 1940 put these bases, as well as the troops in Algeria, in the hands of the pro-German regime of Vichy France. On July 3, a British fleet appeared off Mers el-Kebir and gave the commander of the French warships in port there an ultimatum: go to the West Indies or scuttle the ships -- or be destroyed. The British could not allow the ships to go into German service. The French refused to acknowledge the ultimatum and the British attacked them, sinking or damaging several French ships and killing about 1,300 French seamen.
Algeria was a key Allied objective in the North African invasion of Nov. 1942. Although Vichy forces initially fought the invaders, political negotiations quickly ended resistance. On Nov. 23, 1942, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the invasion forces, made Algiers his headquarters.
Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the anti-Vichy Free French, in Dec. 1943 said that Algerian natives and other natives in French colonies had so helped the Allies that they should be awarded civil rights. But before the Algerians could test French sincerity the French and Algerians clashed -- ironically during celebrations over the end of the European war in May 1945. Nationalists killed eighty-eight French and, in retaliation, French security forces killed at least 1,500 Algerian Moslems. The massacre sowed the bitter seeds for what would be the long and bloody Algerian-French war of the 1950s. [WW2AW]
Allied Conferences
Strategy-setting meetings among Allied leaders. Even before the US entrance into the war, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill began the practice of meeting regularly to discuss strategy. These early conferences evolved into ones involving other major-power leaders, who were usually referred to in the press as the Big Two, Big Three, or the Big Four, depending on how many were meeting....
The Big Two conferences between Roosevelt and Churchill were ATLANTIC, Aug. 9-12, 1941; WASHINGTON (also known as Arcadia Conference), Dec. 22, 1941-Jan. 14, 1942; WASHINGTON, June 25-27, 1942; CASABLANCA, Jan. 15-23, 1943; WASHINGTON (code-named Trident), May 11-17, 1943; QUEBEC (code-named Quadrant), Aug. 10-24, 1943; QUEBEC (code-named Octagon), Sept. 12-16, 1944; EGYPT, Feb. 15, 1945.
Other conferences were: US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, MOSCOW, Oct. 18-Nov. 1, 1943; CAIRO (code-named Sextant), Nov. 22-26, 1943; Roosevelt, Churchill,and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of China, TEHRAN, Nov. 28-Dec. 1, 1943; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet leader Stalin, BRETTON WOODS, July 1944; representatives of Allied nations, DUMBARTON OAKS, Aug. 21-Oct. 7, 1944; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, YALTA (code-named Argonaut), Feb. 4-11, 1945; representatives of Allied nations, SAN FRANCISCO, April 25-June 26, 1945; President Truman, Stalin, and Churchill (later replaced by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, POTSDAM, July 17-Aug. 2, 1945. [WW2AW]
Allied Control Commissions
were formed to oversee the implementation of the terms of the various armistices the Allies imposed on some of the Axis powers. They were controlled by the Allied power which had borne the burden of the fighting against the country surrendering. In the case of Italy the terms of the armistice, and the running of the Commission, were organized by the Americans and the British; with the Finnish armistice in September 1944 it was the USSR, though there were British observers on the Commission.
With Austria and Germany the Commissions were the organizations formed by the Allied occupying powers along the lines drawn up by the European Advisory Commission and confirmed at the Yalta conference in February 1945. Both countries and their capitals were divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones of occupation, and military governments established in each. To co-ordinate the administration of the occupied countries, which included the right for each occupying power to hold war crimes trials within its zone, the Cs-in-C of the occupying armies formed an Allied Control Council, or Commission, with a committee to implement its decisions, and both capitals also had an Inter-Allied Governing Authority (Kommandatura). Besides having zones of occupation, Vienna also had a central district controlled jointly by all four powers. Military government, as defined by [Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery, was rule by the "issue of orders, obedience to which will be exacted" ....  The Americans established it first near Aachen in September 1944, but the areas captured were so small that the German civil administration was retained. The British first occupied German territory near Geilenkirchen, north of Aachen, in November 1944 but the civil population was evacuated.... [OCWW2]