1943 | |
January 4th | Operation Ring approved by STAVKA. It entailed the destruction of the VI Army at Stalingrad unit by unit. |
January 8th | STAVKA proposed to von Paulus, commander of the VI Army at Stalingrad, that he surrenders. Von Paulus refused the offer. |
January 10th | Operation Ring began at 08.00 with a massive artillery attack on the VI Army. The German troops in Stalingrad were hunted out unit by unit as laid down in Operation Ring. |
January 12th | Leningrad gained a rail line to link it to the outside. |
January 13th | The struggle for Kharkov started again. Two Russian armies attacked the Germans at Kharkov. |
January 14th | The start of the Casablanca conference. |
January 22nd | The Germans evacuated Tripoli in North Africa. |
January 31st | Von Paulus surrendered the southern group of the German VI Army at Stalingrad. Two days later, the northern group led by Schreck surrendered. |
February 2nd | The first Allied merchant ship unloaded its cargo in Tripoli, greatly improving Montgomery’s supply lines. |
February 5th | The Americans drove the Japanese out of Guadacanal. What is left of the XVII Army was taken off by the “Tokyo Express”. |
February 8th | The Russians retook the city of Kursk. |
February 9th | Guadacanal was taken by American forces. |
February 14th | Start of the first long-range penetration patrols by Wingate’s Chindits. |
February 16th | The Russians retook Kharkov. |
February 20th | The Germans, led by Manstein, launched a counter-offensive against the Russians. |
March 2nd | The Germans destroyed the Russian 3rd Tank Army. |
March 3rd | Manstein massed four Panzer corps south-west of Kharkov to launch another massive attack on the Russians. |
March 15th | The Germans re-captured Kharkov |
March 31st | The weather (a spring thaw) prevented Manstein from making further gains but in five weeks, Manstein managed to push the Russians back 100 miles on the south-eastern Russian front. |
April 13th | First news of Katyn Wood massacre was broadcast by the Germans. |
April 19th | Start of the Warsaw Uprising. |
May 7th | The German army in North Africa surrendered to the British and Americans. |
June 5th | The start of Operation Citadel; the German attempt to cut off the Kursk salient. |
July 10th | Britain and America invaded Sicily. |
July 12th | The ‘greatest’ tank battle in history occurred at Kursk. |
July 16th | The start of the German withdrawal from the Kursk salient. |
July 17th | Rome received its first major bombing raid of the war.Mussolini met Hitler at Feltre. |
July 24th | The fascist Grand Council agreed that military power in Italy should rest with the king, Victor Emmanuel. |
July 25th | Mussolini was arrested. |
July 28th | A bombing raid on Hamburg resulted in a firestorm that killed more than 50,000 people. |
August 3rd | Italy made her first move towards a peace settlement with the Allies. |
August 6th | German troops poured into Italy to stop any chance of a peace settlement taking Italy out of the war. |
August 22nd | The Germans began their withdrawal from Kharkov and the Russians entered the city the next day. |
August 26th | The Russians started their campaign to liberate eastern Ukraine. |
September 3rd | Britain and America invaded Italy. |
September 8th | American/British forces land at Salerno. |
September 25th | Smolensk was liberated. |
October 1st | British troops entered Naples. |
October 9th | The liberation on the northern Caucasus was completed. |
November 6th | German troops were forced out of Kiev. |
November 20th | Start of the Battle of Tarawa which resulted in the death of over 1,000 US Marines. |
November 23rd | The Japanese were driven out of the Gilbert Islands |
November 28th | Start of the Tehran conference. |
December 26th | ‘Scharnhorst’ was sunk north of Norway. |
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