42-2-8 to -15 Battle of Singapore

Britain's Worst Military Disaster Ever > .

How Britain lost 'Fortress Singapore' - IWM > .

24-3-19 Poisonous Shrimp - Singapore's Military & Defense Strategy - WSJ > .

22-7-10 Singapore: Hx: Richest, Most Militarized Country in Asia - Explore > .

1819-2-6 Modern Singapore established; Signing of Treaty of Singapore - HiPo > .

Singapore - Graydations >> .

Singapore ..

24-6-17 [Poisonous Shrimp-Porcupine-Dolphin: Singapore's Military] - Insight > .

The Battle of Singapore, also known as the Fall of Singapore, was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II when the Empire of Japan invaded the British stronghold of Singapore—nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East". Singapore was the major British military base in South-East Asia and was the key to British imperial interwar defence planning for South-East Asia and the South-West Pacific. The fighting in Singapore lasted from 8 to 15 February 1942, after the two months during which Japanese forces had advanced down the Malayan Peninsula.

The campaign, including the final battle, was a decisive Japanese victory, resulting in the Japanese capture of Singapore and the largest British surrender in history. About 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops in Singapore became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the earlier Malayan Campaign. The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, called it the "worst disaster" in British military history.

42-2-11 Unternehmen Donnerkeil - Operation Thunderbolt

.Operation Cerberus - Channel Dash; Scharnhorst, Gneisenau - Blockade - OpRo > .

The Channel Dash 1942 - BaBa > .

skip ad > .

WW2 - Operations Room >> .

42-2-11 Unternehmen Donnerkeil (Operation Thunderbolt)

On 11 February 1942, the Kriegsmarine ships left Brest at 9:14 p.m. and escaped detection for more than twelve hours, approaching the Strait of Dover without discovery. The Luftwaffe conducted Unternehmen Donnerkeil (Operation Thunderbolt) to provide air cover and as the ships neared Dover, the British belatedly began operations against the German ships. The RAF, the Fleet Air Arm, Navy and coastal artillery operations were costly failures but Scharnhorst and Gneisenau hit mines in the North Sea and were damaged (Scharnhorst being put out of action for a year). By 13 February, the ships had reached German ports, Winston Churchill ordered an inquiry into the debacle and The Times denounced the British fiasco. The Kriegsmarine judged the operation to have been a tactical success and a strategic failure, by exchanging a threat to Atlantic convoys by German surface ships for a hypothetical threat to Norway. On 23 February, Prinz Eugen was torpedoed off Norway, repaired and spent the rest of the war in the Baltic. Gneisenau went into a dry dock and was bombed on the night of 26/27 February, never to sail again; Scharnhorst was sunk at the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943.

Background

A Kriegsmarine (German navy) squadron of both of the Scharnhorst-class battleships, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and escorts, ran a British blockade from Brest in Brittany. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had arrived in Brest on 22 Mar 1941 after the successful Operation Berlin in the Atlantic. Further anti-commerce raids were planned (until late May 1941) and the ships used the dockyard facilities at Brest for refit and repair. They represented a substantial threat to Allied trans-Atlantic convoys, so a series of air raids were carried out by the Royal Air Force (RAF) against the two ships from 30 Mar 1941 (and also targeting Prinz Eugen, which arrived on 1 June 1941). Serious damage was inflicted on Gneisenau on 6 April 1941 and on Scharnhorst on 24 July 1941 after dispersal to La Pallice. As the repair of this damage reached completion in August, consideration was given to evacuating the ships.

In late 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered Oberkommando der Marine (OKM German Navy high-command), to plan an operation to return the ships to German bases, to counter a possible British invasion of Norway. A meeting was held in Paris on 1 January 1942, for the final planning of the operation. The short route up the English Channel was preferred to a detour around the British Isles, to benefit from surprise and from air cover by the Luftwaffe and on 12 January 1942, Hitler gave orders for the operation to be conducted.

The British exploited decrypts of German radio messages coded with the Enigma machine, air reconnaissance by the RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) and agents in France run by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to keep watch on the ships and report the damage caused by British bombers. Operation Fuller, a joint Royal Navy-RAF contingency plan, was devised to counter a sortie by the German ships against Atlantic convoys, a return to German ports by circumnavigating the British Isles or a dash up the English Channel. The concentration of British ships in southern waters was inhibited by a need to keep ships at Scapa Flow in Scotland, in case of a sortie by the German battleship Tirpitz from Norway. The RAF had been required to detach squadrons from Bomber and Coastal commands for overseas service and also kept torpedo-bombers in Scotland ready for Tirpitz, which constrained their ability to assemble large numbers of aircraft against a dash up the Channel, as did the winter weather which reduced visibility and unpredictably blocked airfields with snow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash

Winds of War & WW2 Blunders - Tony Blake
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtakTnKQQMCzR04v6PVlQtBkXlJ9DB2Za

● 1941, December

1941 > .
Timeline WW2 - 41 >>> .
1941 WWII Timeline .

41-12-7 Pearl Harbor

41-12-7 Pearl Harbor > .
Japanese Negotiator to US - Desperate Final Days // Saburo Kurusu - VoP > .

What Happened After the Attack on Pearl Harbor - WeHi > .

Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.

41-6-22 Operation Barbarossa 41-12-5

41-6-22 Barbarossa - Biggest Land Invasion in History - WW2 > .
Logistics of Preparation for Barbarossa - WW2 > .
Operation Barbarossa - Nazi-Soviet Alliance Ends - WW2 to 41-6-27 > .

Operation Barbarossa WW2: Why Hitler failed to defeat Russia - IWM > .

WW2 - Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin - Big Three of the 20th Century - Hoover > .

1943-5-15 Stalin dissolves the Comintern: promoter of worldwide communism > .

22-10-6 Rise of Hitler, 1930s, Invasion of Poland | WWII. E 2 (subs) - Katz > .

22-10-3 Comparing Pootin to Hitler | Dream of the Great Past (subs) - Katz > .

Barbarossa - Red Beard '41 - Bellum >> .

June 22 1941. The first day of Operation Barbarossa begins as Adolf Hitler’s German armies invade Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union with the largest force on the longest front every seen in human history...

Tanks of Barbarossa - https://youtu.be/gh7mt2OS770 .
Trucks and Barbarossa logistics - https://youtu.be/4lSCnOltYdY .
Blitzkrieg tactics - https://youtu.be/qej9DX28-xw .

Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during WW2. The operation put into action Nazi Germany's ideological [Lebensraum] goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered as slave labour for the Axis war effort, to acquire the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories, and eventually through extermination, enslavement, Germanization and mass deportation to Siberia, remove the Slavic peoples and create Lebensraum for Germany.

In the two years leading up to the invasion, Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename Operation Otto), which Adolf Hitler authorized on 18 December 1940.

The Germans had begun massing troops near the Soviet border even before the campaign in the Balkans had finished. By the third week of February 1941, 680,000 German soldiers were gathered in assembly areas on the Romanian-Soviet border.[98] In preparation for the attack, Hitler had secretly moved upwards of 3 million German troops and approximately 690,000 Axis soldiers to the Soviet border regions.[99] Additional Luftwaffe operations included numerous aerial surveillance missions over Soviet territory many months before the attack.

Over the course of the operation, about three million personnel of the Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked an escalation of World War II, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition including the Soviet Union.

The operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in history. The area saw some of the war's largest battles, most horrific atrocities, and highest casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which influenced the course of World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century. The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet Red Army troops, a majority of whom never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved to death, or otherwise killed, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and a vast number of civilians, as the "Hunger Plan" worked to solve German food shortages and exterminate the Slavic population through starvation. Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by the Nazis or willing collaborators,[g] murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.

The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich. Operationally, German forces achieved significant victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union (mainly in Ukraine) and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite these early successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow at the end of 1941, and the subsequent Soviet winter counteroffensive pushed German troops back. The Germans had confidently expected a quick collapse of Soviet resistance as in Poland, but the Red Army absorbed the German Wehrmacht's strongest blows and bogged it down in a war of attrition for which the Germans were unprepared. The Wehrmacht's diminished forces could no longer attack along the entire Eastern Front, and subsequent operations to retake the initiative and drive deep into Soviet territory—such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943—eventually failed, which resulted in the Wehrmacht's retreat and collapse.

40-12-18 Directive 21 - Barbarossa ..
41-6-22 Operation Barbarossa 41-12-5 ..
41-6-22 Unternehmen Barbarossa ..