227. Tough times: 1941 and 1942

The years 1941 and 1942 were tough ones…

Things were going badly in the Battle of the Atlantic, with Germany threatening to strangle Britain by sinking more merchant ships than the British could bear to lose.

In the Far East, the Japanese were giving the British, and indeed several other of the western nations previously seen as unbeatable, that they could be beaten by an Asian power. But by taking on the Americans, they’d made a mistake: the US had barely deployed its strength and, when it did, it first put a stop to Japanese advance by sea or land before it started to fight back.

In Russia too, the German advance was running out steam. Unexpectedly tough resistance from the Soviets stopped the Germans short of their objectives. One army made it as far as the city now called Volgograd, then called Stalingrad. What happened to it there is something for our next episode.

Meanwhile, in North Africa, late 1942 was when Rommel’s breathtaking advance was at last halted at the First Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, by General Claude Auchinleck at the head of the British Eighth Army. Sadly, though, that hadn’t come fast for Winston Churchill or the British Chief of Imperial General Staff, who relieved Auchinleck of his command. Credit for the victory would go to someone else. Again, a story for the next episode.

Illustration: Officers on the bridge of a British destroyer escorting a convoy of ships, looking out for submarines. Public Domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License