Posted on 05/07/2011 6:38:47 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/may41/f07may41.htm
Royal Navy shells Benghazi
Wednesday, May 7, 1941 www.onwar.com
In the Mediterranean... Part of Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet shells the harbor at Benghazi sinking two ships.
In the North Atlantic... In a special operation mounted for the purpose the German trawler Munchen , a weather ship, is captured northeast of Iceland and secret papers relating to the Enigma coding machine are taken.
In Iraq... General Quinan takes command of the British forces in Iraq.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/07.htm
May 7th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: Liverpool and Hull are bombed. For the seventh successive night Liverpool and Merseyside are ablaze. The raids began on 1 May under cloudless moonlit skies and since then the fires, especially in the docks, have never gone out. In the city the Custom House, Corn Exchange, Museum and Central Station were destroyed. Lewis’s department store was gutted and a wing of Walton jail was demolished killing 22 prisoners. A Mersey Ferry, the Royal Daffodil, was sunk and a school shelter was hit, killing 160. Sixty patients and staff of a hospital died in a direct hit. One of the worst fires occurred at the Bryant and May match factory.
Troops have been brought in to help clear the streets of wreckage. Cars have been banned from entering the centre, and so many telephone cables and exchanges are out of action that people have been unable to get through.
There have been 1,450 killed in this “May Week”.
Westminster: In a speech to the House of Commons Churchill says: “Some have compared Hitler’s conquests with those of Napoleon. It may be that Spain and Russia will shortly furnish new chapters to that theme. It must be remembered, however, that Napoleon’s armies carried with them the fierce, liberating and equalitarian winds of the French Revolution, whereas Hitler’s empire has nothing behind it but racial self-assertion, espionage, pillage, corruption and the Prussian boot.” (Peter Kilduff)
Corvette HMS Mignonette commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
GERMANY: U-260, U-662 laid down.
U-352 launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
MEDITERRANEAN SEA: Units of the Mediterranean fleet shell Benghazi during the night.
Operation Tiger, an attempt to get a British convoy to North Africa, begins.
Minesweeper HMS Stoke is bombed and sinks in Tobruk harbour during an air attack. (Alex Gordon)(108)
CHINA: Japanese troops assault Shansi in an attempt to occupy the Chungtiao mountains.
CANADA: Corvette HMCS Summerside launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
U.S.A.: Destroyer USS Woolsey commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
ATLANTIC OCEAN: A cruiser force tries to capture the weather trawler München off Iceland. It yields an Enigma cipher machine and codebook when captured by the British destroyer HMS Somali.
On U-93, three crewmembers were wounded in an accident with the machine gun.
Between 2310 and 2312, U-94 fired four torpedoes at Convoy OB-318 about 200 miles SW of Reykjavik and reported four ships sunk, but U-94 interpreted depth charges dropped by destroyer HMS Bulldog and sloop HMS Rochester immediately after the torpedoes had detonated on Ixion and Eastern Star as hits on other ships. The both escorts dropped together 67 depth charges on the U-boat, damaging it slightly. The master and 18 crewmembers from the Ixion were picked up by corvette HMS Marigold and landed at Greenock. 68 crewmembers and nine gunners were picked up by the British merchantman Nailsea Moor and landed at Sydney. The Eastern Star was hit by one torpedo and sank some hours later in 61°25N/24°18W. All crewmembers abandoned ship in the lifeboats and were picked up by armed trawler HMS Daneman shortly thereafter. (Dave Shirlaw)
http://worldwar2daybyday.blogspot.com/
Day 615 May 7, 1941
Royal Navy knows that German weather ships in the North Atlantic receive encrypted signals using the German naval Enigma codes. Off Iceland, British destroyer HMS Somali captures German weather ship Munchen and her Enigma code book.
In the Arabian Sea 400 miles off Somaliland, German armed merchant cruiser Pinguin shells small British tanker British Emperor, which send a stream of radio signals reporting the attack as the crew is taken off. British Emperor is finally sunk with torpedoes but Royal Navy cruiser HMS Cornwall homes in on the signals to hunt for the raider.
150 miles South of Iceland at 11 PM, U-94 sinks British SS Ixion and Norwegian SS Eastern Star (all hands rescued). Convoy escorts destroyer HMS Bulldog and sloop HMS Rochester drop 98 depth charges over 4 hours but U-94 suffers only minor damage. Italian submarine Tazzoli sinks Norwegian SS Ferlane off West Africa (all hands rescued). German bombers sink British minesweeper HMS Stoke at Tobruk (21 killed, survivors rescued by gunboat HMS Ladybird).
Iraq. 20th and 21st Indian Brigades move out of Basra and capture the nearby port of Ashar.
Overnight, British cruiser HMS Ajax and destroyers HMS Havock, Hotspur & Imperial (en route to meet the Tiger convoy) take a detour to bombard Benghazi, Libya, sinking Italian steamers Tenace & Capitano Cecchi.
Overnight, Luftwaffe bombs Liverpool for the last of 7 nights (75% of the port capacity has been destroyed). Destroyer HMS Hurricane is hit by bomb at Gladstone Dock, causing structural damage (under repair until December). Hull is also bombed.
I’m not sure that the White House is being candid with us. Stimson calls for use of Navy for escort duties in the North Atlantic? According to the deck log of the USS Texas, she just got back (May 5) from a long range convoy escort that she departed on back on April 23.
Left off the link
http://www.bb35library.usstexasbb35.com/movements/movement-bydate/MoveDateAll.html
Why would the ferry pilots be sailing *toward* England? I can see flying over and sailing back, but “victims of a torpedo attack in the Atlantic while *en route* to England.”
This is both shocking and disturbing to me. (Not the part about the White House being less than candid.) According to my usually reliable academic source book on the war (Herman Wouk, The Winds of War) Adm. King has his flag on Texas at this time. This log suggests that the commanding officer of the Atlantic fleet personally took part in convoying. Not exactly a low-key operation.
And disturbing because, according to that same source, it was not Ernest King who headed the convoy patrol in April 1941 but Capt. Victor Henry, acting on verbal instructions from Adm. King, acting in turn on the wishes of FDR. I don't know how Wouk could be so far off the mark here.
Field Marshall Wilhelm List, commander of the Twelfth Army, takes the salute at a victory parade in Athens, 7th May, 1941.The troops are in Schutzenpanzerwagen (SD KFZ)251 half tracks. To List's rear is SS-Gruppenfuhrer Josef "Sepp" Dietrich, implying that the troops are Waffen-SS.
Greek general officers are escorted to the surrender conference in a German staff car. Greece would be garrisoned by German and Italian troops.
Could they have been going over to fly planes already in Britain down to Africa? You would think British pilots would be available for that but maybe they were stretched so thin, what with defending against the blitz, finding crews for RAF raids on Germany and conducting combat ops in the Med that they needed Americans for moving planes to North and West Africa.
On 7 May, Schulenburg,(the German Ambassador) secretly opposed to Hitler's invasion, breakfasted with the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, whom he ambiguously tried to warn. They met thrice but 'he did not warn,' said Molotov later, 'he hinted and pushed for diplomatic negotiations.' Dekanozov informed Stalin who was becoming ever more bad-tempered and nervous. 'So, disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level,' he growled. Dekanozov disagreed.
'How could you allow yourself to argue with Comrade Stalin! He knows more and can see further than all of us!' Voroshilov threatened Dekanozov during a recess.
On 10 May, Stalin learned of Deputy Fuhrer Hess's quixotic peace flight to Scotland. His magnates, remembered Khrushchev who was in the office that day, were all understandably convinced that Hess's mission was aimed at Moscow. But Stalin was finally willing to prepare for war, admittedly in a manner so timid that it was barely effective.
On 12 May, Stalin allowed the generals to strengthen the borders, calling up 500,000 reserves, but was terrified of offending the Germans. When Timoshenko reported German reconnaissance flights, Stalin mused, 'I'm not sure Hitler knows about those flights.'
On the 24th, he refused to take any further measures. The paralysis struck again. Stalin never apologized but he very indirectly acknowledged his mistakes when he later thanked the Russian people for their 'patience'. But he blamed most of his blunders on others, admitting that he 'trusted too much in cavalrymen'. Zhukov confessed his own failures: 'Possibly I did not have enough influence.' This was not the real reason for his quiescence. If he had demanded mobilization, Stalin would have asked: On what basis? Well, Beria, take him to your dungeons!'
Kulik caught the attitude of most soldiers: 'This is high politics. It's not our business.' The intelligence was now flooding in. Earlier it had been presented in an ambiguous way but now it was surely clear that something ominous was darkening the Western border. Merkulov daily reported to Stalin who was now defying an avalanche of information from all manner of sources. On 9 June, when Timoshenko and Zhukov mentioned the array of intelligence, Stalin tossed their papers at them and snarled, 'And I have different documents'
He mocked Richard Sorge, the master spy in Tokyo who used his amorous and sybaritic appetites to conceal his peerless intelligence-gathering: 'There's this bastard who's set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?'
Stalin-The Court Of The Red Tsar
by Simon Montefiore
I’m not sure that we were selling them anything with the range to get from England to Gibraltar the long way around at that point. P-39s, P-40s, Lockheed Hudson bombers and maybe B-25s (although I think it is a few months too early for them)? And it seems the legalities would be different (as if Roosevelt and his buddies cared about that) in flying planes already turned over to the British vs. pre-turnover planes.
Well, I took the radical step of actually reading the story I posted. It turns out the pilots weren’t working for the U.S. Government after all but were free agents going to help the Brits in a time of need. The biographical informations given on a couple of the missing pilots is worth a read. One of them got interested in aviation when, as a youngster, he watched the Wright brothers early efforts. During WWI he was a pilot in the Marine Corps.
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