http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/jul41/f12jul41.htm
Soviets agree to united front with Britain
Saturday, July 12, 1941 www.onwar.com
In Moscow... Britain and the Soviet Union sign an agreement in Moscow providing for mutual assistance and forbidding the making of a separate peace.
On the Eastern Front... Moscow is bombed for the first time.
In North Africa... General Bastico replaces General Gariboldi as Commander in Chief of the Italian, and nominally the German, forces in North Africa.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/12.htm
July 12th, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: British-Soviet mutual-assistance agreement signed at Moscow.
Minesweepers HMS Taitam and Waglan laid down. (Dave Shirlaw)
GERMANY: U-415 laid down.
U-160 launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
U.S.S.R.: Moscow is raided by the Luftwaffe for the first time.
Moscow:
Britain and Russia are allies again after nearly 25 hostile years. Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to Moscow, Vyacheslav and Molotov, today signed a pact which promised that both countries would “render each other assistance and support of all kinds in the present war against Hitlerite Germany.”
Stalin looked on, smiling as the two men signed the documents and the official blue ribbons and red wax seals were applied at a ceremony in the Kremlin. Then chocolates and glasses of Georgian champagne were handed round and Stalin, raising his glass, toasted Anglo-Russian co-operation for victory.
The pact, proposed by Churchill, goes further than an agreement to wage war against Hitler; it also commits both countries to an undertaking that “during this war they will neither negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace except by mutual agreement.”
Churchill has a long memory. It was Lenin’s decision to make peace with Germany in 1918 that enabled the german to mount their last great and nearly successful offensive on the western front.
Lwow: The Nazis have posted photographs of Ukrainian nationalist prisoners slaughtered by the retreating Russians and captioned “Jewish killings.” They are exploiting a local tradition of nationalism and anti-Semitism to recruit a local militia. Just two days after the Germans arrived, local people were massacring Jews in ‘ Aktion Petlura’ a symbolic revenge for the killing of a Ukrainian by a Jews in Paris 15 years ago.
In Kovno, Lithuanian police have murdered over 3,000 Jews under German supervision, in Jassy Romanian troops killed over 200 Jews and crammed 5,000 into sealed cattle trucks. In Bialystock, the Nazi soldiers spent the first day of the occupation herding the city’s Jews into their own blazing synagogue where they died..
PALESTINE: Acre: The first armistice between British and French forces since the Battle of Waterloo was initialled today in the light of a motor cycle headlight. The armistice, ending the fighting in Syria and Lebanon between the Vichy French and the Allies, come as Allied forces tighten their grip on Beirut. For Vichy’s commander, General Dentz, it is virtually a surrender.
NORTH AFRICA: General Bastico replaces General Gariboldi as C-in-C of Axis forces in North Africa.
U.S.A.: New York Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio goes 2-for-5 in the third and final baseball game of the series against the St. Louis Browns at Sportmans’ Park in St. Louis, Missouri. DiMaggio’s hitting streak now stands at 51 consecutive games. (Jack McKillop)