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May 27th, 1943 (THURSDAY)

UNITED KINGDOM: Destroyer HMS Grenville commissioned.
Minesweeper HMS Middlesex launched.

Patrol vessel HMS Kilchatten launched.

(Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: Paris: Looted works of art deemed “Unfit for sale” are brought by military trucks to the Jeu de Paume, and in the garden within the courtyard there, a bonfire is lit and the paintings burnt. Between five and six hundred works by amongst others, Masson, Miro, Pacabia (whose daughter Jeannine is in the resistance network with which Samuel Beckett has contact), Suzanne Valadon, Klee, Max Ernst, Picasso, Kisling (the man himself, a Jew, has been denounced by the model he so delighted in painting), Léger, La Fresnaye and Mané-Katz are destroyed.

The Comité National de la Resistance meets secretly in Paris for the first time. This meeting is primarily the work of de Gaulle’s lieutenant, Jean Moulin. Because this group represents resistance groups nationwide it increases the stock of General de Gaulle in the eyes of the Allies.

GERMANY: Mosquitoes of Nos. 105 and 139 Squadrons RAF, attack the Zeiss Optical Factory and the Schott Glass Works at Jena. (22)

U-980 commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)

ITALY: Rome: For the first time since Italy came into the war, the Italian government admitted to the world today that its people are rebelling against the Mussolini regime and staging strikes. Strikes were forbidden years ago by the Fascist government, and a public decree today ordered all strikers to return to work at once. Fear of an Allied invasion is driving thousands of Italians away from the south of the country.

YUGOSLAVIA: The British SOE (Special Operations Executive) drops officers to Tito’s Partisans.

MEDITERRANEAN SEA: Destroyer FS Leopard stranded and wrecked North of Benghazi. The wreck was destroyed on 19 June 1943. (Dave Shirlaw)

BURMA: Havildar Gaje Ghale (b.1922), 5th Gurkha Rifles led his platoon in storming a strong enemy position after three days in which, despite serious wounds, he had shown tireless courage. (Victoria Cross)

AUSTRALIA: Minesweeper HMAS Cowra launched. (Dave Shirlaw)

TERRITORY OF ALASKA: On Attu Island in the Aleutians in the late afternoon, a U.S. Army assault force attacks up a 60 degree incline in the Fishhook Ridge sector and cuts off the Japanese escape route to Chichagof Valley. The final Japanese defensive line, Buffalo Ridge, is almost taken by the Americans.

About half of the 2,300 Japanese on Attu have been killed to date.

The USAAF’s Eleventh Air Force dispatches a B-25 Mitchell to fly ground support, bomb and strafe troops and drop photos taken on the previous day to friendly forces; a B-24 Liberator and six P-38 Lightnings provide air cover. Six P-40s fly an attack and reconnaissance mission to Kiska Island, concentrating on the Main Camp area and Little Kiska Island. (Jack McKillop)

CANADA: Minesweeper HMCS Lavallee launched Vancouver, British Columbia. (Dave Shirlaw)

U.S.A.: PM Churchill and General Marshall leave Washington, DC for North Africa. There they will meet with General Eisenhower about Italy.

The 101st Infantry Battalion (Separate), personnel of Austrian ancestry is inactivated at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. (Nick Minecci)

The 53-minute U.S. government documentary “Prelude to War,” the first instalment of a multi-part documentary called “Why We Fight” is released in the U.S. Directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, this propaganda film that was used in training for the U.S. Army, compares the various governments of the world. The film is narrated by Walter Huston and features film of (in alphabetical order) Chiang Kai-Shek, Josef Goebbels, Herman Göring , Rudolph Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Herbert Hoover, Pierre Laval, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Haile Selassie, Henry L. Stimson, among others. (Jack McKillop)

ATLANTIC OCEAN: At 0611, the Sicilia was stopped by U-181 by shots across her bow and was sunk by torpedo at 0829 after the crew had abandoned ship. (Dave Shirlaw)