1942

The year in brief

1942 began with Allied defeats. Japan conquered Malaya, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Burma, and on 15 February General Percival surrendered Singapore – the largest capitulation in the history of the British Army. By the summer the Axis had reached its greatest extent of the whole war. In the Pacific, however, carriers brought the turn: after the Battle of the Coral Sea Japan called off its landing at Port Moresby, and in June at Midway American aircraft sank four of Nagumo’s carriers. On 7 August the Marines landed on Guadalcanal.

In the east the Red Army lost three armies in May in the pocket at Barvenkovo, and on 28 June the Germans struck in the south of the USSR for the oil of the Caucasus. Sevastopol fell on 1 July, and on 23 August the Battle of Stalingrad began. In Africa Rommel took Tobruk in June and came to a halt at El Alamein. In the autumn the initiative began to pass to the Allies: Montgomery’s Eighth Army broke Rommel’s position at El Alamein, on 8 November American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria, and on 19 November the Red Army struck on the Don and encircled Paulus’s Sixth Army.

In January Heydrich gathered officials at Wannsee to coordinate the murder of Europe’s Jews that was already under way. In March the first transports reached Bełżec, and from 22 July the Germans deported Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka; by 21 September they had murdered at least 254,000 people there. The Bund Report on 700,000 Jews murdered in Poland reached London, but the West did not believe it. On 14 February Sikorski renamed the ZWZ the Home Army, and on 4 December the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota” was founded in Warsaw. On 17 December Eden read to the Commons a declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. The year ended with the Sixth Army encircled at Stalingrad; the attempt to relieve it had failed.