Media, News, Publishing: News update 23/03/2020 (763)

By this time, the United States of America had entered the war, and the balance of power began to change. Landed in November 1942, a large Anglo-American landing in North Africa was a surprise to the Germans. By May 1943, they had lost almost all of Libya, and soon capitulated in Tunisia. The Allies captured about 250 thousand people, including almost 140 thousand Germans. For Hitler, the defeat in North Africa was, as the German generals later claimed, the second military disaster after Stalingrad.

Active battles were also fought in the tropical part of the continent. French Equatorial Africa became the stronghold of the Free French created by de Gaulle. The French and Africans fought in the detachments formed on African soil. De Gaulle took an active part in the hostilities in North Africa, Ethiopia, helped the British liberate in 1942 the island of Madagascar, the former supply base for Japanese submarines in the Indian Ocean. African units fought on the side of the Allies in France and Italy, Belgium and Syria, in Burma... In total, about 2 million Africans fought in the Allied armies during the war, hundreds of thousands served in various auxiliary units. These are all little-known facts of the history of World War II.

The attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR changed the military-political balance in the world. The United States made its choice, rapidly reaching the forefront in many sectors of the economy, and especially in military-industrial production. The Franklin Roosevelt government announced its intention to support the USSR and other countries of the anti-Hitler coalition with all the means at its disposal. On August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the famous "Atlantic Charter" - a program of goals and concrete actions in the struggle against German fascism. As the war spread throughout the world, the struggle for sources of raw materials and food, for control over maritime transport in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, became more and more acute. From the first days of the war, the allies, primarily England, managed to control the countries of the Near and Middle East, which supplied them with food and raw materials for the military industry, replenishment in manpower. Iran, which included British and Soviet troops, Iraq and Saudi Arabia supplied the allies with oil, this "bread of war". To protect them, the British deployed numerous troops from India, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. In Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, the situation was less stable. Declaring its neutrality, Turkey supplied Germany with strategic raw materials, buying them up in the British colonies. Turkey was also the center of German intelligence in the Middle East. Syria and Lebanon, after the surrender of France, increasingly fell into the sphere of fascist influence. In June 1941, British and French units entered these countries, but the situation in them remained rather difficult until the end of the war.

A threatening situation for the Allies since 1941 has developed in the Far East and vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Here, Japan was asserting itself more and more loudly as a sovereign master. Back in the 30s. Japan made territorial claims, acting under the slogan "Asia for Asians." England, France and the USA had strategic and economic interests in this vast region, but were preoccupied with the growing threat from Hitler and initially did not have sufficient forces for a war on two fronts. Among Japanese politicians and the military, there was no consensus on where to strike the main blow: to the north, against the Soviet Union, or to the south and southwest, to capture Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, numerous archipelagos and islands in the Pacific Ocean. But one object of Japanese aggression has been identified since the beginning of the 30s. — China. The fate of the war in China, the most populous country in the world, was decided not only on the battlefields, because here the interests of several great powers clashed at once, including the USA and the USSR. The difficult domestic political situation in China, which was also torn apart by a civil war, prevented the organization of a powerful rebuff to the aggressors.

By the end of 1941, the Japanese had made their choice. They considered the destruction of Pearl Harbor, the main American naval base in the Pacific, the key to success in the struggle for control of the Pacific Ocean.

... In the early Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, about 200 Japanese bombers, torpedo bombers and fighters hit American warships - and there were about 70 of them in a cramped harbor. At the same time, Japanese submarines broke into the bay. Less than an hour later, another 160 aircraft repeated the raid. The losses of the Americans were huge: 5 battleships and 3 other warships were sunk, 10 more ships were seriously damaged. At the base airfield, the Japanese destroyed more than half and damaged more than a quarter of combat aircraft. The name "Pearl Harbor" has become as symbolic as Dunkirk, and later - Stalingrad, Kursk Bulge.

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понедельник, 23 марта 2020 г.

News update 23/03/2020 (763)

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понедельник, 23 марта 2020 г.

News update 23/03/2020 (763)

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понедельник, 23 марта 2020 г.