World War II calendar
What happened on August 17 during World War II? This date brings together 5 events from 1943 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
The Eighth Air Force dispatched 376 B-17s against the Schweinfurt bearing plants and the Regensburg aircraft works. The Regensburg force continued to North Africa after bombing. Weather delays separated the two wings, allowing German fighters to recover and attack them in sequence. Sixty bombers failed to return.
Continue in The Combined Bomber Offensive →
Bomber Command attacked the German rocket research establishment with 597 aircraft and used a master bomber to control marking over the target. Forty bombers were lost. Damage, deaths among specialist staff and the decision to disperse work delayed parts of the programme, but key research installations survived.
Continue in The Combined Bomber Offensive →
Hitler authorised Army Group G to withdraw from southern and south-western France, holding only Toulon and Marseille as fortresses to deny the ports. It was one of the few timely withdrawal orders he gave in 1944. Blaskowitz had two armies to extract up a single valley under total Allied air superiority, with the Resistance holding much of the country either side of it.
Continue in Operation Dragoon →
Canadian troops entered Falaise as the pocket tightened. Kluge, out of radio contact for a day while pinned under air attack and suspected by Hitler of trying to negotiate a surrender, was relieved and replaced by Model. He took poison on the road home two days later. Model's first act was to authorise the withdrawal east that Kluge had been forbidden, days too late for most of the two armies inside the pocket.
Continue in Operation Overlord →
Pierre Laval was removed to Belfort and the Vichy apparatus in Paris dissolved. German civil administration began burning files and loading lorries, and the Gestapo offices on the avenue Foch emptied. What remained was a garrison without a government, in a city where the authority of the occupier had visibly ended before its army had.
Continue in The Liberation of Paris →
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