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WWII On This Day: January 7

What happened on January 7 during World War II? This date brings together 4 events from 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1943, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1940
Finnish ski troops moving through forest during the Winter War.
Imperial War Museums, HU 52936 · Public domain · Source
The Winter War

Timoshenko takes control of the main Soviet effort

Semyon Timoshenko received command of the newly organised North-Western Front with the decisive mission on the Karelian Isthmus. The Soviet high command now concentrated the campaign's main weight against the Finnish fortified zone. The preparation phase brought heavier artillery groupings, detailed reconnaissance, engineer work against obstacles and training for infantry-tank cooperation. Units rehearsed attacks and identified individual strongpoints before the general offensive resumed. This reorganisation connected tactical learning to operational concentration. The Red Army used January to build a battle it could support repeatedly on a narrow front, turning the…

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1941
Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops in gas masks prepare to advance through rubble in Shanghai, August 1937.
Unknown photographer / Ministry of the Navy · public domain (Japan) as stated on the Wikimedia Commons file page
The Second Sino-Japanese War

Nationalist forces destroy the New Fourth Army in Anhui

On 5 January 1941 the Communist New Fourth Army, about 9,000 strong, was surrounded at Maolin in southern Anhui by about 80,000 Nationalist troops under Shangguan Yunxiang, and fighting lasted from 7 to 13 January. About 2,000 people broke out. On 17 January Chiang Kai-shek ordered the New Fourth Army disbanded. The incident ended substantive cooperation between the Nationalists and the Communists in the war against Japan. On 16 January the Japanese army had adopted its Long-term Operational Guidance Plan for China, and the Chinese side entered 1941 divided as…

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1942
A Soviet 122 mm A-19 gun crew firing during the defence of Moscow on 3 December 1941.
RIA Novosti archive #46802 / Viktor Temin · 3 December 1941 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Source
The Battle for Moscow

The Moscow strategic counteroffensive reaches its operational boundary

By 7 January the Soviet counteroffensive had forced Army Group Centre back roughly sixty to one hundred and fifty miles depending on the sector. Kalinin, Klin, Naro-Fominsk and numerous smaller towns had been recovered, and the immediate threat to Moscow had been removed. The next day Soviet headquarters widened the winter fighting into broader offensives toward Rzhev, Vyazma and other sectors. Those operations continued the struggle against Army Group Centre, but they belong to a new operational phase beyond the Battle for Moscow boundary used on this page.

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1943
A Chindit column crosses a river in Burma during Operation Longcloth in 1943.
Imperial War Museums, IND 2290 · UK Government public domain
The Arakan and the Chindits

The first attacks on Donbaik fail

Indian troops attacked Japanese positions around Donbaik in early January 1943 and found a belt of bunkers covering the narrow coastal approaches. The defences were mutually supporting and difficult to reach through the surrounding ground. Artillery preparation did not produce a clean breach, and infantry attacks were stopped with heavy losses. Further attempts followed over the next two months as commanders tried different brigades and supporting arms against the same defensive problem. Donbaik became the fixed point around which the first Arakan campaign stalled. Japanese troops gained time to reinforce…

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