Skip to content
WW2 Theatres Theatres of the Second World War
Home

World War II calendar

WWII On This Day: June 30

What happened on June 30 during World War II? This date brings together 7 events from 1941, 1942 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1941
New Zealand infantry and Matilda tank crews meeting outside Tobruk during Operation Crusader, photographed 2 December 1941.
Captain Geoffrey Keating / No. 1 Army Film & Photographic Unit · Imperial War Museums E 6918 · UK Government public domain
Tobruk and Operation Crusader

HMAS Waterhen sinks on the Tobruk ferry route

HMAS Waterhen, a Royal Australian Navy V-and-W-class destroyer, sank on 30 June after damage from an Axis air attack while serving the supply line to besieged Tobruk. It was one of the naval losses incurred in carrying stores, replacements and wounded across the Mediterranean. The garrison continued to receive essential supplies. A photograph of Waterhen is used in the equipment section as an undated vessel portrait; no photograph is assigned here as if it documented the sinking.

Continue in Tobruk and Operation Crusader →
Portrait of Joseph Stalin published in 1941.
Portrait of Joseph Stalin published in 1941. Mil.ru · CC BY 4.0 Source
Operation Barbarossa

The Soviet wartime government is formed

On 30 June the State Defence Committee was created under Stalin with extraordinary authority over mobilisation, production, transport, evacuation and internal administration. The frontier catastrophe produced a more concentrated wartime government at the centre of the Soviet state. Western Front was being destroyed while command structures changed and communications with armies repeatedly failed. The new committee concentrated political and economic authority for a war that was already expanding beyond the frontier catastrophe. Its creation nevertheless gave the Soviet leadership an institution able to redirect labour, industry, transport and military resources…

Continue in Operation Barbarossa →
1942
A German tank commander in southern Soviet territory in June 1942, shortly before the opening of Case Blue.
Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-218-0528-30 · CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Source
Case Blue and the Drive to the Caucasus

Sixth Army joins the attack

After weather delays, Sixth Army opened its part of the offensive on 30 June and drove deeply toward the Oskol. Together with Fourth Panzer Army's movement farther north, the advance threatened to surround the Soviet forces still west of the river. Stalin initially pressed for armoured counterattacks around the Voronezh axis, believing the German movement might still develop northward against Moscow. Soviet tank formations were committed before all of them had assembled and before fuel and communications problems had been solved. The German command saw another 1941-style pocket beginning to…

Continue in Case Blue and the Drive to the Caucasus →
German troops in the ruins of Sevastopol, 1942.
Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-231-0703-27 · CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Source
Sevastopol and the Crimea

The defence contracts and Stavka authorizes command evacuation

Fort Malakov fell and German forces cleared the Sapun Heights and entered Balaklava as the remaining Soviet defensive system broke into smaller positions. Ammunition, food and water were critically short. Oktyabrsky requested permission to evacuate senior command personnel and cancel a proposed diversionary operation. Stavka approved during the night. Several hundred priority officers and specialists escaped by air and submarine while the mass of the garrison withdrew toward Cape Khersones.

Continue in Sevastopol and the Crimea →
1944
British troops marching through Bayeux, 27 June 1944.
British troops marching through Bayeux, 27 June 1944. IWM B 6058 · IWM Non-Commercial Licence Source
Operation Overlord

The end of the first month

Epsom was closed down and Hill 112 abandoned. After twenty-four days the Allies held a lodgement roughly seventy miles wide and, at its deepest, some twenty miles inland, well short of the phase lines the planners had drawn, and containing far more men and materiel than the ground could comfortably hold. The counterattack that was supposed to throw them back had been consumed piecemeal in defensive fighting, division by division, as each arrived. The campaign had already become the attritional battle the Reich could not afford.

Continue in Operation Overlord →
Bullet strikes still visible in the ironwork of the original bridge.
Bullet strikes still visible in the ironwork of the original bridge. Wikimedia Commons · Creative Commons Source
Operation Deadstick

What it cost and what it settled

The assault cost two dead and about fourteen wounded. Holding the bridges through the rest of the day and the following night cost the company and the parachute battalion considerably more. The result was that 21st Panzer could not use the crossings to strike west at the beaches, and the airborne division east of the Orne had a supply line. It is the clearest case on D-Day of a very small force deciding something out of all proportion to its size.

Continue in Operation Deadstick →
The cratered clifftop at Pointe du Hoc after the assault.
The cratered clifftop at Pointe du Hoc after the assault. US Army Signal Corps · NARA · Public domain Source
Pointe du Hoc

Was it worth it

The claim that the assault was pointless because the casemates were empty is repeated often and does not survive the record. The guns existed, they were within range of both American beaches, they were loaded and aimed, and they were destroyed within two hours of the Rangers reaching the clifftop. What is fair criticism is that the intelligence picture was six weeks out of date, that the reinforcement plan hung on a single signal with no margin, and that the men who took the position were then left on it…

Continue in Pointe du Hoc →