World War II calendar
What happened on May 27 during World War II? This date brings together 10 events from 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
Captain William Tennant arrived to control embarkation at Dunkirk. Bombing and wrecks had made the normal harbour facilities unreliable. The beaches could be used only through boats and shallow-draft craft. Tennant reported that the outer harbour arms and beaches were the available options and requested every suitable craft.
Continue in Dunkirk: Operation Dynamo →German aircraft attacked the harbour, railway facilities, shipping and troops moving toward the coast. Fires and smoke spread through the town. The damage interrupted embarkation and made movement harder, but smoke and cloud could also obscure ships and beaches during later attacks.
Continue in Dunkirk: Operation Dynamo →British units around Cassel and nearby villages delayed German forces advancing toward the Dunkirk perimeter. The position became isolated. Much of the garrison was killed or captured, but the fighting protected withdrawal routes used by other formations moving north.
Continue in Dunkirk: Operation Dynamo →The first full evacuation effort produced a modest total because harbour use had been disrupted and the small-craft system was not yet in place. Most of those evacuated had embarked in ships that entered the harbour. The result showed that beach evacuation alone would be too slow.
Continue in Dunkirk: Operation Dynamo →
As Australian and New Zealand units withdrew from the Suda area on 27 May, troops near the road known as 42nd Street counterattacked the advancing 141st Mountain Regiment. The action involved men of the Australian 2/7th Battalion, the 28th (Māori) Battalion and other nearby units. The charge drove German troops back and inflicted substantial casualties, interrupting the immediate pursuit. Its purpose was local and urgent: create enough space for the withdrawing columns to continue toward Stilos rather than hold the battlefield indefinitely. The counterattack helped protect the movement south while…
Continue in Battle of Crete →
King George V and Rodney opened fire on the crippled Bismarck in the morning, joined by cruisers. Heavy gunfire progressively destroyed the German ship's command positions, turrets and ability to return effective fire. Tovey broke off the battleship action as fuel became a concern, and Dorsetshire closed to fire torpedoes. Bismarck sank at about 10:40. German survivors also reported scuttling charges had been set, so the final loss resulted from a ship already devastated by gunfire, torpedo damage and deliberate flooding measures rather than a single clean sinking blow. Dorsetshire…
Continue in The Bismarck Chase →
Yorktown came into Pearl Harbor down by the stern and leaking oil after Coral Sea, with damage the yard estimated at three months. She was dry-docked, patched, shored and back at sea in seventy-two hours with fourteen hundred workmen still aboard as she sailed. The Japanese plan counted two American carriers in the Pacific. Yorktown made three, and she carried the dive bombers that killed Sōryū and Hiryū.
Continue in The Battle of Midway →
The First Air Fleet left Hiroshima Bay with Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū. Two of the six carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor were absent, one damaged and one short of aircrew after Coral Sea, so the strike force went to sea at two thirds strength. Behind it, several hundred miles back and unable to influence anything, came Yamamoto with the battleships. Ahead and to the north went a separate operation against the Aleutians. The fleet was divided across a thousand miles in support of nothing.
Continue in The Battle of Midway →
Czechoslovak agents Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attacked Reinhard Heydrich’s car in Prague on 27 May 1942. Heydrich died on 4 June, and German security authorities launched an intensive search accompanied by arrests, executions and collective pressure. Lidice entered the investigation through a chain of suspicion involving a private letter and family connections. The evidence never established that the village had supported Operation Anthropoid, yet the village was chosen for a retaliation intended to be publicly understood. The reprisals widened before the attackers were found. The occupation regime used executions,…
Continue in Reprisal and Massacre →
American heavy bombers attacked the Marseille railway system during the late-May Transportation Plan offensive in southern France. French research cited by Foucrier records 1,752 people killed and nearly 4,500 total casualties. The raid belongs beside the operational results because civilian deaths were part of the plan's political argument from the beginning.
Continue in The Transportation Plan →
