World War II calendar
What happened on May 30 during World War II? This date brings together 10 events from 1940, 1942 and 1945, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
By midnight on 30 May, 126,606 troops had reached England during Dynamo. The official history records 77,412 embarked through the harbour and 49,194 from the beaches by this point, showing the importance of both systems.
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Shortly before 09:00, Harris confirmed Cologne as the target. Group headquarters issued the route, altitude bands, time windows and bombing instructions. Aircraft unable to identify Cologne were directed toward Essen, and failing that toward another built-up Ruhr target. The operation was designed to keep the main force moving rather than circling over the city.
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Crews, armourers, fuel bowsers and maintenance teams prepared aircraft across dozens of stations. Training units carried crews with limited operational experience, some flying aircraft not normally committed to a major raid. The force included Wellingtons, Hampdens, Whitleys, Stirlings, Halifaxes, Manchesters and Lancasters. The mixture complicated speed, altitude and navigation planning.
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A total of 1,046 or 1,047 aircraft was dispatched, depending on the official accounting used. More than half were Vickers Wellingtons. The take-off itself was a major operation. Aircraft departed from widely separated bases and had to merge into a timed stream without modern air-traffic control.
Continue in Operation Millennium →The aircraft crossed the coast in a dense stream arranged by time and altitude. Concentration reduced the period during which German night fighters and anti-aircraft guns could engage the force. It also increased the danger of collision. Crews flew at night with restricted visibility, different cruising speeds and only limited knowledge of the aircraft around them.
Continue in Operation Millennium →The opening aircraft marked the target area near the centre of Cologne. The Rhine, railway system and city lights obscured only partially by blackout helped crews identify the city. The marking system was less developed than the Pathfinder methods introduced later in 1942, so crews bombed a broad urban area rather than a tightly maintained aiming point.
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Hundreds of aircraft reached Cologne and released high explosive and incendiary bombs during roughly ninety minutes. The RAF Museum records more than two thousand tons dispatched against the target. High explosive opened roofs, broke water mains and obstructed streets. Incendiaries then entered exposed buildings and started thousands of fires.
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Civil-defence teams confronted fires across a wide area while water mains, telephone lines and roads were damaged. Separate fires merged in blocks where access failed. Cologne did not develop the single city-wide firestorm later seen at Hamburg, but the number and distribution of fires exceeded the capacity of the emergency services.
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Bomber Command dispatched 1,046 aircraft from fifty-two airfields. Of these, 367 came from training groups. Older Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens still made up most of the force, with 338 Stirlings, Halifaxes, Manchesters and Lancasters providing the newer heavy element. The plan compressed the arrivals into a ninety-minute attack so that more bombers would pass through the German defence sectors than those sectors could process efficiently. The first bombs fell at 00:47 on 31 May and the last at 02:25. Gee brought the opening waves close enough for visual identification in…
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The last outward convoy, JW 67, had left the Clyde on 12 May—four days after VE Day—and reached the Kola Inlet on 20 May without incident. RA 67 sailed home on 23 May and arrived in the Clyde on 30 May, ending the wartime Arctic convoy sequence after Germany's surrender. Across seventy-eight convoys, more than four million tonnes of supplies had been carried through the northern route. The final passage no longer required the wartime contest with German surface ships, but its completion made the endpoint clear: the convoy system…
Continue in The Arctic Convoys →