WWII On This Day: May 8

German troops in the ruins of Sevastopol, 1942. — Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-231-0703-27 · CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Source

May 8, 1942 · 03:15 Sevastopol and the Crimea

Operation Trappenjagd breaks the Crimean Front

After artillery and air preparation, Eleventh Army concentrated the main ground attack on the southern sector of the Parpach line. The breakthrough opened space for mobile forces to turn north behind the Soviet forward armies. VIII Air Corps held a major advantage over the battlefield and struck headquarters, artillery, movement routes and reserves. The Soviet front lost the ability to reorganize before the German advance reached the Kerch crossings.

Continue in Sevastopol and the Crimea →

May 8, 1944 · 23:00 Sevastopol and the Crimea

Hitler authorizes evacuation after the breakthrough

With the Sapun position lost and the perimeter collapsing, permission to evacuate Seventeenth Army was finally given during the night of 8 May. The decision came after months in which earlier withdrawals had been rejected. The available shipping now had to load under Soviet air and artillery pressure from exposed beaches around Cape Khersones. Several convoys reached Romania, while others returned underloaded or could not reach the shore.

Continue in Sevastopol and the Crimea →

Allied landing craft off the Île d'Or at Le Dramont, Camel Beach, during the landing in Provence, August 1944. — Landing craft off the Île d'Or at Le Dramont, Camel sector, August 1944 · Public domain · Source

May 8, 1945 Operation Dragoon

What Dragoon cost and what it settled

Allied casualties for the whole operation were around 17,000 killed, wounded and missing. German losses ran to about 7,000 dead and over 130,000 prisoners, most of the fighting strength of the Nineteenth Army. The counterfactual Churchill wanted is unknowable. What is on the record is that an operation he called a strategic error opened the ports that fed the Western armies, brought a French army of a quarter of a million men back into France, and closed the southern flank in four weeks.

Continue in Operation Dragoon →

Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence. — USHMM

May 8, 1945 The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence

Nazi rule ends in Europe

Germany's unconditional surrender brought the Nazi state and its camp system to an end in Europe. Allied armies had already overrun concentration camps and forced-labour sites across Germany, Austria and occupied territory. Survivors faced disease, displacement, destroyed families and communities, lost property and continuing antisemitic violence. Tracing relatives, documenting crimes and deciding where to rebuild a life became part of the immediate postwar history of the Holocaust.

Continue in The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence →

Horsa gliders on the ground near Hamminkeln after the airborne landing east of the Rhine, March 1945. — Horsa gliders near Hamminkeln, 25 March 1945 · Imperial War Museums BU 2287 · IWM Non-Commercial Licence · Source

May 8, 1945 The Rhine Crossings

What it settled

The Rhine was the last thing the German army in the west could have held. Once it was crossed on a broad front there was no line behind it, no reserve to form one, and no fuel to move what was left. Six weeks later the war in Europe was over. The crossings themselves are among the few operations of 1945 in which the outcome was never in serious doubt, and the arguments about them are almost entirely about cost rather than about result.

Continue in The Rhine Crossings →

A converted cable ship laying pipeline across the English Channel, 1944. — Pipeline laying in the Channel, 1944 ·

May 8, 1945 · 12:00 Operation PLUTO

Useful output, limited share

By the end of the European war, DUMBO was a functioning high-pressure supply route and the submarine lines were operating ahead of the capacity of parts of the continental system. The official postwar accounting credited PLUTO with approximately 370,000 long tons, about eight per cent of petroleum products sent from Britain to the Allied expeditionary force.

Continue in Operation PLUTO →