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

World War II calendar

WWII On This Day: November 18

What happened on November 18 during World War II? This date brings together 5 events from 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1941
Matilda infantry tanks outside the Tobruk perimeter, photographed 18 November 1941, the day Crusader opened.
Matilda infantry tanks outside the Tobruk perimeter, photographed 18 November 1941, the day Crusader opened. Captain Geoffrey Keating / Imperial War Museums E 6600 · UK Government public domain Source
Tobruk and Operation Crusader

Operation Crusader opens with a two-corps advance

The British Eighth Army crossed from Egypt into Libya on 18 November. XXX Corps was ordered into the open desert to bring the German and Italian armoured forces to battle; XIII Corps moved towards the fortified frontier posts. The Tobruk garrison waited for a favourable moment to break out towards the attackers. The attack surprised the Axis command, which had itself been preparing action against Tobruk. British mobility allowed a wide advance, but spread its tanks across separated formations. The next days would reveal the weakness of this dispersion.

Continue in Tobruk and Operation Crusader →
Royal Horse Artillery crew operating a 25-pounder at Tobruk, 18 November 1941.
Royal Horse Artillery crew operating a 25-pounder at Tobruk, 18 November 1941. Captain Geoffrey Keating / Imperial War Museums E 6572 · UK Government public domain Source
Tobruk and Operation Crusader

Tobruk artillery prepares the fortress breakout

At Tobruk on 18 November, an official war photographer recorded the crew of a Royal Horse Artillery 25-pounder serving its gun. The garrison’s supporting fire helped contain the besiegers and would support the movement of infantry and tanks towards the outer positions. The photograph captures the guns on the date Crusader opened. It does not establish that the weapon was fired at the specific minute of the offensive, and its archival description concerns a Tobruk gun detachment rather than the wider armoured battle.

Continue in Tobruk and Operation Crusader →
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

On the eve of Uranus

On 18 November Army Group A remained deep in the Caucasus while Sixth Army fought inside Stalingrad. Between those two German concentrations, long sectors of the Don were held by Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies with limited modern anti-tank strength and only thin German mobile reserves behind them. Those allied armies were not merely weak substitutes placed on an irrelevant rear line. Their sectors had become the operational hinge connecting the Stalingrad commitment to the rest of Army Group B, and German reserves had been consumed or positioned elsewhere by…

Continue in Case Blue and the Drive to the Caucasus →
1943
A German Messerschmitt Bf 110 attacks B-17F Flying Fortresses of the 91st Bomb Group over Europe in January 1944.
U.S. Army Air Forces / National Archives, NAID 204888701 · Public domain in the United States · Source
The Combined Bomber Offensive

The Battle of Berlin opens

Bomber Command dispatched 444 aircraft, with 402 bombing Berlin. The attack began a series of sixteen major raids against the capital through March. Berlin was heavily damaged, but its size, inland location, weather and defences made concentrated destruction more difficult than at Hamburg.

Continue in The Combined Bomber Offensive →
1944
Men of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division climb through the Hürtgen Forest southwest of Düren on 18 November 1944.
Men of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division climb through the Hürtgen Forest southwest of Düren on 18 November 1944. T/4 Moran, 165th Signal Photo Company / U.S. National Archives · Public domain Source
Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest

The 4th Division is drawn into a forest battle

By 18 November the 8th and 22nd Infantry Regiments were grinding forward through woods where mines, registered artillery and machine-gun positions broke the advance into small local fights. Armour and tank destroyers could move only where engineers opened roads and forest tracks. The attack remained part of Operation Queen, but inside the Hürtgen progress was measured in hundreds of yards. Losses among company officers and non-commissioned officers mounted rapidly while evacuation and supply had to use the same restricted routes.

Continue in Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest →