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WWII On This Day: November 18

What happened on November 18 during World War II? This date brings together 3 events from 1942, 1943 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

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…

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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.

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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.

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