World War II calendar
What happened on November 22 during World War II? This date brings together 6 events from 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1944, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
Historian Emanuel Ringelblum organised a clandestine group to collect diaries, official notices, ration cards, drawings, essays and testimony from across occupied Poland. The archive was hidden in metal boxes and milk cans. Two caches were recovered after the war. The surviving documents record German policy and the responses, choices and daily lives of the people subjected to it.
Continue in The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence →
An official British photograph taken on 22 November shows a Bedford OYD truck loaded with troops passing barbed wire at the Libyan frontier. The movement took place while Eighth Army formations were pushing west in support of Crusader. Supply vehicles, infantry trucks and recovery assets were essential to keeping the mobile formations operating beyond the frontier. The photograph illustrates frontier movement, not a documented action by the New Zealand 25th Battalion at Point 175.
Continue in Tobruk and Operation Crusader →
A column of sixty GAZ-AA trucks left the western shore of Lake Ladoga on 22 November, establishing the first regular motor convoy on the developing ice road. The crossing soon became part of a larger military road system with traffic control, repair teams, anti-aircraft positions and medical points; routes shifted as ice thickness and cracks changed.
Continue in The Siege of Leningrad →
Before dawn on 22 November, an advance detachment from XXVI Tank Corps reached the Don crossing at Kalach and captured the bridge before German defenders could destroy it. Surprise and the speed of the Soviet approach secured the key crossing largely intact. The bridge gave the northern mobile forces a direct route across the Don toward the southern pincer. German headquarters west of Stalingrad were being displaced or overrun, and communications between Sixth Army and the rear were breaking down faster than a coherent withdrawal plan could be organised. Inside…
Continue in Battle of Stalingrad →
After four days of limited gains, General Barton renewed the 4th Division's attack. The 8th, 12th and 22nd Infantry Regiments fought toward Hürtgen, Grosshau and the eastern forest edge. Regiments advanced by small envelopments through woods and clearings. Losses among company officers and non-commissioned officers steadily reduced the ability of replacements to operate.
Continue in Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest →
Bengal Speaks, published in 1944, assembled photographs and testimony documenting starvation, relief, household asset sales and survivors. The volume preserved scenes that had often remained outside formal administrative records. Its photographs are historical evidence with their own limitations. Publication date does not make every image an exact-date record of the scene depicted, so they are best used for broad famine conditions rather than a precise daily chronology. The collection became part of the visual archive through which later generations encountered the famine’s civilian experience.
Continue in The Bengal Famine →
