04 October - 10 October 1941

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04 October 1941

South Atlantic : British anti-submarine trawler HMS Lady Shirley forced German submarine U-111 to the surface with depth charges 225 miles west of Tenerife, Canary Islands. U-111’s crew scuttled the submarine after a brief gunfire exchange; U-111 suffered 8 killed and 44 captured, while HMS Lady Shirley suffered 1 killed

Mediterranean Sea : Royal Navy anti-submarine trawler HMS Whippet was sunk by Luftwaffe dive bombers 30 miles north of Bardia, Libya, killing 1.
Royal Navy HMS Talisman sank Vichy French ship Theophile Gautier in a convoy from Crete to the Greek mainland.

Russia : German Panzer Group 3 and Panzer Group 4 began to surround rear elements of the Soviet Western Front in Russia, capturing Kirov and Spa-Demensk in the process. The German troops continued to advance toward Vyasma to complete the envelopment.

Kovno , Baltics : On that day, in Kovno, less than a hundred and twenty miles away, all the patients, doctors and nurses in the ghetto hospital, as well as the orphans in the adjacent Jewish orphanage, were locked in the building by SS Eimsatzgruppen and local militias, which was then set on fire. Anyone who managed to break out was shot. Three days later, at Rovno, the mass murder began of more than seventeen thousand Jews.

05 October 1941

Singapore : US and UK naval commanders met in Singapore.

Russia : General Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist was named the commander of German 1st Panzer Army. The German Second Panzer Group was reorganized as the Second Panzer Army; Heinz Guderian remained the unit’s commanding officer.
The leading German formations reported that they were only about 100 kilometers from Moscow, Russia. On the same day, Moscow-based Soviet fighters discovered German vehicles as close as 50 kilometers from Moscow; when Moscow Military District’s Air Force Fighter Command chief Nikolai Sbytov reported this to his supeiors, he was investigated by the NKVD for disseminating false rumors, but he was lucky that Joseph Stalin believed him. For precaution, Stalin ordered the Soviet Western Front to withdraw to Vyazma to form a new defensive line under a new commanding officer, Georgy Zhukov, replacing Ivan Konev.

Mediterranean Sea : Swordfish torpedo bombers of British No. 830 Squadron Fleet Air Arm based in Malta attacked an Italian convoy en route from Naples, Italy to Tripoli, Libya 67 miles north of Misrata, Libya, sinking tanker Rialto; the 145 survivors were rescued by Italian destroyer Gioberti.
Brtitish cargo ship Tynefield struck a mine in Suez Channel and sunk.

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06 October 1941

Russia : Eight Soviet Armies were encircled at Bryansk and Vyazma, Russia by a surprise maneuver conducted by German 17th Panzer Division. In less than two weeks, the Germans have taken nearly 700,000 prisoners and destroyed or captured 1,200 tanks and 5,000 heavy guns.
General Heinz Guderian commander of 2nd Panzer Army noted in his diary that he had observed snow for the first time in the campaign in the Soviet Union.

USSR : On Stalin’s request , General Georgy Zhukov departed Leningrad for Moscow to take command of Soviet Western Front. General Ivan Fedyuninsky assumed command at Leningrad

Ukraine : 1st SS Panzer Division (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler) cornered and captured most of Ninth Soviet Army at Berdyansk on Sea of Azov. Over 100.000 Soviet troops were captured.

Egypt , North Africa : British forces in Western Desert reorganise as 8th Army (made up two corps 13th Corps mostly infantry and 30th Corps mostly armor and mobile columns) under command of General Alan Cunningham and Middle East Theater Commander General Claude Auchinleck and his staff prepare Operation Crusader plans for a vast scale offensive to relieve Tobruk. Many officers in Mediterranean and Middle East Command do not appropve Auchinleck’s decision to promote Cunningham (a good overseas colonial operation officer but untested and inexperienced in vast scale mechanised maneuvering) to army command but Auchinleck ignored them

Mediterranean Sea : German bombers attacked shipping in the Gulf of Suez east of Egypt, sinking British ship Thistlegorm.

07 October 1941

USSR : In an effort to boost morale in the Soviet Union, Stalin lifted the ban on religion.

Finland : The United Kingdom demanded Finland to stop fighting the Soviet Union; the demand was ignored.

Greenland : Bluie West Eight airfield was officially established by the US Army Air Forces.

Russia : German 10th Panzer Division captured Vyasma, Russia at 1030 hours, surrounding five Soviet Armies. Georgy Zhukov, who had been recalled from Leningrad, Russia and sent to report on the situation on the West Front, arrived at Ivan Konev’s headquarters to discover that there was no information concerning the Vyasma encirclement. He was forced to report to Joseph Stalin that there was no longer a continuous front in the west, and the large gaps could not be closed because the command had run out of reserves.

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08 October 1941

Ukraine : German First Panzer Army reached Berdyansk and Mariupol in Ukraine in an attempt to reinforce the German 11th Army against Soviet 9th and 18th Armies. Across many sectors of the Eastern Front of the European War, heavy rain set in, resulting in mud that crippled the German Panzers’ mobility and held up supplies.

Mediterranean Sea : Italian coaster Paola Podesta was torpedoed and sunk by Fairey Swordfish aircraft of 830 Squadron, Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm at south west of Sicily
British cargo ship Rosalie Muller was bombed and sunk by Luftwaffe HE-111 bombers at Suez Channel.

09 October 1941

Berlin : ‘In a military sense,’ Hitler’s Press Chief, Otto Dietrich, told foreign journalists in Berlin , ‘Soviet Russia has been vanquished.’

Washington , USA : Vannevar Bush took the British Military Application of Uranium Detonation (MAUD) Committee Report to US President Franklin Roosevelt, who agreed to work together with the British to develop atomic weapons.

Russia : A detachment of Soviet NKVD troops prevented a company of German Brandenburg 800 Division saboteurs from destroying the Istra Water Reservoir near Moscow, Russia.

Ankara , Turkey : Turkish goverment signs a trade treaty with German goverment to supply chrome to Germany in exchange of manufactured goods

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10th October 1941

Eastern Front : The German 250.Infanterie Division, also known as the Blue Division, entered service on the Eastern Front. This division was notable as being made up of Spanish volunteers.
General Zhukov took command of a new Soviet Western Front, which was made up of the remnants of the former Western Front, the Southwestern Front, and the Reserve Front. He immediately called for the formation of a new defensive Mozhaysk Line to protect Moscow, Russia, stretching from Tula south of the city to Volokolamsk to the northwest.
Soviet reinforcements from Far East began to arrive before Moscow. The Soviet 32nd Rifle Division began to arrive at Mozhaysk, west of the Soviet capital of Moscow in Russia, from Siberia. Further west in Gzhatsk in Smolensk Oblast, 40 miles west of Mozhaysk and 32 miles east of Vyasma, Soviet 18th and 19th Tank Brigades halted a German offensive. German 4th Panzer Division reached Mtsensk, Russia in Oryol Oblast, but it would be held there for many days by stubborn Soviet resistance.
German general Walther von Reichenau issued the “Severity Order” in which he ordered the annihilation Bolshevism and the extermination of Jews.

South Atlantic : German submarine U-126 torpedoed and sank British ship Nailsea Manor 150 miles northeast of the Cape Verde Islands at 0543 hours; all 51 survived and were picked up by British corvette HMS Violet.

Mediterranean Sea : Royal Navy submarine HMS Thunderbolt torpedoed and sank Italian ship Citta di Simi northeast of Crete, Greece.

Black Sea : Romanian minelayer Regele Carol I struck a mine and sank off Varna

Czechoslovakia : Reinhard Heydrich ordered the town of Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) to be converted into a camp-ghetto for deported German, Austrian, and Czechoslovakian Jews. He placed Adolf Eichmann and Rolf Günther in charge of establishing this camp-ghetto

Luxemburg : Nazi referandum on annexation of Luxembourg to Germany is a total failure , %97 of population abstain.

Washington , USA : President Roosevelt asked Congress to arm US merchant ships.

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Yeah, go the lovely country of Luxembourg (not to confuse with the Belgium province of the same name) :+1:

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