July 12th, 1940 (FRIDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: RAF Bomber Command: 4 Group (Whitley). Bombing - Krupps Works, Kiel and fuel targets at Emden.10 Sqn. Six aircraft. Bad weather. One returned early, two bombed.
51 Sqn. Six aircraft. Bad weather. Two bombed.
102 Sqn. Ten aircraft to Emden. All bombed. Opposition heavy. One hit by Flak and ditched 38 miles from Cromer, crew rescued.
Luftwaffe raiders bomb Wales, Scotland and the south-west of England.
GREECE: Italian bombers hit two Greek naval vessels at Crete.
CANADA: Corvettes HMCS Rimouski and Pictou laid down.
U.S.A.: The U.S. passenger liner SS Manhattan, with 800 American citizens aboard, departs Lisbon, Portugal, for New York City.
Rufus Robinson and Earl Cooley jumped out of a Travelair plane to fight the a forest fire in Idaho's Nez Oerce national Forest. They are the first smoke-jumpers.
ATLANTIC OCEAN:
At 0206, the unescorted Ia was torpedoed by U-99 and sunk at 0248 by a coup de grāce.
At 2231, U-99 missed the Merisaar with one torpedo, surfaced and stopped the ship with 20-mm gunfire across the bow. The crew abandoned ship and the U-boat tried to sink the ship with another torpedo at 2350, but also missed due to the rough seas. The use of the deck gun was also not possible, so Kretschmer told the crew to reboard their vessel and ordered them to set course directly for Bordeaux. On 15 July, Merisaar was bombed and sunk by a German aircraft south of Queenstown, Ireland.