August 31st, 1940 (SATURDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM:
RAF Bomber Command: 4 Group (Whitley). Bombing - oil plant at Wesseling.
10 Sqn. Six aircraft. All bombed primary.
Battle of Britain:
RAF Fighter Command: Very heavy bombing of airfields (Detling, Eastchurch,
Croydon and sector stations at Biggin Hill, Hornchurch (twice) and Debden). Some
close due to unserviceability. Radar stations also attacked.
At night Merseyside
is heavily attacked as well as the Midlands.
Vital airfields in the south-east including Biggin Hill, Lympne, Manston and
Hawkinge, are bombed out of action. Fighter Command loses 39 planes, its
greatest daily loss so far.
London: Berlin and London came under attack last night. One the RAF bomber
pilots reported: "When we arrived we found the target well on fire. We
could see it when we were 25 minutes flying time away. We put our stick of bombs
down just to the left of this big fire. Then four more fires started. Altogether
we were cruising around over Berlin for about half an hour.
Losses: Luftwaffe, 41; RAF 39.
An Anglo-Free French task force under Admiral Cunningham and General DeGaulle departs Liverpool for Dakar, French West Africa.
RN codes are changed and for the first time
operational signals are secure from German interception and decoding. It
will be three years before the convoy codes are made safe from the German
B-Service.
NORTH SEA:
Destroyers sail to lay mines off the Dutch coast.
The minelayers were from the 20th Destroyer Flotilla
consisting of the destroyers HMS Express, HMS Esk, HMS Icarus, HMS Intrepid
and HMS Ivanhoe sailed from Immingham on a minelaying mission off the Dutch
coast. The minelayers were escorted by the 5th Destroyer Flotilla consisted
of the destroyers HMS Kelvin, HMS Jupiter and HMS Vortigern. Aerial
reconnaissance detected a German force and the ships of the 20th and 5th DF
were ordered to intercept, believing wrongly that the German ships were part
of an invasion force. HMS Express struck a mine and was badly damaged, HMS
Esk went to her assistance and hit mine and sank immediately, HMS Ivanhoe
also went to her assistance and hit a mine and was badly damaged, so much so
she had to be sunk by HMS Kelvin. HMS Express was towed back to hull and
took 13 months to repair.
The French colonies of French Equatorial Africa, Cameroon, and Tahiti join with Free France.
GERMANY:
Berlin: Brushing aside the misgivings of his generals and admirals, Hitler has
given orders for Operation Sealion, the invasion of England, to go ahead. Göring
has promised to destroy the fighter defences in the south of England in
four days and the rest of the RAF in two or three weeks. So the Fuhrer says that
he will decide on the invasion date in the next fortnight.
The transfer of shipping to the Channel ports is beginning, and plans for a
feint attack against the east coast of Britain have been made. But Hitler has
still not resolved a bitter dispute between the army and navy over the
deployment of the invasion force.
The army has planned a landing on a 200-mile front from Ramsgate to Lyme Regis,
throwing into action 1,722 barges, 1,161 motor boats, 470 tugs and 155
transports. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder says that it is quite impossible for his
navy to protect such a vast and widely dispersed force. He has told Hitler that
the navy would risk having all its ships sunk by the British.
Raeder, who was made a Grand Admiral by Hitler on 1 April 1939, says that the
army should concentrate on a narrow front between Folkestone and Eastbourne,
"Complete suicide," General Halder, the chief of staff, responded
furiously. The British would hit them with overwhelming force. "I might
just as well put the troops through a sausage machine."
During a strategy meeting at Hitler's Obersalzburg retreat, Hitler asked Raeder
to give his opinion. "All things considered," Raeder said, "the
best time for the operation would be May 1941." This certainly was not the
answer the Fuhrer wanted. By next year the British would have had even longer to
prepare plans to counter an invasion, the British Army would have recovered from
its Dunkirk defeat, and the German Kriegsmarine would still not be able to
challenge the Royal Navy.
U-95 commissioned.
CANADA: Corvette HMCS Prescott laid down.
Corvette HMCS Napanee launched.
U.S.A.: The US calls 60,000 National Guardsmen into active service. The first units will be inducted into Federal service on 16 September.
In the US, Pennsylvania-Central Airlines DC-3-313, msn 2188, registered NC21789, crashes near Lovettsville, Virginia during an electrical storm. All 23 people aboard the DC-3 are killed. U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota was one of the passengers. The aircraft, Flight 19 from Washington, DC to Detroit, Michigan, was flying through a thunderstorm in turbulence when the it nosed over and plunged to earth. The cause of the accident was listed as disabling of the pilots by a severe lightning discharge in the immediate neighborhood of the airplane, with resulting loss of control.
MERCHANT SHIPPING WAR: Losses 45 ships of 163,000
tons.
ATLANTIC OCEAN:
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Long range Focke Wulf
Kondors start patrols off the coast of Ireland from a base near Bordeaux. As
well as spotting for U-boats they attack and sink many ships, and continue to be
a major threat until the introduction of ship-borne aircraft in late 1941 starts
to counteract them.
RN codes are changed and for the first time operational signals are secure from
German interception and decoding. It will be three years before the convoy codes
are made safe from the German B-Service.
Losses (Atlantic): 39 ships of 190,000 tons, 2 armed merchant cruisers and 1
sloop.
1 U-boat
U-38 sank SS Har Zion in Convoy OB-205.
U-46 sank SS Ville de Hasselt.
U-60 damaged SS Volendham in Convoy OB-205.