To provide people with additional history, I'm doing notes on the 55th anniversary of World War II. 1941 and 1942 were 55 years ago, and these years were the turning points of the war. As their distance from our lives grows, it's important to reflect upon how these days shaped the world in which we now live in. I wanted to complete these notes for the 50th anniversary of these events, but never had the opportunity. So I'm honoring this raincheck. The idea came from Colin Kirby.

November 15th, 1941...The German offensive at Moscow, involving two panzer armies, is paralyzed by -20F temperatures. The strain tells heavily on the 3rd SS Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division. This outfit, full of ethnic Germans (Those of German language and culture who lived outside the Reich's 1938 borders), are wounding themselves to avoid further service, and incidents of cowardice are rife. The division has suffered 8,993 casualties in four months, half its original strength. In the Baltic States, Reich Commissar Heinrich Lohse orders killings in progress of Jews to cease, saying "the manner in which they were performed could not be justified." Not moral, but economic reasons are his complaint: the destruction of much manpower that could be of use to the war economy. Is it intended, Lohse asks, that Jews are to be killed "irrespective of age, sex, or economic factors?" Alfried Rosenberg, the Minister for Eastern Territories in Berlin, fires back a swift answer: The demands of the economy "should be ignored." In Hong Kong, two battalions of Canadian infantry, the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers, come ashore to bolster the four British and Indian battalions already in place. The two Canadian outfits are poorly-trained. Some have never fired their weapons in two years of war, spent in Jamaica.

November 16th, 1941...German troops capture Kerch in Crimea. Exceptionally severe wintry conditions are reported in Russia, and German troops for the first time face a new enemy, white-clad Russian ski troops, trained for subzero weather, and equipped with new rapid-fire submachine guns.

November 17th, 1941...Luftwaffe Director-General for Equipment Ernst Udet commits suicide. Udet, a former flying ace with Hermann Goering and Manfred von Richtofen (the Red Baron) of World War I, Udet, who played a major role in the development of the Luftwaffe, has taken the heat of the blame (and deservedly so, historians later agree) for the Luftwaffe's failures over Britain, failure to develop new aircraft, and more failures in Russia. On his way back to the front from the funeral, the Luftwaffe's top ace, Werner Molders, crashes in fog and rain at Breslau and is killed. Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler phones his top aide, Reinhard Heydrich, in Prague, to discuss with him the "elimination of the Jews." That same day, eight Warsaw Jews are executed trying to leave the walled-off ghetto in search of food. One of the girls shot down is just short of her 18th birthday. A Jewish Warsaw diarist notes that during the execution, a few SS officers stood by, watching the scene, "calmly smoking cigarettes and behaving cynically throughout the execution." In Japan, the Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, declares that his foreign policy is aimed at establishing peace in Asia. In North Africa, British commandos led by Maj. Geoffrey Keyes, raid Erwin Rommel's headquarters in an attempt to kill or capture the Desert Fox. Unfortunately for the British, Rommel is inspecting the troops at the front. Keyes is killed in the raid, and receives a posthumous Victoria Cross. On the Eastern Front, German sentries who accidentally fall asleep at their post are found frozen to death in the morning. Russian soldiers, however, are better equipped and show higher morale. One soldier, Efim Diskin, the sole survivor of his anti-tank battery, and himself severely wounded, destroys five German tanks with his solitary gun. For this he receives the medal Hero of the Soviet Union.

November 18th, 1941...German troops attacking Venev, on the southern pincer drive to Moscow, are themselves counterattacked by a Siberian division and armored brigade. These forces bring something new to the battlefield: white fur coats for the Siberian infantry and the T-34 tank, whose American Christie suspension, sloping armor, and 76mm gun make it one of the most powerful in the world. The Germans fight back, but the extreme cold freezes their automatic weapons. The Germans panic. "This was the first time that such a thing had occurred during the Russian campaign, and it was a warning that the combat ability of our infantry was at an end, and that they should no longer be expected to perform difficult tasks." However, German General Franz Halder notes in his diary that "the Soviets had nothing left in the rear, and his predicament is probably even worse than ours." Indeed, the Soviet Army has lost 3 million PoWs to the Germans by this date. The condition of 7,000 of such PoWs is noted by the commander of a German artillery regiment who sees them in their camp that day. The windows of the building in which they are being held, he writes, "are several meters high and wide, and are without covering. There are no doors in the building. The prisoners who are thus kept practically in the open air are freezing to death by the hundreds daily -- in addition to those who die continuously of exhaustion."

The same day, in North Africa, British Commonwealth forces attack Erwin Rommel, seeking to break the siege of Tobruk. Leading the assault is the 2nd New Zealand Division. The British outflank the Germans on the left, but Rommel puts up his usual formidable defense.

The extent of the war is seen this day as HMAS Sydney, an Australian cruiser, encounters the disguised German merchant raider Kormoran off the Indian Ocean coast of Australia. Sydney and Kormoran exchange broadsides and the battle ends with both ships being sunk. However, all 645 officers and men of Sydney are drowned.

November 19th, 1941...In the Western Libyan Desert, the British 8th Army reaches Sidi Rezegh, struggling to relieve Tobruk. That besieged port, the best in Libya, is held by a mixed force of Polish, British, Czech, Indian, and Australian troops, under an Australian general.

November 20th, 1941...while the German offensive at Moscow begins to sputter, the German offensive in the Crimea and Ukraine rolls on, as the Germans capture Rostov-on-Don, a key industrial city less than 200 miles from the foothills of the oil-rich Caucasus. General Erich von Manstein, in his Order of the Day commending his victorious panzertruppen, urges his men to "have understanding of the necessity of a severe but just revenge on sub-human Jews." The same day, Dr. Fritze Mennecke, an expert on the Nazis' euthanasia campaign on mentally retarded people, reports that experiments with poison gas as a means of killing people are nearing their operational stage. In North Africa, British and German tank units slug it out around Sidi Rezegh in a classic tank duel. British plans to break the besieged garrison out of Tobruk are suspended, as the battle hangs in the balance. Winston Churchill, worried about Asia, wires Franklin D. Roosevelt, "I am not very hopeful, and we must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon.: