Travelling across the mountains, the two British commandos reach the power station and explode it. Enroute back to the French sub, they run into a large German force, and are taken prisoner. They are subsequently shot by the Gestapo, under the notorious "Igel" Order from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, which orders executions for British commandos, in violation of the Geneva Convention.

In Stalingrad, the battle for the grain elevator rages on. "The Russians are firing on all sides," writes a German officer. "We stay in our cellar; you can't go out into the street. Sergeant-Major Nuschke was killed today running across a street. Poor fellow, he's got three children."

"September 20 arrived," writes a Soviet Sailor in the elevator. "At noon 12 enemy tanks came up from the south and west. We had already run out of ammunition for our anti-tank rifles, and we had not grenades left. The tanks approached the elevator from two sides and began to fire at our garrison at point-blank range. But no one flinched. Our machine guns and tommy guns continued to fire at the enemy's infantry, preventing them from entering the elevator. Then a Maxim, together with a gunner, was blown up by a shell, and the casing of the second Maxim was hit by shrapnel, bending the barrel. We were left with one light machine gun.

"The explosions were shattering the concrete; the grain was in flames. We could not see one another for dust and smoke, but we cheered one another with shouts.

"German tommy-gunners appeared from behind the tanks. There were about 150-200 of them. They attacked very cautiously, throwing grenades in front of them. We were able to catch some of the grenades and throw them back.

"Fighting flared up inside the building. We sensed and heard the enemy soldiers' breath and footsteps, but we could not see them in the smoke. We fired at sound."

That evening, the Soviets squeeze their way out of the grain elevator.

Meanwhile, other Soviet troops renew their offensive, with some avail. Late that night, an armored brigade breaks through the Germans, and links up with Chuikov's 62nd Army.

The axe falls on Guadalcanal for Marine Col. Capers James, the 1st Marine Division's chief of staff and Col. Leroy Hunt, commander of 5th Marine Regiment. Both are close friends of Maj. Gen. Archibald Vandegrift, 1st Division's commander, but he plays no favorites in an effort to reduce the division's inefficiencies. Neither have shown aggressive spirit, so they are sacked, along with other colonels and majors found lacking.

Vandegrift also creates a unit of Scout-Snipers, drawing three men from each company. They function as guides, intelligence patrols, and snipers.

Rear Adm. Aubrey Fitch replaces Rear Adm. John McCain as head of South Pacific Air Forces, which causes a lull in the air campaign as both sides repair damaged equipment. The Japanese have 45 long-range Zeros at Rabaul, 26 short-range Zeros, and 31 Betty bombers. Guadalcanal defends itself with 36 F4Fs, 25 SBDs, 7 TBF Avengers, and 3 P-400s.

That evening, four Japanese destroyers, each towing a barge, head south to Guadalcanal. The barges are loaded with food and ammunition. Seven Navy and three Marine SBDs jump them, and damage Shikinami. The aerial harassment forces the destroyers to return home with one-third of their supply load.

September 21st, 1942...In Burma, where monsoons rule, the British go on the offensive with the 14th Indian Division advancing in the Arakan, from Chittagong via Cox's Bazar down the Mayu peninsula. The intention is to seize the peninsula, then jump from there to Akyab Island and grab Japanese airfields. Lord Wavell's troops are not ready for jungle warfare, and he lacks the seaborne component planned for this operation. He launches it anyway, even though the Arakan "is not fit to fight in."

Most of southern Stalingrad is now in German hands, except for the vast grain elevator, held by 30 Guards and 18 Sailors. Soviet Sailors used as infantry win a tremendous reputation with friend and foe alike for their tenacity, as those at Stalingrad are Arctic Fleet veterans.

The fighting there is brutal, as the Soviets are running out of food, water, and ammunition.

In Stalingrad's center, German troops try to break through to the left flank of the Tsaritsa River, but are slowed by heavy Soviet artillery fire.

The Japanese try again with a supply destroyer run at Guadalcanal, and this time the destroyer Kagero is damaged. Again one-third of the supplies come home. The Imperial Navy doesn't want to play this game, but Guadalcanal must be reinforced, this time with the 4th Infantry Regiment.

September 22nd, 1942...Back in Madagascar, where the campaign has been on hold for a few months, East African troops advance again, reaching Mahitsy, a few miles from Tananarive. The Vichy French defenders declare the capital an open city, and flee.

In Stalingrad, a German officer writes, "Russian resistance in the grain elevator has been broken. Our troops are advancing towards the Volga. We found about forty Russians dead in the elevator building. Half of them were wearing naval uniform -- sea devils. One prisoner was captured, seriously wounded, who can't speak, or is shamming."

The grain elevator finally falls. The southern part of Stalingrad is in German hands. The whole of 62nd Army's rear is open to German fire.

The Soviets can only use the landing stages in the north of the city at night. General Batyuk's Siberian division is sent in to push the Germans away from the central landing stage. Batyuk hasn't had much combat experience. Chuikov sends for Batyuk and gives him a long harangue on street fighting.

Batyuk interrupts his boss. He has actually studied the battle, and is aware of the situation. "I've come to fight, not parade. My regiments have Siberians in them."

Chuikov lets Batyuk get on with the job. The Siberians cross the river.

September 23rd, 1942...The 1st/1st Nyasaland King's African Rifles enter Tananarive in trucks, and local citizens greet them with flowers and applause. The East Africans move through the city and continue to advance. The French adopt a tactic of roadblocks where the defenders destroy the lead British vehicle, then surrender, killing one or two British without much risk to themselves, preserving a sort of military honor.

The Germans launch yet another offensive in the Caucasus, Operation Attica, hoping to drive along the Black Sea shore through Tuapse, to Sochi, Suchumi, and Batum. The Soviets stop the Germans cold.

At 10 a.m., in Stalingrad, Batyuk's division attacks. The Germans cannot be dislodged, but Paulus's offensive is stalled. 62nd Army is split in two, but still in business.

The same day, a dour, corpulent brigadier general of the US Army Corps of Engineers is summoned to the War Department. The general is asked what he knows of atomic theory. The general knows about atoms being split.

That's been accomplished, the general is told. Now the general is to supervise a program that will handle every aspect, from construction to final delivery, of an "atomic device."

The general asks what his levels of priority and funding are. He is told neither are a problem. Anything he wants is his for the asking. All he has to do is maintain strictest secrecy. The general's name: Leslie R. Groves. The program's codename: "Manhattan Project."

Back on Guadalcanal, two Japanese officers complete a three- day inspection trip and fire off a radio appreciation of the situation to Rabaul. After whining about Guadalcanal's lack of decent billets and a good officers' club, they report that Maj. Gen. Kiyotaki Kawaguchi is in bad shape, his men exhausted and starving, barely holding their own. Kawaguchi needs help -- 150 mm howitzers to shell Henderson Field, and more troops.

September 24th, 1942...2 NZ Division, in Egypt, finally gets some help from the British, who assign 9 Armoured Brigade under Brig. John Currie to support the division, and two artillery regiments. 9 Brigade is a new outfit, composed of the 3rd Hussars, the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, and the Royal Warwickshire Yeomanry, equipped with Crusader tanks and the latest M-4 Shermans, something else new in war.

3rd Hussars has fought alongside the New Zealanders before, in antique Mark VI tanks in Crete. Maj. Gen. Bernard Freyberg orders the brigade and infantry to parade and dine together to build esprit de corps. 9 Brigade also takes part in training exercises with 5 and 6 NZ Brigades to build operational cohesion. Tanks and infantry must work together, Montgomery says.

At "Werewolf" at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, Adolf Hitler is displeased with the 6th Army's offensive. Summer has turned to fall and the Soviets are not defeated. As usual, failure leads to finger-pointing and blame-throwing, and in the Third Reich, that means the axe.

Hitler fires two panzer corps commanders, Von Wietersheim of 14th Panzer Corps and von Schwedler of 4th Panzer Corps. Wietersheim earns his ticket to the retired list for using his tanks to hold open the Rynok corridor from the Don to the Volga, a task better suited to infantry. Von Schwedler is fired for the "defeatist" suggestion that the concentration of such strong forces at the tip of a salient with vulnerable flanks is dangerous for the 6th Army.

After these two generals are sacked, Hitler fires his Chief of General Staff at Army High Command (OKH), Col. Gen. Franz Halder. He winds up the war in a concentration camp for being linked to the plots to kill Hitler and later assists American historians with compiling German military records.

The new OKH head is Col. Gen. Kurt Zeitzler, a logistics specialist and a pliable yes-man.

Last to get the axe is Field Marshal List, boss of Army Group South, whose troops are stalled in the Caucasus, unable to take the oilfields. Their job has been to take Batum, by denying the Soviet Black Sea Fleet its last home, seizing the oilwells, and securing the Crimea (which would impress neutral Turkey).

Col. Gen. Alfried Jodl, Hitler's chief of staff, has gone to inspect List's operation, and reports "List had acted exactly in conformity with the Fuhrer's orders, but the Russian resistance was callow strong everywhere, supported by a most difficult terrain."

The Fuhrer reacts with one of his temper tantrums, denouncing various and sundry enemies. After that he does not leave his hut, even for daily reports on the military situation. Everything has to be given to him through a few aides, including the stocky, bullish, omnipresent Reichsleiter Martin Bormann. Hitler refuses to shake hands with Wehrmacht generals, and puts out the word that Jodl will be fired. His replacement will be Friedrich Paulus, head of the 6th Army, currently attacking Stalingrad. As soon as Paulus grabs the city, the cushy slot at Vinnitsa is his.

This news is passed on by Col. Gen. Alfred Schmundt to Paulus at the Stalingrad front, along with the message that Paulus had better take the city. Paulus answers that he is running short on men and ammunition, and Soviet resistance is heavy. 6th Army is nearly exhausted.

Schmundt tells Paulus to get his act together and take the city. Paulus orders up another offensive.

Meanwhile, the Soviets are husbanding their reserves, feeding them in driblets to Chuikov and Yeremenko. The bulk of the Soviet forces mass on the 6th Army's flanks, against the hapless Rumanians. To ease the task for Soviet generals (and historians) Stalin renames Stalingrad the Don Front and puts it under Lt. Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky. Southeast Front is re- named Stalingrad Front and Yeremenko remains in command. A new Southwest Front under Lt. Gen. Nikolai Vatutin is created, to be on Rokossovsky's right.

Rokossovsky's force, the right flank at Stalingrad, faces the 3rd Rumanian and 8th Italian Armies, on the north. Rokossovsky is a new face in the war, a fiery general who is living under a sentence of death from the 1937-38 purge trials. The sentence, in fact, is still in place. It has just been temporarily remitted until the end of the war.

Soviet success on the bold countermove depends on 62nd Army's ability to hold Stalingrad and keep Paulus tied down.

600 Soviet partisans, some dressed in German uniforms and using heavy artillery, burn down the town of Ryabchichi, on the Smolensk-Bryansk railway and highway.

Back in Berlin, Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop signs off an order to all German Embassies throughout the world "to hurry up as much as possible the evacuation of Jews from the various countries in Europe."

Ribbentrop's deputy, Martin Luther (that's his name) sends follow-up orders to the embassies in Bulgaria, Denmark, and Hungary, ordering negotiations to begin "with the object of starting the evacuation of the Jews of those countries."

At Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, that policy is being put into action: of 6,000 persons deported in three trains that week, all are killed. Five death camps are working at flat-out speed to produce charred corpses: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Maly Trostenets. At Auschwitz, half the new arrivals are going to slave labor at Krupp plants, the other half straight to gas chambers.

The Japanese try again at Guadalcanal, and two destroyers are damaged. The Japanese cancel "Rat Express" runs for the rest of September. Now the Imperial Army is unhappy.

The Japanese have withdrawn west across the Matanikau River, so Vandegrift votes to attack, using his new outfit, the 7th Marines. The commander of 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, is a legend, Lt. Col. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, 44, who has a "chin like a bulldozer blade."

Puller, a Virginian, is the very model of a Marine officer, and will go on to win an unprecedented five Navy Crosses in World War II and Korea.

His men surprise a Japanese bivouac around a rice fire on Mount Austen's northwest slope. The Marines attack and drive off the enemy until game is called due to darkness. The Marines lose seven dead and 25 wounded. Puller asks for another battalion, and gets 2nd/5th Marines.

September 25th, 1942...The US reports the building of 488 merchant ships in 12 months.

The RAF makes a low-level daylight raid on Oslo, Norway, seeking to destroy Gestapo headquarters, during a Nazi Party rally. The aim is to destroy Norwegian Resistance records in German filing cabinets in the building and demonstrate Allied power. The building itself is not hit, and in the surrounding buildings four people were killed. There is, however, panic among the Nazis, many of whom flee the city, and their meeting ends in chaos.

The 6th Army attacks in Stalingrad, using new engineer and flamethrower detachments. German troops, worn by battle, are alternating between frenzy and depression. Some new and green German troops yell across streets to Soviet troops, "Russ! Tomorrow bang-bang!" All that does is warn the Soviets about the upcoming attack.

"The days were shortening again, you could definitely sense it," writes a German officer. "And in the mornings, the air was quite cool. Were we really going to have to fight through another of those dreadful winters? I think that was behind our efforts. Many of us felt that it was worth anything, at any price, if we could get it over before the winter."

Gains and losses are now being measured in yards, and snipers, tommy guns, and hand grenades reign supreme. So do crowbars, picks, and explosives. 62nd Army is now a highly competent force of street fighters, reinforced by Gen. Smekhotvorov's 193rd Infantry Division.

Today's German attack features three infantry and two panzer divisions. The Germans attack by day, the Soviets counterattack by night.

"Stalingrad is hell on earth," a German NCO writes. "It is Verdun, bloody Verdun, with new weapons. We attack every day. If we capture 20 yards in the morning the Russians throw us back again in the evening."

Puller moves on through steamy Guadalcanal jungles, pursuing the withdrawing enemy along a trail called the Maizuru Road.

September 26th, 1942...USS Washington returns to Tongatabu in Tonga and liberty call is sounded at 1 p.m. Queen Salote protects her women's virtue by ordering all the eligible females into the royal compound. American Sailors are warned not to contribute to wartime inflation by paying an exorbitant $1 for souvenirs. "The Queen's grounds are restricted and off-limits," read the Orders of the Day, "It is forbidden to gallop horses along the surfaced roads."

While the world's attention is focussed on Alamein, Stalingrad, and Guadalcanal, war rages in other areas, too. Leningrad is one of them. Operation Sinyavino, an attempt to break the siege, has been in progress for a month, and is rapidly failing. Soviet Supreme Headquarters today gives up on the offensive and orders both Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts to return to their start lines.

The Germans have lost 60,000 casualties, 200 tanks, 200 artillery pieces, 400 mortars, 730 machine guns, and 260 aircraft. The Soviets are cagey about their losses. But Leningrad remains besieged.

At Stalingrad, Chuikov reminds his officers in Army Order No. 166, "I again caution all unit and formation commanders not to execute combat operations with entire units such as companies and battalions. The offensive should be organized mainly on a small-group basis, with automatic weapons, hand grenades, bottles of inflammable mixture and anti-tank rifles."

He also has something new to throw at the Germans, the "Katyusha" rocket launcher, the replacement for all the artillery lost in 1941. It consists of a truck (often a Lend-Lease Dodge or Studebaker) with rockets mounted on top. Each B-13 launcher is capable of delivering a salvo of more than 4 tons of explosives into a 10-acre area in seven to 10 seconds.

And Chuikov is finally getting help from the Soviet Air Force's 8th Air Army, whose 1,400 aircraft include the new Yak-9 and La-5 fighters, far superior to earlier I-16s and Lagg-3s. The Soviets train heavily in night flying and experiment with radio control of air forces to marshal airpower from the front.

SS Lt. Gen. August Frank keeps his typists busy with a memo to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, on "property of the evacuated Jews." Foreign currency, jewelry, precious stones, pearls, and "gold from teeth" are to go to the SS for "immediate delivery" to the Reichsbank. Smaller personal items, such as clocks, wallets, and purses, are to be cleaned, "evaluated" and "delivered quickly" to frontline troops.

The troops will be able to buy these small items, although gold watches go exclusively to the SS. Underwear and footwear will to be given mainly to ethnic Germans. Women's clothing, including shoes, as well as children's clothing, are to be sold to these same folks.

Frank's list is quite detailed, including quilts, woollen blankets, earflaps, thermos flasks, combs, table knives, forks, spoons, and knapsacks, as well as sheets, pillows, towels, and tablecloths. All go to ethnic Germans. Spectacles and eyeglasses go to the Medical Officer of the Wehrmacht. Gold frames go to the SS. So do "valuable furs."

Frank's list even says, "one pair of men's used trousers, three marks; one woollen blanket, six marks etc. It is to be strictly observed that the Jewish Star is removed from all garments and outer garments which are to be delivered." And all items should be searched "for hidden valuables sewn in."

In two weeks, 50 kilograms of dental gold thus accumulated goes to the SS for its own dental needs. SS officers commence to build numbered Swiss bank accounts and open safety deposit boxes filled with gold, as a hedge against the day of reckoning.

The Imperial Japanese Army asks the Navy to try again to re- supply Guadalcanal with further "Rat Express" and "Ant Express" movements, plus a major convoy.

Puller reaches the Matanikau and moves downstream (north) and runs into the Japanese at 11:25 a.m. The Japanese shell Puller with mortar fire, and he cannot get across the river at One-Log Bridge. (The name is self-explanatory)