Timeline of World War II (1941) - July 1941

July 1941

• 1: General Auchinleck takes over from General Wavell in North Africa.
  : The British win the Battle of Palmyra against the French in the middle east.
  : All American men over 21 are required to register for the draft.
  : German troops occupy Latvia's capital, Riga, on the way to Leningrad.
• 3: Stalin announces a "scorched earth policy".
  : The United States of America elevates its General Headquarters, United States Army in order to command and plan for military operations within the Zone Of The Interior.
  : Italian General Pietro Gazzera surrenders the remnants of his forces in the Jimma area.
  : British troops employ brave and risky flanking tactics to win the Battle of Deir ez-Zor.
• 4: Mass murder of Polish scientists and writers, committed by German troops in captured Polish city of Lwów.
• 5: British government rules out possibility of negotiated peace.
  : British torpedo planes sink an Italian destroyer at Tobruk; on the 20th, two more are sunk.
  : German troops reach the Dnieper River.
• 7: British and Canadian troops in Iceland are replaced by Americans.
• 8: Yugoslavia, a country formed by the Versailles treaty, is dissolved by the Axis into its component parts; especially important will be Croatia, with a pro-Axis government.
  : The German armies isolate Leningrad from the rest of Soviet Union.
  : Britain and the USSR sign a mutual defence agreement, promising not to sign any form of separate peace agreement with Germany.
• 9: Vitebsk (Belarus) is captured; this opens the battle of Smolensk, an important communications centre, considered by the German high command to be "the gateway to Moscow."
• 10: Guderian's Panzers take Minsk; the Germans advance farther into the Ukraine.
  :Units of the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia begin to arrive. A legion from the Independent State of Croatia is part of the Italian corps.
• 12: The Vichy French surrender in Syria.
  : Assistant pact signed between the United Kingdom and the USSR.
• 13: Montenegro starts an uprising against the Axis Powers shortly after the Royalists in Serbia begin theirs. Questionable Communist plans instigate parallel uprising and civil war.
• 15: The Red Army start a counter-attack near Leningrad.
  : Argentia naval air base is set up in Newfoundland; it will prove an important transfer station for the Allies for some years.
• 16: German Panzers under Guderian reach Smolensk, increasing the risk to Moscow.
• 17: The air attacks on Malta continue.
• 19: The "V-sign", displayed most notably by Churchill, is unofficially adopted as the Allied signal, along with the motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
• 21: The Luftwaffe strikes heavily at Moscow.
• 26: In response to the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States.
• 28: Japanese troops occupy southern French Indochina. The Vichy French colonial government is allowed by the Japanese to continue to administer Vietnam. French repression continues. The Vichy French also agree to the occupation by the Japanese of bases in Indochina.
  : The Germans push against Smolensk, and in the meantime solidify their presence in the Baltic states; native Jews are being exterminated.
• 31: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring, orders SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."
  : The Japanese naval ministry accuses the United States of intruding into their territorial waters at Sukumo Bay, and then fleeing. No evidence is offered to prove this allegation.
  : Lewis B. Hershey succeeds Clarence Dykstra as Director of the Selective Service System in the United States.