A British party of Lieutenant Francis Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier, and canteen assistant Tommy Brown, boarded the slowly-sinking submarine after it had been damaged by depth charges and retrieved the Enigma codebooks and all the current settings for the U-boat network.

RAF Flight Officer T. D. Dean became the first Allied jet pilot to achieve a combat victory when he ‘tipped’ a Nazi German V-1 ‘doodlebug’ flying bomb with his Gloster Meteor jet fighter.

The move by Hitler effectively merged the offices of both the President and Chancellor into one role, and therefore completed what the Nazis referred to as Gleichschaltung (or ‘Co-ordination’) by establishing Hitler as both Germany’s head of state and head of government.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were concerned about the risk of the Spanish Civil War escalating into a European-wide conflict, so at first their support for the Nationalists was small-scale and consisted mainly of transporting existing Spanish troops from Morocco to the mainland. As the war progressed their involvement grew.