The Allies move north from Salerno and capture Naples

Italy changes sides and declares war on her recent ally, Germany

The Germans halt the Allied advance along the Gustav Line, which includes Monte Cassino

Mussolini becomes Hitler's puppet ruler of a new Fascist republic in north Italy

Colossus Mark I, the world's first computer, goes into decoding service at Bletchley Park in Britain

Commissioned by a church in Northampton to sculpt a Madonna and Child, British sculptor Henry Moore produces the first of his family groups

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Buchenwald, writes his Letters and Papers from Prison

The monastery and town of Monte Cassino are left in ruins after the Allies finally break through the German defences

The separate poems forming T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are brought together for the first time as a single volume, published in New York

Laurence Olivier directs and stars in a patriotic film of Henry V with stirring music by William Walton

US general Dwight Eisenhower is appointed to command the Allied invasion of Normandy

Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, is sentenced to death at the Verona trials and is executed

The RAF's first jet, the Gloster Meteor, flies with a Whittle engine

In Operation Shingle an Allied force lands at Anzio, on the west coast of Italy behind the German lines

The German siege of Leningrad is finally broken, after 900 days

After relieving Leningrad, the Russians begin to drive the Germans back on all fronts

After a campaign of four months the monastery at Monte Cassino is captured, by Polish troops

A multinational Allied force moves fast from Monte Cassino to capture Rome

The Allies cross the Channel on D-day for the Normandy invasion

British general Bernard Montgomery commands the Allied land forces in the Normandy Landing on D-day

Two pre-constructed harbours, known by the code name Mulberries, are towed across the Channel to Normandy

German troops massacre more than 600 civilians in the French village of Oradour

The first V-1 flying bombs (or doodlebugs) appear over London, numbering more than 2000 in two weeks

Adolf Hitler narrowly escapes death from a bomb placed by Claus von Stauffenberg

The Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter-bomber flies into combat, introducing the jet era in aerial warfare