WW2 War Diary for Tuesday, July 27, 1943:
Air War
Germany – OPERATION GOMORRHA: FIRE STORM ENGULFS HAMBURG. Numerous major fires started 3 nights earlier are stoked up by renewed bombing by 722 RAF bombers (17 lost; 2,312t bombs) into single raging inferno.
Sea War
Pacific – Battle of the Pips: US battleships Mississippi and Idaho engage imaginary ‘Japanese battleships’, spotted on radar near Aleutians (the only other vessels in the area are Japanese submarines).
Home Fronts
Britain: Churchill declares in the Commons that if new Italian Government does not surrender ‘Italy will be seared and scarred and blackened from one end to the other.’