Eight New Zealand passengers are among those drowned or killed when the passenger steamer Chakdina is torpedoed off Tobruk. At 3 a.m., Moscow time, a massive blizzard whacks the German frontline at Moscow. The Nazi troops, newspapers stuffed in their boots to keep them warm, are barely able to stand.
Snow is a yard thick.
88 Soviet divisions storm into 67 German divisions along a 500-mile front. German troops have to light fires in their pits under tanks for as much as four hours to thaw them out sufficiently to go into action. The Soviet pressure is inexorable. In one day, the Nazis retreat 11 miles from Moscow. The scenes of shivering Germans staggering back in the snow resemble Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812.