May 2, 1941. The Anglo Iraqi War Commences

British troops wearing pith helmets and carrying SMLEs outside of Baghdad, 1941.

On this day in 1941, fighting between Iraqi insurgents who had recently staged a coup and taken over the country, and the British, started in earnest.  What is sometimes called the Anglo Iraqi War commenced on this day with British bombing raids on Iraqi air assets.  

Today in World War II History—May 2, 1941

War breaks out in Iraq

The entire Iraq episode would prove to be a sort of sideshow in the war, but perhaps one that should have gathered more attention at the time as it showed the practical limits of Axis' power.  Iraqi plotters had figured that the British were proving to be down and out.  In turn, the British would prove to have ample forces to deal with Iraq, even if those forces often looked more like they were out of World War One than World War Two.  The Axis, on the other hand, proved basically incapable of aiding their would be Iraqi allies.

The war would last until May 31, with the British, as noted, emerging victorious.

Romania formed a bureaucratic organization to expropriate Jewish property from Romanian Jews and to redistribute it to non Jewish Romanians.  Oppression of the Jews was a feature of the Romanian fascist state that ran the country until near the end of World War Two but it was home grown, rather than imported from the Nazis, as it was in some other nations. Romania, of course, was a German ally for most of the war.

German functionaries met on this day in 1941 to make economic plans for the occupation of the Soviet Union.  Those plans included seizure of food resources for importation into Germany with the resulting acknowledged starvation of large numbers of Soviet citizens.

The FCC took steps to start the licensing of the first ten commercial television stations in the U.S.