The Battle of Damascus began on this day in 1941.
The battle pitted Allied forces, lead by Indian troops on the ground, but including various Commonwealth countries and Free French forces against Vichy French and colonial Syrian troops.
The battle ran until June 21 and resulted in the surrender of the Vichy French administration to the Allies, thereby closing an Axis rear door in North Africa.
Germany and Turkey signed a treaty of friendship.
The treaty closed the door to the possibility, in German minds, of the Allies wooing Turkey, which was unlikely in the first place. Turkey, for its part, was on a dedicated path of neutrality.
The treaty would benefit both Germany and Turkey, with the Turks benefitting in some unexpected ways. The Germans received a guaranteed supply of chromite from turkey through the treaty, putting the Turks basically in the same position as the Swedes in buying neutrality through raw materials, although in both instances the countries would have been a handful for the Germans to attack if they'd thought it necessary. Indeed, in Turkey's situation the country was far more valuable to Nazi Germany as a neutral than as a combatant, as that closed the door to the British to the south who, as can be seen from the above, were defeating the Vichy French in Syria and who had already defeated an attempt at fascism in Iraq. Unbeknownst to the Turks, the treat also shortened German lines, already pretty stretched, for Operation Barbarossa, which was just about to commence.
The Turks received cash, for chromite, but they also received a large guaranteed supply of arms which, in the dangerous world in which they were living, were something they very much needed. Germany actually took advantage of this provision to supply the Turks with a large supply of unfinished Polish arms, which were of very high quality. Polish small arms were partially based on German designs and the Germans themselves had put them to use in their own armed forces, but Poland had used "small ring" Mausers rather than the "large ring" ones used by the Germans which made finishing them off unattractive to the Germans. This was not the case for the Turks.
The treaty did not preclude other nations, including belligerents, from trading with Turkey and the treaty would inspire a chromite buying effort on the part of the Allies.
The treaty's term was ten years, but the Turks would terminate the agreement in 1944, seeing which way the war was going, and they declared war on Germany on February 23, 1945. Their declaration did not mean that they contributed troops in the final months of the war but can be seen as a means of attempting to protect themselves against a potential Soviet incursion into their territory.
Joe Louis knocked out Billy Conn in a heavyweight boxing match.
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