Thursday, July 9, 1942. Hitler splits his forces.

Hitler split his forces by ordering that Army Group South be so divided, with Group A to seize Rostov-on Don and continue into the Caucasus while Group B was to drive through Stalingrad and on to Astrakhan, a city on the Volga near the Caspian Sea.

Stalin authorized strategic withdrawals in the face of advancing Axis forces, the first time this had been done by the Soviet dictator.

To at least a certain extent, the German actions at this point reflected the original thinking behind Barbarossa.  The Germans thought themselves on the verge of capturing the Caucasian oilfield which they needed, to their thinking, to defeat the British.  They had also taken the Soviet grain belt as well.  Beyond the Volga was largely tractless wilderness, in their view, and they didn't fully conceive of the war really extending beyond that point.

The Soviets, of course, didn't regard being driven east of the Volga as defeat.

Sarah Sundin notes the following on her blog:

Today in World War II History—July 9, 1942: US Navy assigns Lt. Cdr. Samuel Eliot Morison the task of writing the US naval history of WWII, which will run to 15 volumes.

Morison was a professional and academic historian, with a profession at Harvard, where he eccentrically became the last professor to arrive at the school on horseback.  His position commenced before World War One, in 1915, but he temporarily left to enlist in the U.S. Army as a private during the war.  Following the war, he served on the Baltic Commission of the Paris Peace talks.  He then returned to Harvard.

He did not enter the Navy until 1942, in which he was asked to take on the role as Naval historian by Franklin Roosevelt.  In his role, he was active in witnessing combat.  His history of the Navy during the war would be fifteen volumes in length.  He retired from the Navy in 1950, and was promoted to the rank of  Rear Admiral.  He retired from Harvard in 1955 and died in 1976.

Of minor note, Samuel Eliot Morison (one "r") is sometimes confused with Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was a career combat officer in the Navy and who was the father of famed rock star, Jim Morrison.

Morison's history of the Navy is regarded as an authentically important and significant work of history.

German Ju88s damage PQ17's El Capitan and the SS Hoosier, but the first ships of the embattled convoy start pulling into Archangel.  At the same time, Convoy WP 183 comes under heavy attack by German torpedo boats, which sink six ships of the convoy.  German aircraft sink an additional ship.

It's often claimed that torpedo boats didn't live up to their promise during the Second World War, but this event certainly was a successful one for them.

In the Baltic, Soviet submarine S-7 sank Swedish coast freighters ten miles off the Swedish coast, sinking one.  It was carrying coal from Germany to Sweden.

In a part of the war that had grown somewhat quiet, Finns counterattacked a Soviet beached on Someri in the Gulf of Finland and defeated the Soviet invasion force.