World War II Database

• Home
• » Events
• » WW2 Timeline
• » 18 May 1942

• The Royal Navy rejected American request for one of the three British carriers in the Indian Ocean to serve in the Southwest Pacific. ww2dbase [CPC]
• Most of the retreating troops of BURCORPS reached India. ww2dbase [Invasion of Burma | CPC]
• German submarine U-162 sank Norwegian tanker Beth (sailing in service of the British Royal Fleet Auxiliary force) off Barbados at 0210 hours. U-558 sank Dutch ship Fauna 25 miles northwest of British North Caicos island at 0615 hours. German submarine U-156 sank American ship Quaker City 460 miles east of Martinique at 1018 hours; 10 were killed, 29 survived. At 1852 hours, U-156 fired what would be the first of four torpedoes at British tanker San Eliseo between this evening and the next morning as she unsuccessfully chased the tanker. ww2dbase [Second Happy Time | CPC]
• German submarine U-125 sank US tanker Mercury Sun in the Caribbean Sea at 0606 hours. At 2150 hours, U-125 struck again, sinking US ship William J. Salman. ww2dbase [Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico Campaigns | CPC]
• Soviet submarine ShCh-205 sank Turkish ship Duatepe with torpedoes and schooner Kaynardzha with the deck gun 10 miles off Bulgaria; these ships were suspected of smuggling weapons to southern Ukraine for German forces. ww2dbase [ShCh-205 | CPC]
• British submarine HMS Turbulent arrived in the Gulf of Sirte north of Libya in the early hours of the day. At 0510 hours, 50 miles northwest of Benghazi, she spotted and sank Italian ship Bolsena. ww2dbase [CPC]
• Sydir Kovpak was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for the first time. ww2dbase [Sydir Kovpak | CPC]

• Leonardo da Vinci sighted two corvettes in the Atlantic Ocean at 1320 hours, but would lose contact after dusk. ww2dbase [Leonardo da Vinci | Second Happy Time | CPC]

• Australian 14th Militia Brigade arrived at Port Moresby, British Territory of Papua on New Guinea island. ww2dbase [New Guinea-Papua Campaign, Phase 2 | Port Moresby | CPC]

• RAF bombers conducted a raid on Mannheim, Germany. ww2dbase [Bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and Other Cities | Mannheim, Baden | TH]
• Prinz Eugen arrived at Kiel, Germany to receive a new stern, which was destroyed on 23 Feb by a torpedo from HMS Trident. ww2dbase [Prinz Eugen | Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein | CPC]

• At Pearl Harbor, US Territory of Hawaii, Edwin Layton informed Joseph Rochefort that while Chester Nimitz would like to receive further evidence that Midway Atoll was indeed the next Japanese target. Meanwhile, Chester Nimitz ordered William Halsey to bring his carrier group back to the Hawaiian Islands as a precaution. ww2dbase [Battle of Midway and the Aleutian Islands | Pearl Harbor Navy Base and Ford Island Naval Air Station | Honolulu, Oahu | CPC]

• Nikita Khrushchev phoned Joseph Stalin at Moscow, Russia, requesting Stalin to pause the Kharkov offensive in Ukraine in order to focus on other more important campaigns; Stalin rejected the request. ww2dbase [Joseph Stalin | Moscow | CPC]

• 14th and 16th Panzer Divisions of the German 1st Panzer Army destroyed 130 Soviet tanks in combat in Ukraine, forcing Soviet forces to evacuate forward airfields at Izium and Petrovskaia. Semyon Timoshenko requested for permission to fall back from his positions near Kharkov, Ukraine due to this latest German counteroffensive; Joseph Stalin refused to grant his permission, ordering Timoshenko to continue the westward offensive. ww2dbase [Second Battle of Kharkov | Kharkov | TH, CPC]

• The newspaper New York Times published an article in an inside page that Germans had killed 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland, and 200,000 in Russia. ww2dbase [Discovery of Concentration Camps and the Holocaust | New York | CPC]

18 May 1942 Interactive Map