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• Soviet forces launched multiple counter-attacks around Moscow, Russia, trying to blunt the German advance. German troops were now positioned in the west at Volokolamsk 60 kilometers from Moscow and in the south at Plavsk 110 kilometers from Moscow. ww2dbase [Battle of Moscow | TH]
• Mountbatten replaced Roger Keyes as the British Chief of Combined Operations. ww2dbase [Louis Mountbatten | AC]
• President Franklin Roosevelt addressed his country, noting that the German attack on the destroyer USS Kearny "was to frighten the American people off the high seas - to force us to make a trembling retreat", claiming that the "American spirit" was now "aroused". ww2dbase [Franklin Roosevelt | CPC]
• HMS Cossack, damaged by German submarine U-563 300 miles west of Gibraltar on 24 Oct 1941, sank while under tow. ww2dbase [CPC]
• British submarine HMS Tetrach, one day out of Malta, hit an Italian naval mine and sank between Sicily and Tunisia; all 62 aboard were killed. ww2dbase [CPC]
• The Jager Report (issued on 1 Dec 1941) noted that 946 adult male, 184 adult female, and 73 children, all Jews, were killed in Vilnius, Lithuania for a total of 1,203 people. ww2dbase [Discovery of Concentration Camps and the Holocaust | CPC]

• USS Arizona entered the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, US Territory of Hawaii for overhaul, during which she would receive a mounting atop her foremast for future installation of a search radar. ww2dbase [Pearl Harbor Navy Base and Ford Island Naval Air Station | Arizona | CPC]

• Admiral Thomas Hart, having changed his mind on moving the US fleet at the Philippine Islands south to combine with the British allies, decided to base his main force in Manila Bay. ww2dbase [Invasion of the Philippine Islands | CPC]

• Erich von Manstein's German Eleventh Army broke through the mud and fog on the Perekop Isthmus into the Crimean Peninsula in Russia. ww2dbase [Battle of Sevastopol | AC]

• The trial of twenty-eight people indicted on a charge of being in violation of the 1861 Sedition Act and the Smith Act began at the Federal District Court in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. ww2dbase [AC]

27 Oct 1941 Interactive Map