In 1979 The Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious died from heroin overdose aged 21. His death comes a month after the start of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen who was stabbed in the abdomen at a hotel in New York, USA.

 

In 1943 the defeated German’s 6^th Army surrender to Russian forces at Stalingrad. The Germans began their assault on the Russian City of Stalingrad, on the 19^th of August 1942, a city which holds great strategic importance. But it also held great symbolic value as it was named after Russian leader Joseph Stalin, to loose it would weaken the Red armies resolve. But after five months of fighting in weather that reached -30°C the German’s 6^th army were defeated and 90,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner. This victory was a great morale boost to all allied soldiers.

 

In 1942 Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi collaborator established himself as Prime minister of German-occupied Norway. Quisling was a Norwegian commander and Nazi sympathiser who on the 9^th of April 1940 gave the order to permit the Germans safe passage into Norwegian ports allowing them to slip through the mines laid by the British. This allowed thousands of troops to enter Norway and take control of the country. When the Norwegian government refused to surrender they were replaced by more controllable councillors, the chief of these was Quisling. Quisling sent many of his fellow countrymen to German concentration camps, buying favour with his German overlords. At the end of World War II Quisling was tried for treason and executed.

 

In 1916 two days after one of the largest bombing raids by the German Zeppelins of World War I, one of the aircraft is found floating in the North Sea. The nine Zeppelins used in the raid dropped 400 bombs over the midlands of England, killing 70 people and injuring hundreds. The damaged zeppelin was found by the King Stephen fishing trawler on this day in 1916.