Battle of the Caucasus
The Wehrmacht drives for Caucasus oil and flies a flag on Elbrus
On 23 July 1942 Hitler approved Operation Edelweiss to seize the oil of Maykop, Grozny and Baku; the Germans took Maykop and Krasnodar, and on 21 August troops of the 1st Mountain Division planted a flag on the summit of Elbrus. Halted near Ordzhonikidze in November, the Germans fell back in 1943 and left the Taman Peninsula by October.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 24 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 5 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 7 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 14 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 9 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 1 year earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 11 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 10 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 1 year earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 6 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 11 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 6 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 10 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 14 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 16 years later
Asia
- 1942 Fall of Singapore — same year
- 1943 Bengal famine — 1 year later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 3 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 11 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 24 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 13 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 12 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 9 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 5 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 6 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 1 year earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — same year
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 17 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 86)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 73)
- Winston Churchill (aged 68)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 64)
- Albert Einstein (aged 63)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 61)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 53)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 53)
- Mao Zedong (aged 49)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 46)