Air Operations, East Indies

5th Air Force B-17s attack the Celebes/Kendari and Timor/Koepang airfields and Dili, Timor.

Air Operations, New Guinea

5th Air Force B-25s and 22nd Medium Bomb Group B-26s attack Lae.

Arctic

The close cover for PQ-17 leaves Iceland with 4 cruisers, 2 American, and 3 destroyers. QP-13 is sighted by the Germans but is not attacked.

Battle of the Atlantic

• Returning from a successful cruise in the Gulf of Mexico where 12 ships were sunk, U-158 is sunk off Bermuda by a US Martin Mariner flying boat.

U-158 (Rostin), a German submarine Type IXC, sunk off Bermuda by a US Navy plane VP-74 on 30 June 1942. There are no survivors.

U-158 Is Sunk Off Bermuda

U-158

Class	Type IXC
CO	Kapitänleutnant Erwin Rostin
Location	Caribbean, W of Bermuda
Cause	Air attack
Casualties	54
Survivors	None

• The US steamship City of Birmingham (5861t), en route to Bermuda, is torpedoed and sunk by U-202 about 250 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. 6 of the 113-man crew and 2 of 263 passengers are lost in teh sinking. The escorting minesweeper Stansbury (DMS-8) rescues the survivors.

CBI

The inability of Allied forces to move supplies from India over the Himalaya Mountains (known as the Hump) air route to China begins to show. The Chinese are expecting 5,000 tons a month. Only 57 aircraft are available for the airlift and only 186 tons have been delivered over the past 60 days.

Eastern Front

The Germans step up their offensive in the southern sector. The German 2nd Army and IV Panzergruppe attack towards Voronezh, while the 6th Army pushes on eastwards in the region southeast of Belgorod. The Russian High Command orders the evacuation of Sevastopol. The Black Sea Fleet, much weakened by recent operations, attempts to comply with little success. Army Group North eliminates the Russian pocket of resistance west of the Volkhov River.

Col-Gen Georg von Küchler, German commander on the Leningrad front, is promoted to Field Marshal.[MORE]

EVACUATION OF SEBASTOPOL. Russian submarines and small naval craft take off small numbers of troops (June 30-July 3), but larger vessels are unable to approach owing to severity of German-Italian air/sea blockade.

EVACUATION OF SEBASTOPOL

Germany, Planning

Intoxicated by his military triumphs, Hitler issues a directive for a linkup in Egypt of German North African forces and those sweeping through eastern Europe. The plan is for Rommel to press for a decisive victory from the west ant the Germans in Bulgaria will march through Turkey, whether Ankara agrees or not, and the Levant, to complete the destruction of the British position in the Middle East.

Machine gunner Zina Kozlov poses with her water-cooled Maxim heavy machine gun on June 30, 1942. The Red Army "embedded" many women in various formations -- and had several large, exclusively female units.

Women in Combat Units

Indian Ocean

The US freighter Express (6736t), en route from Bombay, India to Cape Town, South Africa, is torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarine I-10 about 200 miles off Mozambique. 2 Armed Guard sailors and 11 of the crew are lost when one of the lifeboats is swamped.

New Guinea

An Australian unit carries out a raid on the Japanese base at Salamaua. A few days later a similar raid is made on Lae, another important Japanese strategic and supply base.

North Africa

The Axis forces maintain their pressure, while the British XXX Corps takes up positions at the north end of the Alamein line. XIII Corps is deployed in the south while X Corps headquarters organizes Delta Force to defend Alexandria and the Nile delta. In his order of the day circulated to the troops, Gen Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East, says 'The enemy is making his final effort and thinks of us as a defeated army. . . He hopes to take Egypt by bluffing. Your job is to show that he is mistaken.'

Pacific

The US submarine Plunger (SS-179) sinks the Japanese merchant ship No. 5 Unkai Maru off the China coast near the approaches to Shanghai.