TODAY IN HISTORY
December 5, 1757: At the Battle of Leuthen, Prussian King Frederick II (“the Great”) wins one of the most impressive victories of his storied military career, using a diversionary attack and a sophisticated oblique maneuver to rout an Austrian army under Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine that was twice the size of his force. Fully a third of the 66,000 man Austrian army was killed, wounded, or captured. Frederick’s victory enabled him to move on to besiege the city of Breslau (Wrocław) in mid-December. Breslau’s fall left Prussia largely in control of Silesia and all but ensured its victory in the Third Silesian War, one of the many conflicts within the larger Seven Years’ War.
December 5, 1941: The Red Army under Georgy Zhukov begins a major counteroffensive against the Nazi Wehrmacht in the Battle of Moscow. The combination of the Soviet military and a brutally cold Russian winter crippled the German forces, and the offensive ended on January 7, 1942 with the exhausted Red Army having driven the Nazi line back some 150 miles from the Soviet capital.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The AP is now reporting that a US counterterrorism raid supposedly targeting a senior Islamic State official in Syria back in October actually wound up killing a government agent who was undercover within IS named Khaled al-Masoud. The New Arab had reported on this raid shortly after it happened. Masoud’s killing does not appear to have affected cooperation between the US military and Syrian security forces but it does seem to have been a significant loss in terms of the information that Masoud had been providing. Masoud’s family is claiming that he was wounded in the raid and then taken prisoner, and they’ve received no clarity as to the treatment he received while in custody or whether that may have contributed to his death.
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