God that would have been a great night!

Newly declassified files from the National Archives at Kew have revealed a number of interesting things today; apparently the Allies had a hit-list of high ranking Nazis in France they considered eliminating prior to the D-Day landings on 6th June 1944; chief among them General Erwin Rommel and Field Marshall Gerd Von Rundstedt. It wouldn't have been the first time the British Government sanctioned an official hit during World War II; in 1942 a British trained group of Czech resistance members who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.

The Heydrich assassination also helps to explain why they didn't go through with the plan, the Nazis enacted brutal reprisals and wiped out the Czech village of Lidice in revenge for his death. The assassination of Rommel, commander of the German forces in Normandy, may have had some effect but the British feared that reprisals against French civilians and POW's would negate it's potential value to the war effort.

Stalin never struck me as a cocktail guy...

As well as the hitlist, there were files that revealed the home office and MI5 were bugging King Edward VIII during the events leading up to his abdication in 1936. Spying on the King? He was a Nazi sympathiser after all!

But for me the most interesting story to come out of the new files was that during Churchill's state visit to Moscow in 1942, he and Stalin got a little drunk and emptied "innumerable bottles". According to Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office Alexander Cadogan:

"what Stalin made me drink was pretty savage. Winston, who by that point was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine"

Stalin the party boy huh? That would have been a hell of a good night to be a part of!