Warsaw, Poland · May 5, 1939 In 1923 Poland’s Baltic neighbor to the north, Lithuania, unlawfully annexed Memel Territory (now Klaipėda Region in present-day Lithuania) that had been, up to 1918, part of Prussia under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Like the Danzig enclave in Poland and the Saar Territory in the Rhineland, Memel was a League of…
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea · May 4, 1942 On this date in 1942 the five-day Battle of the Coral Sea began. A Japanese invasion fleet was steaming toward the capital of Australian Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, which had the potential of becoming, after Rabaul’s capture earlier in January, another major Japanese staging point and…
Rome, Italy · May 3, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler began a six-day Italian state visit to Rome, Naples, and Florence in a display of Axis solidarity, which included a parade by the Italian armed forces (demonstrating to German reviewers a lack of modern equipment) and a review of the Italian navy…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France · May 2, 1945 On this date in 1945, a rain-sodden but peaceful day in Berlin, the battle for the war-ravaged Reich capital ended when General of the Artillery Helmuth Weidling surrendered his garrison to Soviet Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov. The Soviets claimed to have taken 480,000 POWs, captured 1,500 tanks and self-propelled…
Berlin, Germany · May 1, 1945 At 4 a.m. on this date in 1945 in Berlin, the new Chief of German Army General Staff Gen. Hans Krebs was shown into the tactical headquarters of Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army, near Tempelhof airport. Krebs was part of the inner sanctum…
Berlin, Germany · April 30, 1945 On this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler, to all the world the face of unspeakable evil, shot himself in the right temple after he and Eva Braun had poisoned themselves by ingesting cyanide. The Fuehrer’s psychotic desire for an apocalyptic end for Germany—a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung—was nearly completed by his…
Narvik, Norway · April 29, 1940 Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, and Oslo, Norway’s capital, succumbed to German invaders on April 9, 1940, the first day of Operation Weseruebung. Though planning for Weseruebung had begun the previous December, Adolf Hitler did not order full speed ahead until British warships entered the territorial waters of neutral Norway in February 1940…
Slapton Sands, Devonshire Coast, Southwest England · April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (E-boats, or Schnellboote in German) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger (codenamed T‑4), a convoy of eight American LSTs…
Dongo near Lake Como, Northern Italy · April 27, 1945 On this date in 1945, with the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in Italy in full retreat—indeed, their commanders had signed surrender documents on this date—Italian strongman Benito Mussolini was en route to a safe haven in Switzerland. The Duce was wearing a German noncommissioned officers…
SWPA HQ, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia · April 26, 1943 By January 1943, as the six-month campaign for Guadalcanal in the Southwest Pacific Solomon Islands was winding down (the Japanese abandoned the island on February 7), it became clear that the Allies lacked sufficient resources to swiftly dislodge the Japanese from heavily fortified Rabaul, 650 miles away. Rabaul,…
