Berlin, Germany • June 29, 1934 Late on this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler unleashed an extraordinary murder spree known as the “Night of the Long Knives” (“Nacht der Langen Messer”). President Paul von Hindenburg’s doctors had leaked news that the 86‑year-old German military hero had only months to live. Hitler feared that…
Berlin, Germany • June 28, 1935 On this date in 1935, Nazi Germany amended Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that had been in place since 1871 during the chancellorship of Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s Second Reich. Paragraph 175 outlawed acts of “unnatural indecency” only between men. Six years later…
Norwegian and Arctic Seas • June 27, 1942 In March 1941, 9 months before Pearl Harbor plunged the neutral nation into World War II, the United States inaugurated the “Lend-Lease” program. That program gave Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other Allied nations resisting Axis aggressors, mainly Germany and Japan, vast amounts of war matériel to…
Cherbourg, France • June 26, 1944 On June 19–22, 1944, a violent gale featuring 332‑knot/59‑km/h winds hit the 2 huge Mulberry artificial harbors that the Allies had built in England, towed across the English Channel under danger of wind, weather, and enemy air attack, and planted off the Normandy invasion beaches, one off Omaha, the other…
London, England • June 25, 1940 Under the threat of imminent invasion from Nazi Germany, the British government on this date in 1940 began interning all suspect aliens living in the United Kingdom. Thousands of Germans, Austrians, and Italians, including Jewish refugees from the Nazis, were placed behind barbed wire in England (racetracks and unfinished…
London, England • June 24, 1942 On this date in 1942 Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London, England, to assume administrative and operational command of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army. At the time (end of May) the U.S. Army in Europe consisted of 3 infantry regiments. Set up 16 days prior to…
Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile/724 kilometer front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources), an area of operations roughly half the size of California. Sabotage of rail networks…
Poltava, Ukraine SSR, Soviet Union • June 22, 1944 Since mid-1942 U.S. Army Air Forces brass had proposed to the Soviets an expansion of shuttle bombing missions that would strike hard-to-reach targets in Central and Eastern Europe. The concept of shuttle bombing was straight-forward: Allied bombers and fighter escorts would launch themselves from 1 airfield, unload…
New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands • June 21, 1943 On this date in 1943, the U.S. kicked off Operation Toenails, as the New Georgia campaign was called, with unopposed landings by the elite 4th Marine Raider Battalion followed the next day by the Army’s 43rd Infantry Division. The year before, in October, the Japanese had reconnoitered…
Mont Mouchet, South-Central France • June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a vital role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI, or Fifis (Forces Françaises de…
