Paris, Occupied France • August 10, 1944 On August 1, 1944, almost two months after the initial D-Day landings in Normandy, France, more than 14,000 personnel and equipment from 41-year-old Gen. Philippe Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armored Division began landing on Utah Beach. Leclerc (1902–1947) juggled three roles: He was a subordinate divisional commander in an…
Moscow, Soviet Union • July 1, 1941 Early in the morning of August 24, 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of nonaggression, formally known by the two signatories’ names—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which bore the date August 23, 1939. Neither Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (who was also Soviet Premier)…
Camp Ritchie, Maryland • June 19, 1942 On this date in 1942 the U.S. Army activated the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie. Former property of a failed ice company, the rural site was converted into a summer training camp for the Maryland National Guard in 1926. Sixteen years later the U.S. Army…
Tromsø, Occupied Norway • June 7, 1940 Within days of the German invasion of neutral Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940 (Operation Weseruebung), it became clear that the Norwegian armed forces could not resist the more powerful Wehrmacht (German armed forces), bristling with modern weaponry and supported by highly effective air cover. Caught largely by…
Near Tobruk, Libya, North Africa • May 26, 1942 The yearlong Western Desert Campaign (Desert War) in the wasteland of Western Egypt and Eastern Libya had reached a stalemate in May 1942, with both Allied and Axis sides licking their wounds. The fighting started four days after Benito Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Great Britain…
Luebeck, Northern Germany • April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Reich Minister of the Interior, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies as German defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army east back across the Spree…
Wilbur Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio • April 22, 1945 During the war Allied countries were keen to gain access to the products of German research and development. A British commando raid on a German radar installation on February 27–28, 1942, in occupied France convinced British scientists who analyzed the radar array that it was impervious to…
Berlin, Germany • April 7, 1933 Following his swearing in as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party began a policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization), whereby Germany would be thoroughly reordered along Nazi lines. With the Reichstag’s passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, signed into law by German president Paul von…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia • April 6, 1941 At the tail end of February 1941 British Commonwealth forces from Nigeria captured Mogadishu, capital of Italian Somaliland (part of today’s Somalia), after Benito Mussolini’s armies had abandoned any pretense of defending their East African colony. The Italian colony in the Horn of Africa, which in August 1940 absorbed…
Xanten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany • March 23, 1945 In the aftermath of Operation Market Garden, the inventive but failed September 1944 thrust into Adolf Hitler’s Germany, came Operation Plunder, another offensive conceived by British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. (Operation Plunder was the overall name for Montgomery’s 21st Army Group’s crossing the Rhine, but each of…