Manila, Philippines · December 10, 1941 On this date in 1941, three days after the U.S. Pacific fleet had been crippled at Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops landed on the U.S.-held island of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean and occupied it within hours. On the same day elements of the Japanese 14th Area Army under Lt….
Tokyo, Japan · December 9, 1940 On September 27, 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, or Axis Pact as it was also known. The Pact was an outgrowth of the “Rome-Berlin Axis” celebrated by the Italo-German “Pact of Steel,” which Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Benito…
Washington, D.C. · December 8, 1941 At 12:30 p.m. on this date in 1941, standing before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and a world listening by radio, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, laid several typewritten sheets on the speaker’s podium. The day before, the president had calmly and…
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii · December 7, 1941 On this date in 1941, a quiet Sunday morning on the Hawaiian island of Oahu just before 8 o’clock, Japan staged an unprovoked attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields dotting the harbor perimeter. Twelve days…
Moscow, Soviet Union · December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Germans and their Axis partners had reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet capital. Tactically, the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) won resounding victories, taking over three million Soviet prisoners in 1941 and seizing…
Tokyo, Japan · December 5, 1937 On this date in 1937 Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army and uncle by marriage to Japanese Emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa), flew from Tokyo to his new assignment—temporary command of the Japanese Shanghai Expeditionary Force, a unit of Gen. Iwane…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Tinian, Mariana Islands · December 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 eighty-six B‑29 Superfortresses belonging to XXI Bomber Command, a unit of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force, left the northwestern Pacific Mariana Islands base on Tinian on their third Tokyo bombing mission. Ten days earlier 111 of these heavy bombers had launched the first raid on…
Bari, Italy · December 2, 1943 World War I combatants had used a variety of poison gases on each other ranging from incapacitating and temporarily blinding the enemy to gases that burned the body, destroyed the lungs, and liquefied the tissues. Sometimes their use had unintended consequences, as when the gases inflicted casualties on the…
Berlin, Germany · December 1, 1939 From a small cadre of fanatical thugs assigned to protect Adolf Hitler at political meetings in the 1920s, the Schutzstaffel (“protection squad”), or SS, grew into one of the most notorious organizations in history, with many responsibilities. Under Reinhard Heydrich, it ran the Reich Security Main Office (Reichsicherheitshauptamt) with…