This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
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Berlin, Germany · July 19, 1940 Military operations between France and the Axis powers, that is, Germany and Italy, ended on June 25, 1940. Three and a half weeks later, on this date in 1940 in Berlin, victorious Wehrmacht troops marched through the Brandenburg Gate for the first time since Kaiser Wilhelm I’s victory over…
Leipheim Air Base, Bavaria, Germany · July 18, 1942 In mid-April 1941 test flights began of what would become the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow. The test was really of the airframe, because the BMW turbojets—primitive and temperamental—were nowhere close to being ready for fitting. On this date in…
Detroit, Michigan · July 17, 1940 As war clouds gathered over Europe in the late 1930s, the U.S. Army asked American automobile manufacturers to tender suggestions to replace its existing, aging light-motor vehicles, mostly motorcycles and sidecars but also (incredible as it seems) some Ford Model Ts. As early as 1937–1938, several prototypes were presented…
Paris, Occupied France · July 16, 1942 On June 22, 1940, representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, premier of the French Third Republic, signed a ceasefire with Germany, 44 days after the Wehrmacht had invaded France. Early that October Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government—named after the resort community in which his administration had settled—approved the first French anti-Semitic…
San Francisco, California · July 15, 1945 On this date in 1945 the USS Indianapolis, a Portland-class cruiser in California for repairs, received orders to pick up a piece of special cargo at Hunters Point (predecessor name for the now-closed San Francisco Naval Yard). Eleven days later, on July 26, the Indianapolis delivered her mysterious cargo…
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La · July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of Operation Starvation—the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits—Navy air groups destroyed over half the train ferries…
Kursk, Soviet Union · July 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 Operation Citadel (Zitadelle), Adolf Hitler’s gambit to retake Kursk, an important Soviet rail hub south of Moscow, and straighten the German line on the Eastern Front failed with devastating losses on both sides, but especially to German strategic armored reserves. A day earlier…
Beirut, Lebanon · July 12, 1941 During their advance on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in June 1941, the British shot down a Luftwaffe aircraft flown in support of the pro-German Iraqi government of Rashid Ali el‑Ghalani. (El-Ghalani had led a nationalist coup that unseated a pro-British regime weeks before and was understood to be…
The Berghof, Bavaria, Germany · July 11, 1944 Adolf Hitler had been the target of four assassination attempts before he became head of state in January 1933 and perhaps two dozen afterwards. On this date in 1944 Lt. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg arrived at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian retreat near Berchtesgaden, carrying…
London, England · July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized the Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey off the Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the lone European…
