This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
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Washington, D.C. · May 10, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Harry S. Truman signed the Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067. The person behind the directive was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former Treasury Secretary who had long advocated that postwar German occupation include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage war…
London, England · May 9, 1941 As war loomed in Europe, British codebreakers based at Bletchley Park outside London worked feverishly to unravel the Enigma cipher machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their most secret communications. The Enigma had a number of differently wired scrambler rotors that operators changed and shuffled through billions of…
Oslo, Norway · May 8, 1945 On May 5, 1945, five days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide in the catacombs beneath his Reich capital, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, sent a telegram to resistance leaders in Norway, who passed it to the Commander in Chief of German forces in Norway,…
Reims, France · May 7, 1945 Five days after the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945, Adm. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, an emissary from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, arrived in Reims, France, headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Friedeburg was tasked with opening surrender negotiations on behalf of Doenitz, head of the…
Manila, Occupied Philippines · May 6, 1942 On December 8, 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, a largely self-governing U.S. possession. (December 8, Manila and Japanese time, was the same date Japanese carrier-based planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a set of interlocked assaults on U.S. military assets in the Pacific region.) The combined U.S.-Filipino force…
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…
