This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
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Berlin, Germany · April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945, a stooped, jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom due to the Wehrmacht’s failure to halt the Soviet advance…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · April 19, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. The largest of the ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw…
Berlin, Germany · April 18, 1941 On this date in 1941 tests began of the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Swallow (Schwalbe). The tests were really of the airframe because the BMW turbojets were nowhere close to being ready. On July 18, 1942, a fully configured version flew—this almost nine months before the…
Monte Cassino, Italy · April 17, 1944 On this date in 1944, 52,000 soldiers of the untested Polish II Corps under Maj. Gen. Wladyslaw Anders quietly moved into position under the cover of darkness and smokescreen. The Polish II Corps, part of Gen Oliver Leese’s British Eighth Army, relieved the exhausted New Zealand II Corps, which since…
London, England · April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940 to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of…
Moscow, Soviet Union · April 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 Soviet Gen. Géorgui Zakharov placed a patrol of six Yak-7s with Soviet pilots under Free French command. The initial six French pilots formed a mixed patrol of six French and six Russian planes. The brainchild of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the…
Berlin, Germany · April 14, 1945 Austria’s capital Vienna fell to the Red Army on April 13, 1945, and the Soviet News Agency announced it to the world on this date in 1945, the same day Adolf Hitler, in his Fuehrerbunker under the rubble of the Reich Chancellery, learned of it. The Austrian front had been…
London, England · April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Forward SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · April 12, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. That same day the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, informed his staff that neither…
Berlin, Germany · April 11, 1934 On this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler secretly met with German War Minister Gen. Werner von Blomberg, the unofficial representative of the officer corps of the Reichswehr (German armed forces), and reached an agreement that sealed the fate of the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Behind titular President…
