This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
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…
Riga, Occupied Latvia · November 30, 1941 On November 25 and 29, 1941, Einsatzgruppe 3 (Special Task Group 3), one of many SS (Schutzstaffel) mobile death squads operating behind the front lines, murdered 5,000 “Reich Jews,” that is, German- and Austrian-born Jews. These men, women, and children had arrived in the Baltic ghetto at Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest…
Berlin, Germany · November 29, 1939 On this date in 1939, nearly three months after the German Wehrmacht overran neighboring Poland, launching World War II in Europe, German dictator Adolf Hitler issued Fuehrer Directive Number 9, the first of two directives on measures his country would have to take to render the British economy and infrastructure incapable…