Wake Island, Central Pacific Ocean • December 11, 1941 As war clouds gathered over the Western and Central Pacific in the late 1930s/early 1940s, U.S. military brass identified a V‑shaped set of coral islets, since 1899 an American outpost between Hawaii and Guam, a “priority defense requirement.” Actually a submerged volcano top, Wake Island (see…
Manila, Philippines • December 10, 1941 At 3:40 a.m. on December 8, 1941 (Manila time), 1 hour and 40 minutes after the start of Japan’s unprovoked air and naval attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 62‑year-old Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur awoke to a terrible day of his own. Within 3 hours MacArthur learned that Japanese carrier…
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 “His genius was problem-solving,” it was said of Andrew Jackson Higgins (1886–1952). “Higgins applied it to everything in life: politics, dealing with [trade] unions, acquiring workers, producing fantastical things or huge amounts of things.” Among the “fantastical things” he produced in quantity were the very amphibious landing boats linked…
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 a devious, vicious, unprovoked air and naval attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields that…
Moscow, Soviet Union • December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 with the express goal of “crush[ing] Soviet Russia in a quick campaign” (Fuehrer Directive 21, December 18, 1940), the Germans and their Axis partners had indeed reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet…
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, just 4 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 requested his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Tinian, Mariana Islands • December 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 86 4-engine 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 4‑engine heavy bombers had launched the…
Chicago, Illinois • December 2, 1942 In November 1942 the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor was assembled piecemeal below the bleachers of an unused and unheated double racquetball (squash) court at the University of Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg Field. The impetus for building an American nuclear reactor, which consisted (mostly) of a huge pile of…