Rome, Italy • September 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Italy, the Allies from their strongholds in North Africa (since November 1942) and Sicily (since July‑August 1943) invaded the boot-shaped Italian mainland at Salerno, some 170 miles/274 km southeast of Rome, Italy’s capital, with diversionary landings at Reggio di Calabria (September 3,…
Washington, D.C. • September 8, 1940 On this date in 1940 the 7-member British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States, or Tizard Mission as it was informally known, assembled in the nation’s capital. Sir Henry Tizard, brilliant visionary scientist and head delegate, had been in Washington, D.C., since August 22, meeting with notables, including…
On an English Beach • September 7, 1943 On this date in 1943, on a popular beach near a seaside village in Southwest England, the British military not so secretly tested a giant rocket-propelled, explosive-laden contraption called the Panjandrum, known also as The Great Panjandrum. The highly experimental vehicle consisted of a pair of 10‑ft./3‑m-high…
Tokyo, Japan • September 6, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, Japanese military and political leaders embarked on a collision course with the West. It was decided that Japan would begin war preparations against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands (all countries with territorial claims in Southeast Asia;…
Alam el Halfa, Egypt • September 5, 1942 The years-long back-and-forth Western Desert Campaign (June 11, 1940 to February 4, 1943) in the scrubby desert wastelands of Western Egypt and Eastern Libya had reached a stalemate at the end of July 1942, when both Allied and Axis sides licked their wounds in the wake of…
London, England • September 4, 1943 On this date in 1943 the British War Office and Admiralty gave the go-ahead to build two temporary portable deep-water artificial harbors, one (codenamed Mulberry “A”) to be positioned off Omaha Beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and the second (Mulberry “B”) off Gold Beach at Arromanches-les-Bains. The components of both harbors…
London, England • September 3, 1939 Addressing a national audience by radio on this date in 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain intoned the following words: “This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to…
London, England and Paris, France • September 2, 1939 Shortly after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier confirmed for themselves the German invasion of Poland on September 1, the 2 leaders gave the order for general mobilization and evacuation of hundreds of thousands of children and mothers, tens of thousands of hospital patients,…
Warsaw, Poland • September 1, 1939 Eighty-six years ago World War II in Europe began on this date in 1939 in Danzig (now the present-day Polish city of Gdańsk) when the elderly German training ship Schleswig-Holstein, under the guise of a ceremonial visit to the city, bombarded Poland’s naval base in Danzig harbor. After a…
Berlin, Germany • August 31, 1939 On August 22, 1939, in a meeting at his Bavarian mountaintop retreat, the Berghof, Adolf Hitler told his generals he would fabricate “a propagandistic reason” to justify his planned aggression against neighboring Poland. The plan was for Nazi Party Schutzstaffel (SS) operatives to dress in Polish uniforms, attack a…
