Budapest, Occupied Hungary • July 9, 1944 On this date in 1944 Raoul Wallenberg, a 31-year-old bachelor from a distinguished Swedish family, arrived in Budapest, capital of Nazi-occupied Hungary. With diplomatic accreditation from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Sweden was a neutral nation), Wallenberg had been secretly recruited by the recently created (January 22, 1944)…
London, England • July 8, 1941 On this date in 1941, 5 months before the United States was drawn into World War II, the Boeing B‑17 Flying Fortress was flown in combat for the first time, this by the Royal Air Force in an attack on the North German port of Wilhelmshaven. The first production model, the…
Wanping, Near Beijing, China • July 7, 1937 The major turning point that ultimately led to Japan’s disastrous war with the United States and its European allies in December 1941 occurred late on this date, July 7, 1937, and into the next. Japanese and Chinese soldiers clashed at a bridge over the Yongding River near Wanping,…
Saipan, Marianas, Central Pacific • July 6, 1944 The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944) was a pivotal U.S. naval victory, effectively eliminating Japan’s ability to both conduct large-scale carrier actions and reinforce its garrisons to the east in the Mariana Islands chain. The most important islands in the Marianas were Guam (an…
Near Kursk, Russia • July 5, 1943 The pivotal year of the war in Europe was 1943. Early February saw Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ German Sixth Army, the largest army the Wehrmacht (armed forces) fielded in the war, surrender at Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in Southern Russia. Some 850,000 service members from German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and…
Washington, D.C. • July 4, 1942 On this date in 1942 Gen. Claire Lee Chennault was appointed commander of China Air Task Force (CATF), replacing his original (officially disbanded) command, the American Volunteer Group (AVG) of “Flying Tigers” fame. The AVG volunteer group of U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine flyers had been created by Nationalist…
Mers-el-Kébir, French Algeria • July 3, 1940 On June 22 and 23, 1940, representatives of the new French prime minister, Marshal Philippe Pétain, signed armistices with emissaries from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Article 8 of the Franco-German armistice permitted the defeated French nation, headquartered after July 1 in the spa town of Vichy, to…
Tokyo, Japan • July 2, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference of high-level Japanese officials (Gozen Kaigi), Shōwa Emperor Hirohito sanctioned the military seizure of bases in the south of Vichy French Indochina (present-day Vietnam). It was in keeping with Japan’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to force the surrender of their Chinese…
Cairo, Egypt • July 1, 1941 During World War II Great Britain excelled in creating multiple networks of secret operatives. Perhaps the most famous set of secret agents worked for the Special Operations Executive. Officially formed on July 22, 1940, to “set Europe ablaze,” as Prime Minister Winston Churchill expressed it, the SOE was specifically tasked…
Tokyo, Japan • June 30, 1941 On September 19, 1931, soldiers of the Kwantung Army (eventually the largest, most prestigious branch of the Imperial Japanese Army) invaded Manchuria in Northeast China from their Chinese base at Port Arthur (known as Ryojun in Japanese; present-day Dalian or Lüshun Port) and established a puppet state they called…
