Chidori Airstrip, Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands • June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 Japanese Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi stepped from his plane onto the dirt runway of Iwo Jima’s Chidori airstrip, or Airfield No. 1. Roughly 8 square miles/21 square kilometers of mostly black volcanic ash and stone (cinder) anchored by 554‑ft./169‑m‑high Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima had been…
London, England • June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (66 ft., 5 in./196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French brigadier general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from the BBC in London on this date in…
Munich, Germany • June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the 2 conspirator…
Foggia Airfield Complex, Southeast Italy • June 16, 1944 On this date in 1944 nearly 600 B‑17 Flying Fortresses and B‑24 Liberators from the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force took off from bases in Foggia, Southeastern Italy, to attack oil refineries around Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. After Romania, Austria was the biggest Axis crude oil producer,…
Rheine Airfield, Lower Saxony, Germany • June 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 the world’s first jet-powered bomber, the Arado Ar 234 Blitz (English, Lightning), made its appearance in the skies over Northwestern Germany. The flight of this all-metal, single-seat, twin-jet prototype came 11 months after the first flight test of a fully configured Messerschmitt Me 262…
Auschwitz, German-Occupied Poland • June 14, 1940 On this date in German-occupied Poland 728 male political prisoners, Catholic priests, and Jews left Tarnów’s train station for Auschwitz concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz), 80 miles/129 kilometers away. It was the first mass transport of prisoners to Auschwitz (Polish name, Oświęcim) since the camp was opened for business on April 27, 1940,…
Carentan, Cotentin Peninsula, France • June 13, 1944 Late Monday, June 5, 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history was set to launch. The next day, June 6, D-Day, 3 Allied armies began depositing their precious cargo of men and equipment on 5 Normandy beaches and in multiple aerial drop zones behind them. By evening the first-day wave…
Off the Mariana Islands, Central Pacific • June 12, 1944 On this date in 1944 in the Marianas, U.S. carrier aircraft began attacking Japanese defenses on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in preparation for the 3‑week battle for the archipelago’s administrative center, Saipan. Eight hundred U.S. warships carrying 162,000 fighting men were set to smash into the…
Malta, Central Mediterranean • June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta, a British possession since 1800. Benito Mussolini speculated…
London, England • June 10, 1943 On this date in 1943 U.S. and British air forces unleashed their Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) against industrial targets valuable to Nazi Germany’s war machine, particularly to the Luftwaffe. The CBO had several antecedents. In late 1942 both the British and the Americans had identified “bottleneck” German industries (Great…
