London, England • May 19, 1940 Following Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, neither of the Allies committed to launching a significant land offensive against Adolf Hitler’s Germany as punishment for the invasion of its eastern neighbor, Poland, which was in a treaty relationship with the two Western powers. The…
Cassino, Italy • May 18, 1944 On February 15, 1944, British Gen. Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of all Allied armies in Italy, ordered the aerial bombing of the ancient Benedictine abbey towering over the pastoral town of Cassino on the banks of the Rapido (or Gari) River in Italy. Earlier in January, British, American, and French…
Reykjavik, Iceland • May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the 2 West European Allies, at war with Germany for 3½ months now, were hell-bent on disrupting the…
London, England • May 16, 1943 At least since 1937, 2 years before the outbreak of European hostilities, British intelligence had looked into developing alternative ways to destroy German factories in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. One suggestion was to attack dams in the Ruhr region. The idea was to blow up the dams or…
London, England • May 15, 1940 On this date, just five days after assuming the top leadership position in Great Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a telegram to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was also 5 days since the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had flooded over the borders of the Low Countries and France,…
Washington, D.C. • May 14, 1942 Early in 1941 Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts informed Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall that she intended to introduce a bill in the U.S. Congress to establish a volunteer women’s Army corps, separate and distinct from the existing Army Nurse Corps. After long debate—and after…
London, England • May 13, 1940 As Adolf Hitler’s armies raced across Europe, seemingly unstoppable, gobbling up country after country for Nazi Germany, and (God forbid) perhaps Britain herself, Winston Churchill succeeded a war-weary Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister on May 10, 1940. Chamberlain had appointed Churchill to be First Lord of the Admiralty, a…
Sedan, France • May 12, 1940 Great Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939, on account of Germany’s aggression against its eastern neighbor Poland 2 days earlier. Both nations honored their guarantee to protect Poland’s borders in the event of a German invasion. Ten days into May 1940 Germany attacked neutral Belgium…
Attu, Aleutian Islands, Alaska • May 11, 1943 The Japanese assault on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands began with a carrier-based aerial attack on June 3 and 4, 1942, that targeted U.S. Navy and Army facilities at Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island (see map below), the most populous island in the Alaskan archipelago. The carrier strike force was…
London, England • May 10/11, 1941 Although it would not be known for over a month, the Luftwaffe raid on London on this night, May 10/11, 1941, brought closure to Nazi Germany’s 15‑month strategic bombing campaign of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The British public dubbed the aerial campaign the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 10, 1941),…
