Bletchley Park, England • May 9, 1941 As war loomed in Europe, British codebreakers based at Bletchley Park outside London worked feverishly to unravel the Enigma cipher machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their most secret communications. The Enigma had a number of differently wired scrambler rotors (aka coding cylinders) that operators changed and…
Berlin-Karlshorst, Germany • May 8, 1945 Five days after the suicide of Adolf Hitler in Berlin on April 30, 1945, Adm. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, an emissary from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, arrived in the French cathedral town of Reims, headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. For the second time in less…
With Rear Adm. Fletcher’s Task Force 17 • May 7, 1942 In the 6 months following Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on U.S. naval and air facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese had the advantage of dominant air and naval power in the Pacific Ocean region. During these months the Japanese military looked to expand…
South Portland, Maine • May 6, 1943 On this date the New England Shipbuilding Corporation laid down the keel of SS Jeremiah O’Brien. Named after a Scots-Irish Revolutionary War hero from Maine (then part of Massachusetts), the SS Jeremiah O’Brien was one of 2,710 emergency cargo (EC)‑class freighters built in 18 different shipyards across the United States. The…
Warsaw, Poland • May 5, 1939 In 1923 Poland’s Baltic neighbor to the north, Lithuania, unlawfully annexed Memel Territory (now Klaipėda Region in present-day Lithuania) that had been, up to 1918, part of Prussia under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Like the Danzig enclave in Poland and the former Territory of the Saar Basin that had briefly been…
Lueneburg Heath, Northern Germany • May 4, 1945 Lueneburg (German, Lüneburg), a district in Lower Saxony, Northern Germany, had been captured by elements of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s 21st Army Group on April 18, 1945. Montgomery made his headquarters at Moellering Villa in the village of Haecklingen just south of Lueneburg. At midday, May 3,…
Rome, Italy • May 3, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler began a 6‑day Italian state visit to Rome, Naples, and Florence in a display of Axis solidarity. The choreographed visit featured a parade by the Italian armed forces (demonstrating to German reviewers a lack of modern equipment), a review of the Italian…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France • May 2, 1945 On this date in 1945, a rain-sodden but peaceful day in Berlin, the battle for the war-ravaged Reich capital ended when General of the Artillery Helmuth Weidling surrendered his garrison to Soviet Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, whose Eighth Guards Army was part of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s First Belorussian…
Berlin, Germany • May 1, 1945 A little before 4 a.m. on this date in 1945 in Berlin, the new Chief of German Army General Staff Gen. Hans Krebs was shown into the tactical headquarters of Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army, on the west side of Tempelhof airport. A…
Berlin, Germany • April 30, 1945 Sometime after 3 p.m. on this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler, to all the world the face of unspeakable evil, shot himself in the right temple after he and Eva Braun, his wife of 40 hours (and near-secret mistress for 14 years), had poisoned themselves by ingesting cyanide. The Fuehrer’s psychotic…
