Berlin, Germany • April 9, 1940 On this date in 1940 German land, sea, air, and specialized forces advanced overland into Denmark and attacked various points along Norway’s coast from the air and sea. Earlier in the year, on January 27, the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) had established a task force to orchestrate…
Berlin, Germany • April 8, 1940 On this date, April 8, 1940, when Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was at the top of its game (the occupation of Denmark and the invasion of Norway were a day away), the German Fuehrer issued his order regarding the “handling of Jewish mixed-breeds in the German armed forces” (Behandlung…
East China Sea • April 7, 1945 On this date the Japanese super-battleship Yamato steamed toward Okinawa and to a martyr’s death dispensed by pilots from Rear Adm. Mark A. “Pete” Mitscher’s U.S. Fast Carrier Task Force 58 (TF58). Early in World War II, Mitscher commanded the Hornet, which from her deck famously launched Col. Jimmy…
Off the Coast of Okinawa, Japan • April 6–7, 1945 For centuries the concept of individual suicide was accepted within Japanese society. Among the warrior, or Samurai, class especially, suicide was seen as the way to, among other things, atone for one’s failure, attenuate shame, and restore honor for oneself or for one’s family or…
Berlin, Germany • April 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Berlin, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents’ home by two agents of the Gestapo (Secret State Police). One of the leading Protestant theologians of the past century, Bonhoeffer was a founding pastor of the dissident Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which…
Ohrdruf, Central Germany • April 4, 1945 Over the first 3 weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than 100 concentration and extermination camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. Discoveries like these came mostly by accident because sites of this nature were not…
Washington, D.C. • April 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Roosevelt administration appointed Gen. Douglas MacArthur Commander-in-Chief U.S. Army Forces Pacific (AFPAC), responsible for all Army and Army Air Forces units in the Pacific Theater excepting Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force based in the Marianas. At the same time Adm. Chester…
Berlin, Germany • April 2, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were growing panicky. In the west, American troops had succeeded in crossing the Rhine River at Remagen 35 miles/56 kilometers south of Cologne on March 7 and were advancing into the German heartland. In the east, the tracks of Soviet mechanized…
Aboard Admiral Spruance’s Flagship USS Indianapolis • April 1, 1945 For weeks the largest Allied fleet since Operation Overlord 10 months earlier—nearly 1,500 U.S. and British vessels—fired 2.3 million shells onto Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago and a little more than 300 miles/483 kilometers from Kyūshū and Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese Home Islands. (Tokyo was 550 miles/855 kilometers away.)…
London, England • March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, 2 weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed by the French a few days later, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. “If any action clearly threatened…
