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…
Nanjing (Nanking), China • March 30, 1940 By 1940 Japan had close to a decade’s worth of experience in administering conquered Chinese territory, having installed a puppet government in 1932 in Manchuria, which the Japanese called Manchukuo. On this date, March 30, 1940, in Nanjing (Nanking), China, the Japanese installed Wang Jingwei (Ching-wei) as head of…
Berlin, Germany • March 29, 1945 By 1945 everything was falling apart for the Nazi regime. Most of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union and Western Europe had been recaptured from the Germans. The last gambit by the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • March 28, 1945 On this date in 1945 Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower telegrammed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he proposed, after encircling Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles/80 kilometers west of Berlin, there to…
Paris, Occupied France • March 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of 84‑year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named president of the…
U.S. Navy Offshore Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands • March 26, 1945 Late in 1944 Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, recently appointed commander of the First Air Fleet in Japanese-held Manila, the Philippine’s capital, championed a special attack force (tokubetsu kogeki tai, abbreviated as tokkotai) that would inflict maximum damage on Allied naval vessels squeezing the island empire: Japan’s…
Vienna, Austria • March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not 2 days…
Tokyo, Japan • March 24, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Japanese Deputy Minister of War, Lt. Gen. Kaneshiro Shibayama, informed the Japanese Diet (Parliament) of the formation of a militia for the defense of the Home Islands. A home militia was critical to the nation’s survival because 60 percent of the roughly 4.6 million Japanese combat…
Moscow, Soviet Union (USSR) • March 23, 1941 On this date in 1941 Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka (1940–1941) arrived in Moscow after a 7‑day journey by train from the Siberian port city of Vladivostok. On this his first of 2 visits to senior Soviet officials, Matsuoka met Soviet Premier Vyacheslav Molotov. At the top of Matsuoka’s…
Oppenheim, Germany • March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, 1 day before the mixed British-Canadian 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., sneaked soldiers of the…
