Washington, D.C. • December 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed William Knudsen to head a 4‑member board (Office of Production Management, or OPM) to plan for national defense and coordinate aid to Great Britain following Germany’s total blockade of that island nation in mid-August (Battle of the Atlantic). A Danish…
London, England • December 19, 1939 On the afternoon of August 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s foreign secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop appeared in Moscow’s Kremlin fortress to sign off on the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. The 10‑year pact, also known by the twin surnames of Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Ribbentrop, was the necessary…
Washington, D.C. • December 18, 1944 On December 7 and 8, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unprovoked air and sea attack on U.S. military assets in the Central and Western Pacific Ocean, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Philippines, respectively. On December 11, 1941, the U.S. Congress declared war on the aggressor nation. Seventy…
San Pietro Infine, Southern Italy • December 17, 1943 On this date in 1943 what little remained of the ancient Italian farming community of San Pietro Infine, population 1,400, fell to the U.S. 36th (“Texas”) Infantry Division of Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army—this after the collapse of the Bernhardt Line (or Reinhard Line), an…
Washington, D.C • December 16, 1940 The late 1930s saw storm clouds and thunder rumble over both mainland China and Europe. The 8‑year Second Sino-Japanese war erupted in July 1937, shattering an uneasy truce between the Nationalist Chinese and the Empire of Japan. In mid-March the following year events in Europe threatened full-scale war when Nazi…
Mindoro Island, Philippines • December 15, 1944 On October 17, 1944, the naval, air, and land forces of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, began their assault on the Japanese-held Philippine island of Leyte. Three days later MacArthur and his staff, accompanied by Philippine president Sergio Osmeña, waded onto Palo Beach (Red Beach),…
Berlin, Germany • December 14, 1939 On this date in 1939 Adolf Hitler and high-ranking members of the German Navy and Army met with Norway’s right-wing politician Vidkun Quisling, whose private visit to Berlin had been sponsored by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist. From 1931 to 1933 Quisling had served as Norway’s…
Berlin, Germany • December 13, 1940 Italy had long had an interest in the neighboring Balkans, which lay to the country’s east across the Adriatic Sea. In June 1917 Italian soldiers briefly seized portions of central and southern Albania, declaring them a protectorate. Italian Fascism, which was rooted in Italian nationalism, urged Italians to reestablish…
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Adlerhorst Forward HQ, Central Hessen, Germany • December 12, 1944 “It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain,” Adolf Hitler told his generals on this date, December 12, 1944, at his rural Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) headquarters near Bad Nauheim, Germany, the camouflaged western command outpost that Architect of the Reich…