Red Wind over the Balkans: The Soviet offensive south of the Danube, September-October 1944
ASIN: 1910777803
[amzn_product_post]
Tokyo, Japan · December 9, 1940 On September 27, 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, or Axis Pact as it was also known. The Pact was an outgrowth of the “Rome-Berlin Axis” celebrated by the Italo-German “Pact of Steel,” which Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Benito…
Washington, D.C. · December 22, 1941 On this date in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their respective chiefs of staff assembled in Washington, D.C., for their first strategic conference as combatants-in-arms. The First Washington Conference, codenamed Arcadia, was the second face-to-face meeting (there would be nine in all) between…
Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945 On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/16 kilometers north of Munich, Bavaria’s capital, U.S. soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Rainbow Division,” the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, and the 27th Tank Battalion were overwhelmed by the horror they saw as they closed in on Dachau concentration…
Berlin, Germany · August 26, 1939 Serious discussions between the Nazi and Soviet regimes began secretly in late July 1939. On August 21 Germany announced that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been invited to Moscow. Two days later the world learned that Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, had initialed a non-aggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)…
Moscow, Soviet Union · December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Germans and their Axis partners had reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet capital. Tactically, the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) won resounding victories, taking over three million Soviet prisoners in 1941 and seizing…
Salzburg, Austria · April 8, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time since the collapse of the Axis defense of Stalingrad at the end of January. Ignoring Mussolini’s trial balloon about negotiating a ceasefire with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, Hitler remained convinced…