San Francisco, California • July 15, 1945 On this date in 1945 the USS Indianapolis, a fast Portland-class cruiser in California for repairs, received orders to pick up some special cargo at Hunters Point (predecessor name for the now-closed San Francisco Naval Yard). Eleven days later, on July 26, Indianapolis unloaded her mysterious cargo—a large crate…
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La • July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits, aptly named Operation Starvation, Navy air groups destroyed over…
Chicago, Illinois • July 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 Hungarian-born physicist and inventor Leó Szilárd drafted the first of two versions of a petition to President Harry S. Truman, urging him not to use the atomic bomb on Japan before that nation had been given a chance to surrender. It was Szilárd who,…
Quebec, Canada • August 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Quebec, Canada, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, along with their Combined Chiefs of Staff, set to work planning Operation Overlord, the 1944 invasion of German-occupied France. At this first of two Quebec conferences,…
Tokyo, Japan • August 8, 1945 On this date in 1945, Japan’s Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō, the government’s leading civilian proponent of a peace settlement with the Allies, visited Emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa) at his palace to brief him on Hiroshima’s ruin by (as Hirohito later characterized it) “a new and…
Tinian, Mariana Islands · March 27, 1945 An island nation, Japan was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food and strategic materials. On this date, March 27, 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy, hoping to put the final nail in the enemy’s coffin, kicked off Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japanese…
Washington, D.C. · December 31, 1943 By this date in 1943 Boeing delivered its 92nd B‑29 Superfortress to the U.S. government after the giant bomber began rolling off the assembly line the previous September. Even before the country was at war and government funds had been allocated, Boeing had produced a prototype of the long-range…
Telemark, Occupied Norway · November 16, 1943 In the spring of 1940 Norway fell under the Nazi jackboot in a campaign that lasted 62 days and cost 5,000 lives on both sides. Three and a half years later, on this date in 1943, a massive daylight bombing raid by 143 U.S. Army Air Forces B‑17s caused extensive damage…
London, England · October 1, 1938 The storm clouds of war in Europe seemed to have parted on this date in 1938 in London, one day after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his triumph in Munich. Three visits to Germany had been required to part the clouds: the first to the Berghof…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France · September 30, 1944 On this date in 1944 staff at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) estimated that since the start of the Normandy landings on D-Day, June 6, 1944, one million German soldiers had been killed, captured, or taken prisoner by Allied armed forces. By the…