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…
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…
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 12, 1945 In 1945 the endgame in Europe was to take Berlin, the epicenter of Nazi resistance, which the Red Army did in the last week of April. On May 7 and 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s heir, Adm. Karl Doenitz, surrendered Nazi Germany unconditionally to the Allies. The endgame in the Pacific War…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 9, 1945 Despite the shockwaves that Hiroshima’s destruction on August 6, 1945, sent through Imperial circles, Japan’s government refused to agree to an unconditional surrender, their leaders insisting on preconditions that protected the status of Hirohito as emperor. (Without Japanese foot-dragging, would the war have been over…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 6, 1945 For several months the U.S. had dropped more than 63 million leaflets across Japan, warning civilians of devastating aerial bombings. Many Japanese cities suffered terrible damage from napalm bombs that set their wood-frame buildings on fire. On August 1, some 80 percent of Hachioji, a rail choke point near…
Peconic, Long Island, New York · August 2, 1939 On this date in 1939, one month before the outbreak of World War II, German-born mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibility of using a nuclear chain reaction to produce enormous amounts of energy that could be used in making…
San Francisco, California · July 15, 1945 On this date in 1945 the USS Indianapolis, a Portland-class cruiser in California for repairs, received orders to pick up a piece of special cargo at Hunters Point (predecessor name for the now-closed San Francisco Naval Yard). Eleven days later, on July 26, the Indianapolis delivered her mysterious cargo…
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,…
Pentagon, Washington, D.C. · May 31, 1945 On this date in 1945 a special group met in the Pentagon to search for an alternative to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The group had been called into existence by the new American president, Harry S. Truman. Neither Truman nor anyone else in the room knew…