Bucharest, Romania • June 27, 1940 On this date in 1940 Red Army troops invaded Romania in the wake of Romanian King Carol II’s refusal to cede the eastern territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (see map). These territories, once part of Czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary before 1918, had been assigned to…
Berlin, Germany • May 12, 1941 On this date in 1941, two days after Deputy Reich Fuehrer Rudolf Hess had embarked on his historic “peace mission” to England (see story below), Adolf Hitler finally confirmed June 22 as the start date for Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Moving toward the…
London, England • July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s humiliating capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized Great Britain’s Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey off France’s Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in occupied France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the…
Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German…
London, England • December 29, 1940 On this date in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the nation in a radio “fireside chat” to support his proposal to strengthen the U.S. military in light of developments in Europe, the German Luftwaffe delivered a massive attack on London. Almost 3,000 civilians were killed in the…
Berlin, Germany • December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, addressed a toothless Reichstag (German parliament), its members eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after air and naval units of the Imperial Japanese Navy had ambushed the…
Washington, D.C. • November 7, 1941 On March 11, 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Lend-Lease Act, which was a government-back program under which the still-neutral United States would begin supplying Great Britain and members of the British Commonwealth (Australia and New Zealand, for instance), Free French Forces led by Gen….
Berlin, Germany • August 20, 1939 In the early morning hours on this date in 1939 the first of two back-to-back seismic changes to Europe’s political, economic, and geostrategic equilibria occurred with the signing of the German-Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement in Berlin. An outgrowth of monthslong economic and political talks between German and Soviet…
Moscow, Soviet Union • July 1, 1941 Early in the morning of August 24, 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of nonaggression, formally known by the two signatories’ names—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which bore the date August 23, 1939. Neither Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (who was also Soviet Premier)…
Berlin, Germany • September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some 2 months after Germany had invaded Poland, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, instructed a subordinate to draw up a paper on “the possibility of troop landings in England.” The study paper set out four prerequisites. The next month the German Army, with input…