Along the Eastern Front · June 28, 1942 On this date in 1942 on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler launched Germany’s second summer campaign against the Soviet Union in 2 years. (The first had been Operation Barbarossa begun the previous June, which had been intended to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1941.)…
London, England • April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Moscow, Soviet Union • October 15, 1941 On June 22, 1941, the day Adolf Hitler sprang his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, a country of 180 million people to Germany’s east, he reportedly confided to some of his intimates: “I feel as if I have opened a door into a dark, unseen room—without knowing what lies behind…
London, England • April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of Commons,…
Aboard HMS Duke of York • December 12, 1941 On this date in 1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the immediate impact of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval and air bases at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” posture, boarded the British battleship HMS Duke of York,…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union • November 1, 1942 By one German count, over five million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner since Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union begun 16 months earlier. As for the number of Soviet service personnel killed and disabled, there was only a rough estimate, but clearly…
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 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 Japanese citizens celebrated the 15th anniversary of the succession to the Imperial Throne of Emperor Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa), according to tradition the 124th direct descendant of Jimmu, the legendary first ruler of the Empire of the Rising Sun. Festive toasts…
Berlin, Germany · December 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Berlin, one day before receiving the credentials of the new Soviet ambassador to Germany, Adolf Hitler signed Fuehrer Directive 21, Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), thereby initiating the secret preparations and military operations that led to the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,…
Aboard HMS Duke of York · December 12, 1941 On this date in 1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the immediate impact of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” posture, boarded the battleship HMS Duke of York for an Atlantic…