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…
Berlin, Germany · December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler addressed a toothless Reichstag eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, without technically being forced or even obligated by treaty to…
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…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Riga, Occupied Latvia · November 30, 1941 On November 25 and 29, 1941, Einsatzgruppe 3 (Special Task Group 3), one of many SS (Schutzstaffel) mobile death squads operating behind the front lines, murdered 5,000 “Reich Jews,” that is, German- and Austrian-born Jews. These men, women, and children had arrived in the Baltic ghetto at Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest…
Berlin, Germany · November 29, 1939 On this date in 1939, nearly three months after the German Wehrmacht overran neighboring Poland, launching World War II in Europe, German dictator Adolf Hitler issued Fuehrer Directive Number 9, the first of two directives on measures his country would have to take to render the British economy and infrastructure incapable…
London, England · November 6, 1940 On this date in 1940 a German Heinkel 111 was shot down and sank in the shallows off southern England. A waterlogged X‑Geraet (“X‑device”) was recovered. The X‑Geraet played a role in the Battle of the Beams, a period early in the war when German bombers were equipped with…
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…
Rome, Italy · October 28, 1940 In October 1940 Romanian strongman Gen. Ion Antonescu gave Adolf Hitler permission to occupy his country. Hitler’s Axis partner Benito Mussolini was caught off guard by the news, and the Italian public reacted negatively: for years the Italian dictator and his countrymen had considered Romania to lie within their…
Moscow, Soviet Union · October 19, 1941 On this date in 1941, the day the official “state of siege” was declared in the Soviet capital of Moscow, Red Army forces from the Soviet Far East and Siberia began arriving on the Russian Front. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was convinced that evacuating most of his troops…
