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…
London, England · November 25, 1944 On this date in 1944 a German ballistic missile slammed into a crowded Woolworths store in London, England, killing 160 civilians and seriously injuring 108 more. The V‑2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2, or “Vengeance Weapon 2”) with its one‑ton payload of high explosives was truly a weapon of mass destruction. After these deadly results,…
Brenner Pass, Italy · October 4, 1940 On this date in 1940, at a border crossing between Germany and Italy, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met for the seventh time. (The two would meet seventeen times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the two dictators followed on the heels of their June 18 meeting in Munich, which…
Berlin, Germany · September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some two 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 Wehrmacht (German armed…
London, England · August 15, 1940 Although the Battle of Britain (July 10 to October 31, 1940) had intensified days earlier, the Luftwaffe’s air attacks had been launched in poor weather and mostly limited to the south of England. However, on this date in 1940 the Luftwaffe sent five waves of fighters, dive bombers, and…
London, England · July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized the Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey off the Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the lone European…
London, England · June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 4 in), young (49), relatively unknown French general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from London on this date in 1940. In a celebrated…
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…
Hermann Goering (or Göring) was a World War I fighter ace who joined the Nazi Party in 1923. He helped Adolf Hitler plan the Munich Beer Hall Putsch against the Bavarian government the same year, was wounded in the leg and groin on the afternoon of November 9 when police fired into the crowd at the Odeonsplatz in…
When Preparations completed in August 1940 Where Southeast English coast from Ramsgate and Dover (county Kent) in the north to Portsmouth (county Sussex) and Devon in the south, as well as the Isle of Wight off the south coast of Hampshire Who Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) (English: Supreme Command of the Armed…