Chungking, China · October 31, 1944 The war against the Japanese in China was desultory at best, and service in that theater was viewed as a graveyard by U.S. military and diplomatic officials. On this date, October 31, 1944, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer arrived to replace dismissed Gen. Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell as commander of…
Rome, Italy · October 8, 1941 Two months before Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on Japan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used this date in 1941 to blast the Japanese for not carrying their weight in the Tripartite Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan had signed…
Moscow, Soviet Union · August 20, 1939 The he Soviet Union and Japan, two expansionist powers that occupied portions of the Asian mainland north of China, butted heads in the Mongolian borderlands as early as 1929. They had also fought a war in 1904–1905, the Russo-Japanese War, over influence in China, Mongolia, and Manchuria, the…
Shanghai, China · August 13, 1937 The Battle of Shanghai began on this date in 1937. It was the first major battle of World War II (the European conflict erupted two years later), and it eventually involved nearly one million combatants. When hostilities broke out, Gen. Hajime Sugiyama, Minister of War in the Imperial Japanese Army…
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), French Indochina · July 25, 1941 On September 21, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the capital of China, Nanking, shortly after igniting the Second Sino-Japanese War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed the shock of “every civilized man and woman” over “the ruthless bombing” of Chinese civilians. Generally, however, U.S. and European…
Tokyo, Japan · May 11, 1939 Europe, the United States, and Japan, profiting from the technological, economic, social, and military advantages conferred on their countries by the Industrial Revolution, began placing weaker nations elsewhere in the world under their “protection.” The United States did that in 1898 when the Philippines became an American territory. Japan…
Nanjing (Nanking), China · March 30, 1940 By 1940 Japan had close to a decade’s worth of experience in administering conquered Chinese territory, having installed a puppet government in 1932 in Manchuria, which the Japanese called Manchukuo. On this date in 1940 in Nanjing (Nanking), China, the Japanese installed Wang Jingwei (Ching-wei) as head of…
Central Burma · March 4, 1945 The British Fourteenth Army was a multinational force that took part in the Burma Campaign (January 1942 to July 1945). Units were drawn from the British Army and the Indian Army, with significant contributions from Ghurkha and West and East African regiments. The Fourteenth Army has often been referred…
Singapore Island, British Malaya · February 8, 1942 On this night and the next day in 1942 in British Malaya (today’s Malaysia) Japanese forces surged over and soon pushed the British-led defenders back to the edges of the 220‑sq-mile/566‑sq-kilometer island of Singapore (the “Gibraltar of the East”), nearly 600 miles/966 kilometers from the initial Japanese landing sites….
New Delhi, India · February 1, 1943 On this date in 1943 in New Delhi, delegates from Great Britain, the U.S., and China opened a conference to develop a campaign plan (codenamed Anakim) for the reconquest of Burma (also called Myanmar), then a British colony, and to reopen the land supply route to China. The…