London, England • June 25, 1940 Under the threat of imminent invasion from Nazi Germany, the British government on this date in 1940 began interning all suspect aliens living in the United Kingdom. Thousands of Germans, Austrians, and Italians, including Jewish refugees from the Nazis, were placed behind barbed wire in England (racetracks and unfinished…
London, England • June 24, 1942 On this date in 1942 Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London, England, to assume administrative and operational command of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army. At the time (end of May) the U.S. Army in Europe consisted of 3 infantry regiments. Set up 16 days prior to…
London, England • June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (66 ft., 5 in./196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French brigadier general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from the BBC in London on this date in…
Malta, Central Mediterranean • June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta, a British possession since 1800. Benito Mussolini speculated…
London, England • June 10, 1943 On this date in 1943 U.S. and British air forces unleashed their Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) against industrial targets valuable to Nazi Germany’s war machine, particularly to the Luftwaffe. The CBO had several antecedents. In late 1942 both the British and the Americans had identified “bottleneck” German industries (Great…
London, England • June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFNL). Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk, the Channel port in Northwestern France (May 26 to June 4,…
Berlin, Germany • May 28, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler informed his senior military commanders of his plans to march into neighboring Czechoslovakia and erase that country from the map. No serious objections were raised by those who heard the German dictator ring the death knell for Czechoslovakia and for the European…
Muerwik, near Flensburg, Northern Germany • May 23, 1945 Twenty-three days after German dictator Adolf Hitler had committed suicide under the rubble of his Reich capital, and sixteen days after military emissaries from Reich President Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s government agreed to the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces, a telephone call reached the admiral’s…
London, England • May 19, 1940 Following Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, neither of the Allies committed to launching a significant land offensive against Adolf Hitler’s Germany as punishment for the invasion of its eastern neighbor, Poland, which was in a treaty relationship with the two Western powers. The…
London, England • May 15, 1940 On this date, just five days after assuming the top leadership position in Great Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a telegram to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was also 5 days since the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had flooded over the borders of the Low Countries and France,…