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. The most the British were prepared to do was deploy a 315,000‑man…
Slapton Sands, Devonshire Coast, Southwest England · April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (S‑boats, short for Schnell [Fast] boats, aka E-boats) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger, codenamed T‑4. Operation Tiger consisted of…
London, England · January 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed command of the Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to liberate France from the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. A month earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the 53‑year‑old army general Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion…
SHAEP HQ, Versailles, France · January 1, 1945 Nazi Germany’s position on the Western Front had declined precipitously after the D-Day landings of Allied troops on June 6, 1944. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third U.S. Army was driving rapidly into the enemy’s rear. The German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) was aware that German troops were…
Washington, D.C. · December 28, 1941 The Seabees were in effect combat engineers of the U.S. Navy, working and, when necessary, fighting on land. On this date in 1941 Rear Admiral Ben Moreell requested authority to organize a militarized Naval Construction Force, and a week later he gained permission from the Bureau of Navigation (later…
Antwerp, Belgium · December 22, 1944 The German Kriegsmarine possessed several notable midget submarines (Kleinst-U-Boote), one being the one-man Biber (German for “beaver”) and the other the two-man Seehund (German for “seal”). Neither U‑boat was particularly successful as a weapon against Allied ships and merchantman. Influenced by a captured one-man British submarine, a prototype Biber…
Cairo, Egypt · November 24, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Egypt, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek continued their series of talks during their Cairo Conference (November 23–27, 1943). Churchill and his party had hoped to establish a way to deal with Soviet leader…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France · September 30, 1944 On this date in 1944 staff at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) estimated that since the start of the Normandy landings on D-Day, June 6, 1944, one million German soldiers had been killed, captured, or taken prisoner by Allied armed forces. By…
On an English Beach · September 7, 1943 On this date in 1943, on a popular beach near a seaside village in southwestern England, the British military not so secretly tested a giant rocket-propelled, explosive-laden contraption called the Panjandrum, known also as The Great Panjandrum. The highly experimental vehicle, consisting of a pair of 10‑ft‑high steel…
Antwerp, Belgium · September 4, 1944 Almost three months after D-Day British troops, assisted by members of the Belgium resistance, entered Antwerp on this date in 1944. Opening the Belgian port, whose 10 square miles of docks, 20 miles of waterfront, and 600 cranes were 80 miles from open sea on the Scheldt River, was meant to solve the…
