Antwerp, Belgium • September 4, 1944 Almost three months after D-Day British troops, assisted by members of the Belgian resistance, entered Antwerp on this date in 1944. They seized Belgium’s port on the Scheldt River before the Germans could destroy its installations. Opening Western Europe’s largest deep-water port, whose 10 square miles of docks, 20 miles of…
Moscow, Soviet Union · April 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 Soviet Gen. Géorgui Zakharov placed a patrol of six Yak‑7s with Soviet pilots under Free French command. The initial six French pilots formed a mixed patrol of six French and six Russian planes. The brainchild of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the…
Ottawa, Canada · December 30, 1941 On December 28, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill left Washington’s Union Station for Canada. Six days earlier Churchill and his military and civilian advisers had arrived in the nation’s capital to meet with their American and Canadian counterparts. The visit by the two heads of state between Christmas…
Washington, D.C. · December 24, 1941 On this grim date, Christmas Eve 1941, a tiny piece of Vichy France—the Atlantic islets of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, whose granite outcroppings lay just 12 miles off the Newfoundland coast adjacent to Canada—fell to the forces of Free France. It was the first French territory to be liberated in…
Washington, D.C. · December 22, 1941 On this date in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their respective chiefs of staff assembled in Washington, D.C., for their first strategic conference as combatants-in-arms. The First Washington Conference, codenamed Arcadia, was the second face-to-face meeting (there would be nine in all) between…
Bucharest, Romania · December 21, 1937 On this date in 1937 Romania’s last free elections (until 1990) ended in the ouster of the middle-of-the road National Liberal government. The Liberals, who remained the largest party in parliament, were unable to form a coalition government with the next 2 runner-up parties. A week later King Carol II named the…
London, England · December 19, 1939 In the afternoon of August 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s foreign secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop appeared in Moscow’s Kremlin fortress to sign off on the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. The 10‑year pact, also known by the twin surnames of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Ribbentrop, was…
Berlin, Germany · December 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Berlin, one day before receiving the credentials of the new Soviet ambassador to Germany, Adolf Hitler signed Fuehrer Directive 21, Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), thereby initiating the secret preparations and military operations that led to the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,…
Washington, D.C. and London, England · December 17, 1942 In remarks he made to senior Nazis at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 22, 1942, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head Office and head of the German secret police apparatus, spoke of “practical experience” that was being collected “in…
SHAEF HQ, France · December 16, 1944 “It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain,” Adolf Hitler told his generals on December 12, 1944. Four days later, on this date in 1944, elements of four German armies, comprising nearly 300,000 German troops in 14 infantry and 5 armored (panzer) divisions (tank divisions), smashed…
