Moscow, Soviet Union · December 6, 1941 Three weeks after launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Germans and their Axis partners had reached close enough to Moscow to fly sorties and bomb the Soviet capital. Tactically, the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) won resounding victories, taking over 3 million Soviet prisoners in 1941 and seizing…
Toulon Harbor, French Mediterranean · November 27, 1942 Between November 10 and 12, 1942, Germany and Italy engaged in a joint operation (German, Unternehmen Anton, or Case Anton) to occupy Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy France, the French Riviera, and the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. These three areas comprised the so-called “Free Zone,” which was…
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 “Retribution Weapon 2”) with its one‑ton payload of high explosives was truly a weapon of mass destruction. After these deadly…
Bucharest, Romania · November 23, 1940 In September 1940 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being sent to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” Early the next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · November 19, 1942 On this date in 1942 the Soviets kicked off Operation Uranus, Phase I of the Red Army’s encirclement of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army (the single-largest German troop formation), as well as the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Third and Fourth Romanian armies at Stalingrad (today’s Volgograd)….
London, England · November 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Royal Air Force Bomber Command under Arthur “Bomber” Harris launched the airborne Battle of Berlin, which lasted through March 1944. Harris believed the aerial assault on Berlin—if it came anywhere close to Hamburg’s terrifying destruction the previous July (Operation Gomorrah)—could be the blow…
Telemark, Occupied Norway · November 16, 1943 In the spring of 1940 Norway fell under the Nazi jackboot in a campaign that lasted 62 days and cost 5,000 lives on both sides. Three and a half years later, on this date in 1943, a massive daylight bombing raid by 143 U.S. Army Air Forces B‑17s caused extensive damage…
Cologne, Germany · November 15, 1944 As the Allied offensive ground on west of the Rhine River, dozens of German tank and infantry divisions gathered in assembly areas northwest of the city of Cologne and in the thick forest cover of the Eifel Mountains on this date in 1944. Conceived by Adolf Hitler, the plan,…
Coventry, England · November 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 the first firestorm of the war was inflicted on Coventry, England, a city of almost 240,000 people, during the German Blitz against that country. German “pathfinder” bombers flying along radio-direction beams targeted the medieval cathedral city and industrial-munitions center in the English Midlands. Nearly…
Bari, Italy · November 8, 1943 In this date in 1943, 13 U.S. Army flight nurses, 13 young enlisted medics, and 3 flight crew boarded a Douglas C‑53 transport in Sicily for a 90‑minute flight to Bari on the Italian mainland. As a unit of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, the team’s assignment was to…
