Berlin, Germany · February 12, 1945 On this date in 1945 German women were called up for service in the Volkssturm (national militia). Adolf Hitler was playing his final card in World War II by mobilizing practically every German civilian for an apocalyptic defense of the Third Reich, a 20th-century Wagnerian Goertterdaemmerung. Nazi themes of death,…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · January 31, 1943 On this date in 1943 Red Army staff officers arrived at German Sixth Army headquarters in Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) to discuss surrender terms for an invading enemy now bereft of ammunition, food, and effective command. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’ defensive perimeter had shrunk to 300 yards when he surrendered…
Near Holtzwihr, Colmar Area, Northeastern France · January 26, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. Army Second Lt. Audie Murphy, age 20, commanded an infantry company when it came under attack from two hundred German infantrymen and a half dozen tanks on the outskirts of Holtzwihr, near Colmar in northeastern France. Armed with an M1 carbine,…
South West Pacific Area HQ, Brisbane, Australia · January 24, 1944 On this date in 1944 an advance party of the 93rd Infantry Division landed on the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal, the first African American (“colored” was the term used at the time) infantry unit to see action in World War II. Reactivated on May 15, 1942,…
Warsaw, Liberated Poland · January 17, 1945 On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Communist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of the Polish capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht, the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. On January 26, 1945, Soviet…
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 of…
Casablanca, Morocco, North Africa · January 14, 1943 This date in 1943 saw the start of the ten-day Casablanca Conference at a seaside resort in Morocco between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been invited to the summit but reportedly…
Saarbruecken, Saarland, Germany · January 13, 1935 On this date in 1935 Germans held a plebiscite in the only part of Germany that remained under foreign occupation following their country’s defeat in World War I—the Saar region, or Saarland in German. The wealth of its coal deposits and their large-scale industrial exploitation, coupled with its location…
Moscow, Soviet Union · January 11, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Germans intercepted a Soviet radio transmission that ominously declared, “Everything is ready.” The Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Carpathian Mountains in the south began the next day with an artillery barrage that…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · January 10, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Soviets launched Operation Ring, their name for the action that tightened the noose around the 250,000-plus soldiers of the German Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Operation Ring had been preceded by Operation Uranus (November 19–23, 1942), a one-million-man-plus Soviet offensive…