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. Set up 16 days earlier, ETOUSA directed U.S. ground, air, and service operations north of Italy and the Mediterranean coast. When…
Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 German troops marched into Paris, forcing the French government to move to Tours, then to Bordeaux, where it set up an impromptu headquarters. In a futile plea to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the French government under Prime Minister Paul Reynaud implored the…
San Leandro, California · May 30, 1942 On this date in California in 1942, California-born Japanese American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to comply with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War and his military commanders to require all Japanese Americans be removed from designated “military areas” and…
London, England · May 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleship Bismarck set out from occupied Norway into the main Atlantic shipping lanes, there to act as long-distance commerce raiders. It was the maiden voyage of Germany’s monstrous battleship, the most lethal weapon in any navy’s…
Reykjavik, Iceland · May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the two West European Allies, at war with Germany for three and a half months now, were…
Washington, D.C. · May 10, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Harry S. Truman signed the Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067. The person behind the directive was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former Treasury Secretary who had long advocated that postwar German occupation include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage…
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…
Washington, D.C. · April 10, 1941 On April 9, 1941, a full year after Operation Weseruebung had brought Denmark and Norway into Nazi Germany’s orbit, the Danish minister in Washington, D.C., Henrik Kauffmann, signed a treaty with the United States, authorizing the U.S. to protect the remote Danish colony of Greenland “against attack by a…
Vienna, Austria · March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not two…
London, England · March 6, 1941 By January 1941 the Allies had lost 1,300 merchant vessels, almost half of them to German U‑boats. Following the enslavement of 120 million people in seven Western and Eastern European countries by Nazi Germany the previous year, the British were reduced to fighting Adolf Hitler’s military juggernaut alone. In…