London, England · June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 5 in/196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from London on this date in 1940. In a…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
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…
Normandy, Liberated France · June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy D-Day. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel, when on this date in 1944 in Normandy, France, the U.S. First Army under Gen. Omar Bradley assaulted Utah and Omaha beaches, while to the east British and Canadian units of…
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France · June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the people of Sainte-Mère-Église on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, retired to their beds on the eve of the largest air- and seaborne invasion in history—Operation Overlord. As early as 1942, U.S. military planners had been eyeing this crossroads town. If the…
London, England · June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been the big day, the Allied invasion of a 50‑mile stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when the weather had been perfect, to June to allow another…
London, England · June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Off the Normandy Coast, Occupied France · May 29, 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‑boot was particularly successful as a weapon against Allied supply and troop ships. Influenced by a captured one-man…
Berlin, Germany · May 24, 1943 In June 1942 German submarines sank 637,000 tons of British shipping—a greater total than in any previous or subsequent month. So many prowling U‑boats made it hard for merchant convoys sailing in the major trans-Atlantic traffic lanes to evade detection. The next year, in March, Atlantic U‑boats sank 82 ships (476,000 tons)…
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…
