Berlin, Germany · July 19, 1940 Military operations between France and the Axis powers—that is, Germany and Italy—ended on June 25, 1940. Three and a half weeks later, on this date in 1940 in Berlin, victorious Wehrmacht troops marched through the Brandenburg Gate for the first time since Kaiser Wilhelm I’s victory over France in the Franco-Prussian…
London, England · July 10, 1940 On this date in 1940, less than one month after France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and just 10 days after the Germans had seized Great Britain’s Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey off France’s Brittany coast, Luftwaffe aircraft based in France began a relentless aerial campaign targeting the lone European…
Malta, Central Mediterranean · June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Lying 50 miles off the Sicilian coast and 200 miles north of…
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…
Muerwik, near Flensburg, Northern Germany · May 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, twenty-three days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide under the rubble of the Reich capital, Berlin, and sixteen days after emissaries from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s government agreed to the unconditional surrender of all German military forces, a British liaison officer went to…
Berlin, Germany · April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945, a stooped, jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in his command bunker under Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom due to the Wehrmacht’s failure to halt the Soviet advance…
London, England · April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of…
Berlin, Germany · April 11, 1934 On this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler secretly met with German War Minister Gen. Werner von Blomberg, the unofficial representative of the officer corps of the Reichswehr (German armed forces), and reached an agreement that sealed the fate of the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Behind titular President…
Berlin, Germany · March 21, 1943 Adolf Hitler was the target of assassins on at least 30 occasions. On this date in 1943 in Berlin, German army officers made the second of two attempts in March to kill Hitler with a bomb. The week before, two staff officers had planted a bomb aboard Hitler’s private plane….
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…