Gulf of Salerno, Italy • September 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Italy, the Allies from their strongholds in North Africa and Sicily invaded the boot-shaped Italian mainland at the historic port of Salerno 29 miles/47 km southeast of Naples (Operation Avalanche), with diversionary landings at Reggio di Calabria (Operation Baytown, September 3, 1943), which lay…
Fort William Henry Harrison, Helena, Montana • July 9, 1942 On this date in 1942 the First Special Service Force was activated as a joint U.S.-Canadian force. Regarded as parents of the U.S. Green Berets, the United States Special Operations Command, and the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, these volunteers were the shock troops of the…
Tokyo, Japan · December 9, 1940 On September 27, 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, or Axis Pact as it was also known. The Pact was an outgrowth of the “Rome-Berlin Axis” celebrated by the Italo-German “Pact of Steel,” which Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Benito…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease Program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Bari, Italy · December 2, 1943 World War I combatants had used a variety of poison gases on each other ranging from incapacitating and temporarily blinding the enemy to gases that burned the body, destroyed the lungs, and liquefied tissues. Sometimes their use had unintended consequences, as when the gases inflicted casualties on the users…
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)….
Rome, Italy · November 17, 1938 On July 14, 1938, Italy’s Manifesto of Racial Scientists (Manifesto Degli Scienziati Razzisti) laid out a scientific explanation for the politics of biological racism. Signed by 42 eminent Italians, the manifesto, published in Il Giornale d’Italia, a newspaper strongly supporting Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, declared that Italians belonged to…
Alexandria, Egypt · November 11, 1940 Italian Army operations in North Africa, based in Libya, required a supply line from the Italian mainland. The British Army’s North African Campaign, based in Egypt, suffered from supply difficulties in the Mediterranean Theater due to the proximity of Italy’s Regia Marina naval base at Taranto on the Italian…
Munich, Germany · November 10, 1942 On this date in 1942, just 2 days after Allied landings in Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch), Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent his son-in-law, foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, to Munich in his stead to speak with Adolf Hitler. Mussolini had wanted to meet the Fuehrer in Salzburg, in the…
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…