Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands • February 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 Guadalcanal, the largest of the nearly one thousand islands in the Solomon Islands chain, was declared secure. U.S. Marines had landed on the previously obscure island beginning on August 7, 1942, in the first major offensive by Allied forces against Japan. Operation Watchtower, as…
West New Britain, Papua New Guinea • December 26, 1943 Following the successful conclusion of the U.S. and Australian Buna-Gona Campaign on New Guinea’s southeastern peninsula in late-January 1943, the Allies moved west along the island’s north shore. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, used Buna (see map, lower…
Coventry, England • November 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 the first firestorm of the war was inflicted on Coventry, England, a city of almost 240,000 people, during the German Blitz against that country. German “pathfinder” bombers flying along radio-direction beams targeted the medieval cathedral city and industrial-munitions center in the English Midlands. For…
Tokyo, Japan • November 12, 1948 On this date in 1948 some 28 verdicts for Class A war criminals were read out at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), better known as the Tokyo Trials or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Convened in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, on April 29, 1946, to try Japan’s highest-ranking…
Off the China Coast • October 25, 1944 By October 1944 U.S. Navy submarine Tang and her skipper Richard O’Kane were legendary. (O’Kane had earlier made a name for himself aboard the U.S. Navy sub Wahoo as executive officer under Dudley Walker “Mush” Morton.) The Tang, a 312‑ft Balao-class submarine, was credited during the war…
Berlin, Germany • September 27, 1940 On January 6, 1939, Japan was approached by Germany with a proposal to reshape the Anti-Comintern Pact. The anti-communist pact, which Japan had signed with Nazi Germany in 1936 and Fascist Italy in 1937, largely targeted the Soviet Union, Tokyo’s decades-long adversary on the Asian continent. The January proposal…
Aboard USS Shangri-La • July 28, 1945 In December 1941 the Imperial Japanese Navy had the second most powerful navy in the Pacific Theater in World War II and the third largest navy in the world after the U.S. and Royal navies. During the first years of the war the Japanese Combined Fleet (Rengō Kantai), the IJN’s…
Chicago, Illinois • July 3, 1945 On this date in 1945 Hungarian-born physicist and inventor Leó Szilárd drafted the first of two versions of a petition to President Harry S. Truman, urging him not to use the atomic bomb on Japan before that nation had been given a chance to surrender. It was Szilárd who,…
U-852 in Mid-Atlantic Ocean • March 13, 1944 On this date in 1944 German U‑boat 852, skippered by 28‑year‑old Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, torpedoed the British-chartered Greek freighter SS Peleus as it steamed west across the Atlantic from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. After the Peleus sank, U‑852 patrolled the large debris field for five…
58th Bombardment Wing HQ, Kharagpur, India • January 15, 1945 The final strategic bombing raid by American B‑29 Superfortress heavy-bombers based in China occurred on this date in 1945. Targets of Operation Matterhorn, as the bombing of Japanese assets by India- and China-based B‑29s was called, were on the Japanese-occupied island of Formosa (today’s Taiwan). Behind Operation…
