Moscow, Soviet Union · October 19, 1941 On this date in 1941, the day the official “state of siege” was declared in the Soviet capital of Moscow, Red Army forces from the Soviet Far East and Siberia began arriving on the Russian Front. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was convinced that evacuating most of his troops…
Tokyo, Japan · October 16, 1941 On this date in 1941 Prince Fumimaro Konoe resigned as prime minister of Japan. Konoe had lost the support of cabinet and Army minister Gen. Hideki Tōjō, who called for a firmer line with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the U.S. ban on the export of…
Tokyo, Japan · October 13, 1940 On this date in 1940 Japan’s foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who had grown up in Oregon and California (1893–1902), invited the United States and other nonaligned nations to join the Tripartite Pact, which Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan had initialed in Berlin the previous month (September 27). The Pact…
Northern Mariana Islands · October 12, 1944 The Pacific Theater was the largest theater of World War II. Because of its watery expanse, Army aviation engineers and Seabees had to build more than 100 airfields on islands that dotted the Pacific Ocean, from New Guinea in the south, up through Guam, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, to Okinawa….
Honolulu, Hawaii · October 11, 1943 On this date in 1943 the USS Wahoo, a Gato-class (early World War II) submarine under Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, was sunk in the La Pérouse (Soya) Strait, the channel that separates the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō and the Japanese-held southern half of Sakhalin Island (today’s Sakhalin Oblast in Russia’s…
Tokyo, Japan · October 9, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Tokyo, Baron Kijūrō Shidehara became Prime Minister of Japan at the head of a constitutional government committed to pursuing a peaceful future. Before the war Shidehara had been a prominent Japanese diplomat and a leading proponent of pacifism in Japan. On the same…
Rome, Italy · October 8, 1941 Two months before Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on Japan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used this date in 1941 to blast the Japanese for not carrying their weight in the Tripartite Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan had signed…
Washington, D.C. · October 7, 1940 In the 1930s Japan’s statesmen and military leaders in China were acutely aware that their economy and armed forces were dependent on imports from the United States and its colonial friends who had holdings in the Asia Pacific region: the Americans in the Philippines, the British in Malaya (now…
Washington, D.C. · October 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Japanese news agency Domei acknowledged that the 8,000‑ton Konron Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the west coast of the Japanese home island of Honshū, with the loss of 544 lives. The troopship was sunk by the USS Wahoo using the new,…
Vichy, France · September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to Vichy French authorities for permission to station troops in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and for their warships to take up naval stations off Northern Indochinese ports. On…
