Tinian, Mariana Islands · December 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 eighty-six B‑29 Superfortresses belonging to XXI Bomber Command, a unit of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force, left the northwestern Pacific Mariana Islands base on Tinian on their third Tokyo bombing mission. Ten days earlier 111 of these heavy bombers had launched the first raid on…
Kurile Islands, Northern Japan · November 26, 1941 For several months the airmen of Japan’s First Naval Air Fleet had trained for an attack on the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Squadrons of naval planes flew low over the city of Kagoshima on the…
Cairo, Egypt · November 24, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Egypt, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek continued their series of talks during their Cairo Conference (November 23–27, 1943). Churchill and his party had hoped to establish a way to deal with Soviet leader…
Nanking, China · November 22, 1937 On this date in 1937 in Nanking (today’s Nanjing), China’s capital at the time, fifteen foreign businessmen, missionaries, and journalists under the leadership of German national and Nazi Party member John Rabe organized the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone to shelter Chinese refugees against the looming Japanese…
Washington, D.C. · November 20, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, Japanese ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura presented his government’s final proposal for peace in the Asia Pacific region. Through much of 1941, Ambassador Nomura had negotiated with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to resolve festering bilateral issues, among them the Japanese conflict with…
Coventry, England · November 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 the first firestorm of the war was inflicted on Coventry, England, a city of 200,000 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. Nearly 450 bombers rained…
Department of the Navy, Washington, D.C. · November 13, 1942 Commissioned on February 14, 1942, the light anti-aircraft cruiser USS Juneau (CL-52), named after the capital city of Alaska, first saw service in the Caribbean, where it performed blockade patrol in early May off Martinique and Guadaloupe Islands to prevent the escape of Vichy French…
Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands · November 12, 1942 On this date in 1942 in the South Pacific, U.S. and Japanese fleets began the four-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, often at point-blank range and under the cover of darkness. Variously referred to as the Third and Fourth Battles of Savo Island, the Battle of 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 ferry…
Tokyo, Japan · November 5, 1941 Early in September 1941 Japanese officials gave their diplomats until October to reverse the policy of the Western powers—principally the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands—of restricting Japan’s access to vital Southeast Asian resources, among them oil, rubber, tin, timber, and rice. The restrictions had been imposed the previous…
