Quebec, Canada · August 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Quebec, Canada, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, along with their Combined Chiefs of Staff, set to work planning Operation Overlord, the 1944 invasion of German-occupied France. At this first of two Quebec conferences,…
Shanghai, China · August 13, 1937 The Battle of Shanghai began on this date in 1937. It was the first major battle of World War II (the European conflict erupted two years later), and it eventually involved nearly one million combatants. When hostilities broke out, Gen. Hajime Sugiyama, minister of war in the Imperial Japanese Army…
Tokyo, Japan · August 12, 1945 In 1945 the endgame in Europe was to take Berlin, the epicenter of Nazi resistance, which the Red Army did in the last week of April. On May 7 and 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s heir, Adm. Karl Doenitz, surrendered Nazi Germany unconditionally to the Allies. The endgame in the Pacific War…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 9, 1945 Despite the shockwaves that Hiroshima’s destruction on August 6, 1945, sent through Imperial circles, Japan’s government refused to agree to an unconditional surrender, their leaders insisting on preconditions that protected the status of Hirohito as emperor. (Without Japanese foot-dragging, would the war have been over…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 8, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Japan, two days after 40,000 Hiroshima men, women, and children had died in an instant (90,000–166,000 would die within days of burns and radiation), U.S. airplanes carpet-bombed the country with over five million leaflets. The leaflets described Hiroshima’s…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 6, 1945 For several months the U.S. had dropped more than 63 million leaflets across Japan, warning civilians of devastating aerial bombings. Many Japanese cities suffered terrible damage from napalm bombs that set their wood-frame buildings on fire. On August 1, some 80 percent of Hachioji, a rail choke point near…
U.S. Seventh Fleet HQ · July 30, 1943 During the Pacific war, U.S. submarines fired some 11,000 torpedoes, sinking hundreds of Japanese warships and well over one thousand merchant ships. The number of lives lost in the later engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions….
Aboard the USS Shangri-La · July 28, 1945 The Imperial Japanese Navy was the second most powerful navy in the Pacific War 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, the IJN’s main ocean-going component, dominated the…
Saigon, French Indochina · July 25, 1941 On September 21, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the capital of China, Nanking, shortly after igniting the Second Sino-Japanese War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed the shock of “every civilized man and woman” over “the ruthless bombing” of Chinese civilians. Generally, however, U.S. and European reaction to Japanese aggression…
San Francisco, California · July 15, 1945 On this date in 1945 the USS Indianapolis, a Portland-class cruiser in California for repairs, received orders to pick up a piece of special cargo at Hunters Point (predecessor name for the now-closed San Francisco Naval Yard). Eleven days later, on July 26, the Indianapolis delivered her mysterious cargo…
