Tokyo, Japan • July 2, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference of high-level Japanese officials (Gozen Kaigi), Shōwa Emperor Hirohito sanctioned the military seizure of bases in the south of Vichy French Indochina (present-day Vietnam). It was in keeping with Japan’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to force the surrender of their Chinese…
Tokyo, Japan • June 30, 1941 On September 19, 1931, soldiers of the Kwantung Army (eventually the largest, most prestigious branch of the Imperial Japanese Army) invaded Manchuria in Northeast China from their Chinese base at Port Arthur (known as Ryojun in Japanese; present-day Dalian or Lüshun Port) and established a puppet state they called…
New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands • June 21, 1943 On this date in 1943, the U.S. kicked off Operation Toenails, as the New Georgia campaign was called, with unopposed landings by the elite 4th Marine Raider Battalion followed the next day by the Army’s 43rd Infantry Division. The year before, in October, the Japanese had reconnoitered…
Chidori Airstrip, Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands • June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 Japanese Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi stepped from his plane onto the dirt runway of Iwo Jima’s Chidori airstrip, or Airfield No. 1. Roughly 8 square miles/21 square kilometers of mostly black volcanic ash and stone (cinder) anchored by 554‑ft./169‑m‑high Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima had been…
Off the Mariana Islands, Central Pacific • June 12, 1944 On this date in 1944 in the Marianas, U.S. carrier aircraft began attacking Japanese defenses on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in preparation for the 3‑week battle for the archipelago’s administrative center, Saipan. Eight hundred U.S. warships carrying 162,000 fighting men were set to smash into the…
Normandy, Liberated Northwestern France • June 7, 1944 On this date in 1944 soldiers of the U.S. First Army’s 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion succeeded in permanently raising the first of a slew of 35‑ft./11.6‑m‑long hydrogen-filled, low-floating barrage balloons that would bob in the skies over Omaha and Utah invasion beaches. The morning before, hundreds of trained…
Pentagon, Washington, D.C. • May 31, 1945 On this date in 1945 a special group met in the Pentagon to search for an alternative to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The group had been called into existence by the new American president, Harry S. Truman. Neither Truman nor anyone else in the room knew…
Clark Field, Philippines • May 29, 1945 On this date in 1945 3 test versions of the B‑32 4‑engine Dominators made their first combat appearance in World War II. Leaving Clark Field 60 miles/97 kilometers north of the Philippine capital of Manila, the Dominators targeted a Japanese supply depot less than a flight hour away. Four more B‑32 field…
Hashirajima Anchoring Area, Hiroshima Bay, Japan • May 27, 1942 A little over 4 months after Japan devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet riding at peaceful anchor at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese Shōwa Emperor Hirohito and his Army and Navy staff officers received a rude calling card from Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle and 79 other airmen of…
Attu, Aleutian Islands, Alaska • May 11, 1943 The Japanese assault on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands began with a carrier-based aerial attack on June 3 and 4, 1942, that targeted U.S. Navy and Army facilities at Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island (see map below), the most populous island in the Alaskan archipelago. The carrier strike force was…
