London, England • June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Paris, France • May 10, 1940 On this date in 1940 the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) began its western offensive, the dual conquest of France, like Great Britain at war with Nazi Germany since September 3, 1939, and the neutral Low Countries. The year before, on October 9, 1939, five weeks after setting in motion the conquest…
London, England • December 29, 1940 On this date in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the nation in a radio “fireside chat” to support his proposal to strengthen the U.S. military in light of developments in Europe, the German Luftwaffe delivered a massive attack on London. Almost 3,000 civilians were killed in the…
Wilbur Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio • April 22, 1945 During the war Allied countries were keen to gain access to the products of German research and development. A British commando raid on a German radar installation on February 27–28, 1942, in occupied France convinced British scientists who analyzed the radar array that it was impervious to…
Berlin, Germany • September 17, 1940 In November 1939, some 2 months after Germany had invaded Poland, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, instructed a subordinate to draw up a paper on “the possibility of troop landings in England.” The study paper set out four prerequisites. The next month the German Army, with input…
Cologne, Germany • May 30, 1942 During World War II in Europe Allied air power had several principle objectives. Foremost among them were destroying Nazi Germany’s war-making capacity, oil installations, and transportation networks; demoralizing Germans by laying waste to their population centers, where mostly civilians lived, many working for the military-industrial firms in the area;…
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…
London, England • April 16, 1941 This night and early the next morning in 1941, when London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral was bombed and damaged, marked the start of the final phase of the Blitz (September 7, 1940, to May 21, 1941), which reached its climax on May 10 with a deadly raid that hit the House of Commons,…
Rotterdam, The Netherlands • May 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Holland, the German Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam’s medieval city center, killing nearly 1,000 people and leaving 85,000 homeless. Rather than endure more ferocious bombings—leaflets dropped on Utrecht indicated it was next Dutch city in German crosshairs—the Dutch Army surrendered the next day. The German…
London, England · December 29, 1940 On this date in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the nation in a radio “fireside chat” to support his proposal to strengthen the U.S. military in light of developments in Europe, the German Luftwaffe delivered a massive attack on London. Almost 3,000 civilians were killed in the…