Falaise, Northern France • August 18, 1944 Two and a half months had passed since the initial landings of U.S., British, and Canadian forces in Northern France (Operation Overlord). On the British flank the Canadian First Army, Second Division, II Corps entered Falaise on August 16, 1944 (see map below) and engaged the Germans in bitter street…
Cairo, Egypt • August 5, 1942 On this date in 1942 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, flew into Cairo. They arrived in the Egyptian capital 44 days after the British garrison at Tobruk in Eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) had fallen to German Gen. (soon Field…
London, England • July 25, 1942 On this date in 1942 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned that the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), an amalgam of the high-ranking military officers of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (War and Navy Departments) and their British counterparts, the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, had established the…
Caen, Normandy, France • July 21, 1945 The capture of the historic Norman town of Caen, a city of 62,000, was a key objective of Operation Overlord (June 6, 1944 to August 30, 1944), the start of the Allies’ liberation of German-occupied Western Europe. Overlord’s plans called for the British Second Army and the Canadian…
Cairo, Egypt • July 1, 1941 During World War II Great Britain excelled in creating multiple networks of secret operatives. Perhaps the most famous set of secret agents worked for the Special Operations Executive. Officially formed on July 22, 1940, to “set Europe ablaze,” as Prime Minister Winston Churchill expressed it, the SOE was specifically tasked…
London, England • June 24, 1942 On this date in 1942 Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London, England, to assume administrative and operational command of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army. At the time (end of May) the U.S. Army in Europe consisted of 3 infantry regiments. Set up 16 days prior to…
Normandy, Liberated France • June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy and chilly late spring day, D-Day, arguably the least ordinary day of the 20th century. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, stalked relentlessly by Anglo-American air forces, had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel. Sadly for him, the Luftwaffe chief had just 327 aircraft to oppose the Allied…
Southwick House near Portsmouth, England • June 5, 1944 Weather conditions over France’s Normandy beaches on invasion day, D-Day, tentatively set for this date, June 5, 1944, had to be as ideal as possible before Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower would issue the “go” signal for the largest sea, air, and land invasion ever executed….
Southwick House, Southeast England • June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been an epic day—the day Allied forces invaded a 50‑mile/80‑km stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The cross-Channel invasion of Northwestern France, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when there had been roughly…
London, England • May 30, 1944 In the run-up to the invasion of mainland Europe (Operation Overlord), the Western Allies concocted an ambitious strategic deception plan to mislead their adversaries as to where and when the actual invasion would take place. Called Operation Fortitude, the plan had 2 polar-opposite components. Fortitude North supposedly threatened German-occupied Norway…