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 had fallen to German Gen. (soon Field Marshal) Erwin Rommel…
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. Set up 16 days earlier, ETOUSA directed U.S. ground, air, and service operations north of Italy and the Mediterranean coast. When…
Cairo, Egypt · June 21, 1942 After a disorderly retreat by the British Eighth Army into Egypt following Erwin Rommel’s breakthrough of the Gazala line in mid-June, the Desert Fox stormed the Mediterranean fortress and harbor of Tobruk in Eastern Libya on this date in 1942. The newly minted German field marshal seized huge quantities…
Normandy, Liberated France · June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy D-Day. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel, when 71 years ago on this date in 1944 in Normandy, France, the U.S. First Army under Gen. Omar Bradley assaulted Utah and Omaha beaches, while to the east British and…
London, England · June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been the big day, the Allied invasion of a 50-mile stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when the weather had been perfect, to June to allow another…
Near Tobruk, Libya, North Africa · May 26, 1942 The yearlong Desert War in the wasteland of western Egypt and eastern Libya had reached a stalemate in May 1942, with both Allied and Axis sides licking their wounds. The fighting started four days after Benito Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Great Britain and France in…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · March 28, 1945 On this date in 1945 Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower telegrammed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he proposed, after encircling the Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles from Berlin, there to…
Xanten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · March 23, 1945 In the aftermath of Operation Market Garden, the inventive but failed September 1944 thrust into Germany, came Operation Plunder, another offensive conceived by British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. It kicked off on this date in 1945 when the first set of 300,000 U.S., British, and Canadian troops crossed…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton sneaked a division of his U.S….
Berlin, Germany · February 6, 1941 During the German invasion of France in 1940, an ambitious general named Erwin Rommel distinguished himself as the “lead from the front” commander of the 7th Panzer Division. His armored formation was nicknamed the “Ghost Division” owing to its rapid thrusts and independence. Adolf Hitler had more than a…