Berlin, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; and London, England • August 27, 1939 On this date in 1939, just a day after Adolf Hitler aborted his plan to invade his eastern neighbor, Poland, German mobilization continued. Between August 25 and 31, a further 21 infantry divisions and 2 motorized divisions were in place along the German-Polish frontier. No reserve units were…
Salzburg, Austria • August 11, 1939 On this date in 1939 near Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, about Hitler’s decision “to set Europe on fire.” “We want war,” Ribbentrop said to the 36‑year‑old Ciano (who was Mussolini’s son-in-law), though the German foreign…
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…
Berlin, Germany • July 19, 1940 Military operations between France and the Axis powers—that is, Germany and Italy—ended on June June 25, 1940. A week and a half earlier, on June 14, the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) marched unchallenged into the nearly deserted French capital of Paris under skies heavy with soot from the oil reserves the…
Kursk, Soviet Union • July 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 Operation Citadel (Unternehmen Zitadelle), Adolf Hitler’s delayed gambit to retake the important Soviet rail hub of Kursk, south of Moscow, and straighten the German line on the Eastern Front failed with devastating losses on both sides, but especially to German strategic armored reserves….
Berlin, Germany • June 29, 1934 Late on this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler unleashed an extraordinary murder spree known as the “Night of the Long Knives” (“Nacht der Langen Messer”). President Paul von Hindenburg’s doctors had leaked news that the 86‑year-old German military hero had only months to live. Hitler feared that…
Munich, Germany • June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the 2 conspirator…
Malta, Central Mediterranean • June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta, a British possession since 1800. Benito Mussolini speculated…
Berlin, Germany • May 22, 1939 On this date in 1939 Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed the “Pact of Steel” (German, Stahlpakt; Italian, Patto d’Acciaio). The pack, known formally as the “Pact of Friendship and Alliance,” tied the 2 dictatorships in a 10‑year military and political alliance and stipulated, among other things, that neither…