Long Beach, California • December 23, 1941 Of all the workhorse aircraft in World War II, none was more widely and effectively deployed than the Douglas C‑47 military transport. Nicknamed the “Gooney Bird” by American crewmen and passengers, the C‑47 Skytrain was a derivative of the Douglas propeller-driven commercial airliner, the DC‑3. (The British and Australians…
Dieppe, German-Occupied France • August 19, 1942 Ever since the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had launched its surprise Blitzkrieg on the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) the Allies had been sensitive to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s increasingly desperate appeals to Western leaders to open a “second front now” in Northwestern Europe. British Prime Minister…
Vichy, France • July 11, 1940 On July 10, 1940, the French National Assembly meeting in the municipal opera house in Vichy, France, a small resort town 200 miles/322 kilometers south of German-occupied Paris, ceded its power and authority to Premier Philippe Pétain, the 84‑year-old Maréchal of France and World War I hero. On this date, 1 day later, Marshal…
Vichy, France • September 4, 1942 Because so many young German men were needed on Germany’s Eastern Front to engage the Soviet Army, Adolf Hitler, toward the end of spring 1942, insisted that the French collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain, whose capital was in the central France town of Vichy, assign some 350,000 French workers…