Department of the Navy, Washington, D.C. · November 13, 1942 Commissioned on February 14, 1942, the light antiaircraft cruiser USS Juneau (CL‑52), named after the capital city of Alaska, first saw service in the Caribbean, where it performed blockade patrol in early May off Martinique and Guadeloupe Islands to prevent the escape of Vichy French…
Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands · November 12, 1942 On this date in 1942 in the South Pacific, U.S. and Japanese fleets began the four-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, often at point-blank range and under the cover of darkness. Variously referred to as the Third and Fourth Battles of Savo Island, the Battle of the…
Bari, Italy · November 8, 1943 In this date in 1943, 13 U.S. Army flight nurses, 13 young enlisted medics, and 3 flight crew boarded a Douglas C‑53 transport in Sicily for a 90‑minute flight to Bari on the Italian mainland. As a unit of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, the team’s assignment was to…
Tokyo, Japan · November 5, 1941 Early in September 1941 Japanese officials gave their diplomats until October to reverse the policy of the Western powers—principally the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands—of restricting Japan’s access to vital Southeast Asian resources, among them oil, rubber, tin, timber, and rice. The restrictions had been imposed the previous…
Chungking, China · October 31, 1944 The war against the Japanese in China was desultory at best, and service in that theater was viewed as a graveyard by U.S. military and diplomatic officials. On this date, October 31, 1944, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer arrived to replace dismissed Gen. Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell as commander of…
Honolulu, Hawaii · October 29, 1943 In World War II’s Pacific Theater, sea mines—explosive underwater devices that damaged, sank, or deterred Japanese warships, submarines, and maritime commerce—were weapons that had difficulty gaining the same respect as guns, bombs, and torpedoes enjoyed in the U.S. arsenal. Over time, however, a small number of mining advocates in…
Off the China Coast · October 25, 1944 By October 1944 U.S. Navy submarine Tang and her skipper Richard O’Kane were legendary. (O’Kane had earlier made a name for himself aboard the Wahoo as executive officer under Dudley Walker “Mush” Morton.) The Tang, a Balao-class submarine, was credited during the war years not only with sinking…
Leyte, Philippines · October 20, 1944 In October 1944 Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded 225,000 Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. On this date in 1944, on a 25‑mile stretch of Leyte Island in the Philippines, an Allied fleet of more than 730 transport and escort vessels, supported by aircraft carriers and 100 warships, put 160,000 U.S. troops…
Moscow, Soviet Union · October 19, 1941 On this date in 1941, the day the official “state of siege” was declared in the Soviet capital of Moscow, Red Army forces from the Soviet Far East and Siberia began arriving on the Russian Front. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was convinced that evacuating most of his troops…
Tokyo, Japan · October 13, 1940 On this date in 1940 Japan’s foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who had grown up in Oregon and California (1893–1902), invited the United States and other nonaligned nations to join the Tripartite Pact, which Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan had initialed in Berlin the previous month (September 27). The Pact…
