Berlin, Germany · September 26, 1944 On this date in 1944 the German news agency announced the surrender of 600 British troops in a small village west of Arnhem in the Netherlands. For days the lightly armed men of the British 1st Airborne Division had held the northern end of a key bridge that crossed…
Marseille, France · August 16, 1944 On this date in 1944, two-and-one-half months after the Allies had landed in Northern France (Operation Overlord) and one day after thousands of servicemen from the U.S. Seventh and French First armies had landed by air and sea on the French Riviera (Operation Dragoon), Adolf Hitler reversed himself and…
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…
Berlin, Germany · April 14, 1945 Austria’s capital Vienna fell to the Red Army on April 13, 1945, and the Soviet News Agency announced it to the world on this date in 1945, the same day Adolf Hitler, in his Fuehrerbunker under the rubble of the Reich Chancellery, learned of it. The Austrian front had…
Ohrdruf, Central Germany · April 4, 1945 Over the first three weeks of April 1945, during the brutal terminal phase of the Third Reich, Allied armies discovered more than one hundred concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Flossenbuerg, and Bergen-Belsen. On this date in 1945 soldiers of Gen. George S. Patton’s Fourth Armored Division unexpectedly came upon…
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 Law Montgomery. It kicked off on this date in 1945 when the first set of 300,000 U.S., British, and Canadian troops…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Law 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, Jr., sneaked a division of…
Bastogne, Belgium · January 25, 1945 On this date in 1945, in the thickly forested Belgian Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge (referring to the German-induced bulge in Allied lines) effectively ended. The largest, most costly land battle fought by American soldiers in World War II marked in many ways the U.S. Army’s finest performance. Besides…
South West Pacific Area HQ, Brisbane, Australia · January 24, 1944 On this date in 1944 an advance party of the 93rd Infantry Division landed on the Pacific Island of Guadalcanal, the first African American (“colored” was the term used at the time) infantry unit to see action in World War II. Reactivated on May 15, 1942,…
SHAEF HQ, France · December 16, 1944 “It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain,” Adolf Hitler told his generals on December 12, 1944. Four days later, on this date in 1944, elements of four German armies, comprising nearly 300,000 German troops in 14 infantry and 5 panzer divisions, smashed through the Ardennes…