Cologne, Germany · November 15, 1944 As the Allied offensive ground on west of the Rhine River, dozens of German tank and infantry divisions gathered in assembly areas northwest of the city of Cologne and in the thick forest cover of the Eifel Mountains on this date in 1944. Conceived by Adolf Hitler, the plan,…
Tunis, Tunisia · November 9, 1942 On this date in 1942, one day after the largest amphibious invasion force in history to that time landed Allied troops on the Algerian and Moroccan coasts, German troops, tanks, and aircraft starting pouring into neighboring Tunisia from bases in Italy. Operation Torch, under the command of Gen. Dwight…
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 Holland. For days the lightly armed men of the British 1st Airborne Division had held the northern end of a key bridge that crossed the…
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 Rommel…
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 been…
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 U.S. Third Army unexpectedly came…
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….
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 four British…