Washington, D.C. · December 22, 1941 On this date in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their respective chiefs of staff assembled in Washington, D.C., for their first strategic conference as combatants-in-arms. The First Washington Conference, codenamed Arcadia, was the second face-to-face meeting (there would be nine in all) between…
Aboard HMS Duke of York · December 12, 1941 On this date in 1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the immediate impact of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” posture, boarded the battleship HMS Duke of York for an Atlantic…
Manila, Philippines · December 10, 1941 On this date in 1941, 3 days after the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been severely crippled at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese troops landed on the U.S.-held island of Guam in the Western Pacific Ocean and occupied it within hours. On the same day elements of the Japanese 14th Area…
Washington, D.C. · December 8, 1941 At 12:30 p.m. on this date in 1941, standing before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and a world listening by radio, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, laid several typewritten sheets on the speaker’s podium. The day before, the president had calmly and…
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii · December 7, 1941 On this date in 1941, a quiet Sunday morning on the Hawaiian island of Oahu just before 8 o’clock, Japan staged a devious, vicious, unprovoked air and naval attack on America’s doorstep, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine airfields that…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease Program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Kurile Islands, Northern Japan · November 26, 1941 For several months the airmen of Japan’s First Naval Air Fleet had trained for an attack on the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Squadrons of naval planes flew low over the city of Kagoshima on the…
Washington, D.C. · November 20, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Washington, Japanese ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura presented his government’s final proposal for peace in the Asia Pacific region. Through much of 1941, Ambassador Nomura had negotiated with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to resolve festering bilateral issues, among them the Japanese conflict with…
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…
Tokyo, Japan · October 16, 1941 On this date in 1941 Prince Fumimaro Konoe resigned as prime minister of Japan. Konoe had lost the support of cabinet and Army minister Gen. Hideki Tōjō, who called for a firmer line with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the U.S. ban on the export of…