Boljanić, German-Occupied Yugoslavia • December 27, 1944 On this date in December 1944 the last 20 U.S. airmen were extracted in a hazardous Balkan air rescue courtesy of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Operation Halyard (aka Halyard Mission) began nearly 5 months earlier on August 2, though it had been…
Berlin, Germany • September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The announcement was Berlin’s warning shot across Moscow’s bow that the Soviets were…
Ploesti (Ploiești), Romania • August 1, 1943 Allied war planners had long favored a second, much more damaging air strike on the Ploesti (Ploiești) oil complex, the center of Romania’s natural oil industry some 35 miles/56 km north of the capital, Bucharest. In mid-June 1942, 13 U.S. B‑24 Liberators lifted off from a British airfield in Egypt, crossed…
Foggia Airfield Complex, Southeast Italy • June 16, 1944 On this date in 1944 nearly 600 B‑17 Flying Fortresses and B‑24 Liberators from the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force took off from bases in Foggia, Southeastern Italy, to attack oil refineries around Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. After Romania, Austria was the biggest Axis crude oil producer,…
Crete, Eastern Mediterranean • May 20, 1941 With the start of marathon German operations against the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a month away, Adolf Hitler needed to ensure that his oil supplies in and around Ploiești, Romania, where he had sent a German “military mission,” would not come under Allied bomber attack from stationary…
London, England • September 21, 1944 On this date in 1944 some 147 of 154 dispatched B‑17 Flying Fortresses bombed the synthetic oil plant at Ludwigshafen, an industrial city on the Rhine River in West-Central Germany. The sortie was one of 7 (for a total of more than 1,400 B‑17s) that unloaded high-explosive and incendiary…
Budapest, Hungary • January 4, 1945 In March 1944 Adolf Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) to occupy his wavering Axis ally Hungary, whose oil reserves and fuel storage tanks at Nagykanizsa (German, Grosskirchen) southwest of the capital Budapest in the Lake Balaton (German, Plattensee) area had grown strategically more important to the German…
Bucharest, Romania · November 23, 1940 In September 1940 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being sent to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” Early the next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…
London, England · September 21, 1944 On this date in 1944 some 147 of 154 dispatched B‑17 Flying Fortresses bombed the synthetic oil plant at Ludwigshafen, an industrial city on the Rhine River in West-Central Germany. The sortie was one of seven (for a total of more than 1,400 B‑17s) that unloaded high-explosive and incendiary bombs on…
Berlin, Germany · September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…