London, England · February 27, 1942 Under the cover of darkness on this date in 1942, 119 British paratroopers kicked off Operation Biting when they parachuted into Nazi-occupied Normandy close to a German radar station in the parish (commune) of La Poterie-Cap-d’Antifer, 12 miles north of the large French harbor of Le Havre. A number of what…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France · February 21, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. fighter-bombers attacked the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden on the Bavarian-Austrian border. The Berghof served as an outpost of Hitler’s Berlin chancellery, making it an obvious target. Further north, in a less symbolic move, more than…
London, England · February 20, 1944 On this date in 1944, while Soviet armed forces were ridding their country of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, U.S. and British air forces embarked on Operation Argument in the skies over the Western Front. Unofficially dubbed “Big Week,” Operation Argument was an intensive 6‑day air campaign…
Dresden, Germany · February 13, 1945 On this night in 1945, Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday, and over the next day, Ash Wednesday, some 1,300 British and American bombers appeared over largely untouched Dresden in Eastern Germany. A city of 642,000 (1939) swelled by 300,000 refugees fleeing from fighting on the Eastern Front, Dresden was the…
London, England · January 12, 1940 On this date in 1940 the German Luftwaffe conducted its first bombing raid on London, the British capital, 4 months after assaulting the Polish capital, Warsaw, at the start of World War II in Europe. Five months later, on May 10, the Royal Air Force retaliated with its first strategic bombing raid…
London, England · January 2, 1945 In the 19th century the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, long associated with gingerbread, sausages, handmade toys, and Christkindlmaerkte (Christmas markets), had become an important industrial center with companies such as engineering and manufacturing giants Siemens and MAN. Both firms contributed mightily to Germany’s war effort—Siemens by producing everything from…
London, England · November 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Royal Air Force Bomber Command under Arthur “Bomber” Harris launched the airborne Battle of Berlin, which lasted through March 1944. Harris believed the aerial assault on Berlin—if it came anywhere close to Hamburg’s terrifying destruction the previous July (Operation Gomorrah)—could be the blow…
London, England · August 15, 1940 Although the Battle of Britain (July 10 to October 31, 1940) had intensified days earlier, the Luftwaffe’s air attacks had been launched in poor weather and mostly limited to the south of England. However, on this date in 1940 the Luftwaffe sent five waves of fighters, dive bombers, and…
London, England · August 4, 1944 The British had begun deploying the first of several bunker-buster bombs (Tallboy and its successor Grand Slam) in 1944 while the Americans had none to deploy. On this date in 1944 the U.S. Eighth Air Force kicked off Operation Aphrodite, a program developed in total secrecy and designed to…
Hamburg, Germany · July 24, 1943 On this date in 1943 over the North German city of Hamburg, the Royal Air Force kicked off Operation Gomorrah (July 24 to August 3, 1943). British retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s firebombing of the medieval city of Coventry in the English Midlands, where 500 tons of explosives and 56 tons of incendiaries over…