London, England · June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been the big day, the Allied invasion of a 50‑mile stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when the weather had been perfect, to June to allow another…
London, England · June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Near Tobruk, Libya, North Africa · May 26, 1942 The yearlong Desert War in the wasteland of Western Egypt and Eastern Libya had reached a stalemate in May 1942, with both Allied and Axis sides licking their wounds. The fighting started four days after Benito Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Great Britain and France in…
Berlin, Germany • February 6, 1941 During the German invasion of France in 1940, an ambitious general named Erwin Rommel distinguished himself as the “lead from the front” commander of the 7th Panzer Division. Disregarding the performance-enhancing effects of his consumption of Army-issued Pervitin, a methamphetamine soldiers dubbed “Panzer Schokolade,” Rommel was a daredevil by…
London, England · January 21, 1943 Arguably one of Germany’s greatest assets early in World War II was the Enigma machine. It could encrypt and decrypt sensitive diplomatic and military messages in billions of ways (actually 10 to the 23rd power). The location of U‑boats in the Atlantic, supply convoys, and the orders of battle were…
Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany · January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began 2 days of crisis talks at the Berghof, Hitler’s palatial Alpine residence whose enormous sliding window afforded magnificent views of nearby Berchtesgaden and, in the distance, Salzburg, Austria. High on the agenda was…
Berlin, Germany · December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler addressed a toothless Reichstag eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, without technically being forced or even obligated by treaty to…
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…
Cairo, Egypt · September 13, 1940 On this date in 1940, 250,000 soldiers of the Italian Tenth Army under the command of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani crossed from the Italian colony of Libya into Egypt (see map), where British troops were protecting the Suez Canal, the vital waterway to the Middle Eastern oilfields and beyond that…
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…