Cairo, Egypt · June 21, 1942 After a disorderly retreat by the British Eighth Army into Egypt following Erwin Rommel’s breakthrough of the Gazala line in mid-June, the Desert Fox stormed the Mediterranean fortress and harbor of Tobruk in Eastern Libya on this date in 1942. The newly minted German field marshal seized huge quantities…
Malta, Central Mediterranean · June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Lying 50 miles off the Sicilian coast and 200 miles north…
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. His armored formation was nicknamed the “Ghost Division” owing to its rapid thrusts and independence. Adolf Hitler had more than a…
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…
Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany · January 19, 1941 On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began two 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…
Rommel was a highly decorated officer in World War I, distinguished for his exploits on the Italian front. Between the two world wars he held battalion commands, served as an instructor at a war college, and authored several military textbooks, catching the eye of Hitler, who asked him to conduct a tour of Hitler Youth…
Montgomery saw service in France during World War I, rising to the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1919 he briefly commanded a battalion in the British Army of the Rhine. Later he saw service in India and in the British mandate of Palestine, where, promoted to major general in October 1938, he put down an…