Washington, D.C • December 16, 1940 The late 1930s saw storm clouds and thunder rumble over both mainland China and Europe. The 8‑year Second Sino-Japanese war erupted in July 1937, shattering an uneasy truce between the Nationalist Chinese and the Empire of Japan. In mid-March the following year events in Europe threatened full-scale war when Nazi…
Manila, Philippines • December 10, 1941 At 3:40 a.m. on December 8, 1941 (Manila time), 1 hour and 40 minutes after the start of Japan’s unprovoked air and naval attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 62‑year-old Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur awoke to a terrible day of his own. Within 3 hours MacArthur learned that Japanese carrier…
Washington, D.C. • December 8, 1941 “His genius was problem-solving,” it was said of Andrew Jackson Higgins (1886–1952). “Higgins applied it to everything in life: politics, dealing with [trade] unions, acquiring workers, producing fantastical things or huge amounts of things.” Among the “fantastical things” he produced in quantity were the very amphibious landing boats linked…
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, just 4 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 requested his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Tehran, Iran • November 28, 1943 On November 27, 1943, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt left Cairo for Tehran, Iran’s capital. The Egyptian capital had hosted 2 Western leaders, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The Cairo Conference, codenamed Sextant, was a feeder conference to a weightier one…
Hitokappu Bay, 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…
Cairo, Egypt • November 24, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Egypt, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (leader of a sometimes forgotten ally) continued their series of talks during their Cairo Conference (November 23–27, 1943). Churchill and his party had hoped to establish a…
Washington, D.C. • November 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Washington, D.C., U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added his signature to an agreement by representatives of 44 nations to establish the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. UNRRA (pronounced un-ruh) was the first U.N. organization to be created, established 1½ years before the United Nations…
Washington, D.C. • November 7, 1941 Relations between the U.S. and Japan grew chilly in mid-1941 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoed oil and gasoline exports to Japan in retaliation for that country’s occupation of Indochinese airfields in what is today Vietnam. The year before Roosevelt had banned…