Tokyo, Japan • November 5, 1941 On September 6, 1941, Japanese officials, in a decision endorsed by Shōwa Emperor Hirohito, gave their diplomats until mid-October to reverse the policy of the Western powers—principally the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands—of restricting Japan’s access to vital Southeast Asian resources, among them oil, rubber, tin, bauxite, timber,…
Chungking, China • October 31, 1944 The war against the Japanese in China was desultory at best, and service in that theater was viewed as a graveyard by U.S. military and diplomatic officials. On this date, October 31, 1944, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer arrived to replace dismissed Gen. Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell as commander of the China…
New York City, New York • October 30, 1939 On this date in the Manhattan borough of New York City hundreds of American Nazis paraded in front of the headquarters of the German American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Bund; Bund, pronounced “bunt,” means “alliance” in English). Among German speakers, Bund members, and fascist supporters the organization was…
Belgrade, Yugoslavia • October 22, 1944 By late March 1941 Yugoslavia, a multiethnic nation of 15.5 million people in Central and Southeast Europe, was surrounded on all sides by Axis-aligned nations with the exception of Greece to its south. Romania and Hungary had joined Yugoslavia’s neighbor to the west, Italy, in the Tripartite Pact in…
Washington, D.C. • October 2, 1939 On January 31, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a closed-door meeting with the Senate Military Affairs Committee at the White House. Reportedly FDR made the comment that “the frontier of the United States is the Rhine,” meaning France’s eastern border with Nazi Germany. When the statement was leaked…
Vichy, France • September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to Vichy French authorities for permission to station troops in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and for their warships to take up naval stations off Northern Indochinese ports in…
Little Creek Naval Training Center, Virginia • September 17, 1941 On this date in 1941 the U.S. Navy created a camp for Armed Guard gun training at Little Creek, Virginia, 12 miles/19 km northeast of the huge naval complex at Norfolk. Few people then and even less now have ever heard of this branch of the U.S. Navy….
Washington, D.C. • September 11, 1941 Eight months before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on U.S. assets at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Nazi Germany’s navy began mounting a series of U‑boat attacks on cargo ships crossing the North Atlantic from North America to Great Britain, a nation at war with Germany since September 3, 1939. The…
Washington, D.C. • September 8, 1940 On this date in 1940 the 7-member British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States, or Tizard Mission as it was informally known, assembled in the nation’s capital. Sir Henry Tizard, brilliant visionary scientist and head delegate, had been in Washington, D.C., since August 22, meeting with notables, including…
Tokyo, Japan • September 6, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, Japanese military and political leaders embarked on a collision course with the West. It was decided that Japan would begin war preparations against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands (all countries with territorial claims in Southeast Asia;…