Washington, D.C. • September 8, 1939 On this date in 1939, 8 days after Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Poland and triggered World War II in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency.” The proclamation directed measures “for the purpose of strengthening our [U.S.] national defense within the limits of peacetime authorizations.”…
With Maj. Gen. Mark Clark in Italy • May 25, 1944 In 1943–1944 the centerpiece of German defenses in Italy was the Gustav Line, whose most famous bastion was centered on the historic Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. Thousands of German soldiers and conscripted Italian civilians worked hard to strengthen the line, 65 miles north of the…
Berlin, Germany • December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, addressed a toothless Reichstag (German parliament), its members eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after air and naval units of the Imperial Japanese Navy had ambushed the…
Washington, D.C. • November 7, 1941 On March 11, 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Lend-Lease Act, which was a government-back program under which the still-neutral United States would begin supplying Great Britain and members of the British Commonwealth (Australia and New Zealand, for instance), Free French Forces led by Gen….
Washington, D.C. • December 8, 1941 Although the devastating Japanese surprise attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, came as a shock to most Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had already begun weighing possible responses to an outbreak of war with Japan, Germany, and Italy—countries treaty-bound in a mutual…
Along the Eastern Front · June 28, 1942 On this date in 1942 on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler launched Germany’s second summer campaign against the Soviet Union in 2 years. (The first had been Operation Barbarossa begun the previous June, which had been intended to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1941.)…
Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 German troops marched into a half-empty Paris, forcing the French government to move to Tours, then to Bordeaux on the French Atlantic coast, where for the third time since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 it set up an impromptu national headquarters. In a…
Bari, Italy • December 2, 1943 World War I combatants had used a variety of poison gases on each other ranging from incapacitating and temporarily blinding the enemy to gases that burned the body, destroyed the lungs, and liquefied tissues. Sometimes their use had unintended consequences, as when the gases inflicted casualties on the users…
Washington, D.C. • May 10, 1945 On this date in 1945 President Harry S. Truman signed the Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067. The person behind the directive was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former Treasury Secretary who had long advocated that postwar German occupation include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage…
58th Bombardment Wing HQ, Kharagpur, India • January 15, 1945 The final strategic bombing raid by American B‑29 Superfortress heavy-bombers based in China occurred on this date in 1945. Targets of Operation Matterhorn, as the bombing of Japanese assets by India- and China-based B‑29s was called, were on the Japanese-occupied island of Formosa (today’s Taiwan). Behind Operation…
