Berlin, Germany · September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…
Moscow, Soviet Union · August 20, 1939 The Soviet Union and Japan, two expansionist powers that occupied portions of the Asian mainland north of China, butted heads in the Mongolian borderlands as early as 1929. (They had also fought a war in 1904–1905, the Russo-Japanese war, over influence in China, Mongolia, and Manchuria, the latter…
Moscow, Soviet Union · August 19, 1939 On this date in 1939 Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov presented to Adolf Hitler’s Moscow ambassador a draft of a nonaggression pact between the two powers. The draft contained essentially everything the German serial aggressor could have wished for because it opened the gates for crushing neighboring Poland…
On the Eastern Front · July 27, 1941 On this date in 1941, five weeks after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of Army Group North. Army Group North had begun its first attack on Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg)—the Soviet…
Berlin, Germany · June 22, 1941 The largest military force ever assembled—three million soldiers, 4,300 tanks, nearly 4,400 aircraft, and some 46,000 artillery pieces—assaulted the Soviet Union on this date in 1941. Since the 1920s Adolf Hitler had championed a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with its political, ideological, and economic center in Moscow. Hitler believed that only when…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
Berlin, Germany · May 12, 1941 On this date in 1941, two days after Deputy Reich Fuehrer Rudolf Hess had embarked on his historic “peace mission” to England, Adolf Hitler finally confirmed June 22 as the start date for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Among Hitler’s goals was the eradication of the “Jewish Bolshevik”…
Tokyo, Japan · May 11, 1939 Europe, the United States, and Japan, profiting from the technological, economic, social, and military advantages conferred on their countries by the Industrial Revolution, began placing weaker nations elsewhere in the world under their “protection.” The United States did that in 1898, when the Philippines became an American territory. Japan…
Moscow, Soviet Union · April 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 Soviet Gen. Géorgui Zakharov placed a patrol of six Yak-7s with Soviet pilots under Free French command. The initial six French pilots formed a mixed patrol of six French and six Russian planes. The brainchild of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the…
London, England · April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
