Seelow Heights, Germany • April 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Allies called off their strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany because most targets were already in Allied hands or, like the Reich capital, Berlin, would be soon. So on the day the aerial campaign stopped the Red Army unleashed a battle to…
Berlin, Germany • March 29, 1945 By 1945 everything was falling apart for the Nazi regime. Most of the conquered areas in the Soviet Union and Western Europe had been recaptured from the Germans. The last gambit by the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • March 28, 1945 On this date in 1945 Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower telegrammed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he proposed, after encircling Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles/80 kilometers west of Berlin, there to…
Vienna, Austria • March 25, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Vienna, the government of Yugoslav regent Prince Paul signed a protocol of adherence to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Pact, thereby setting the stage for a complex guerrilla war against Germans, Italians, and their Yugoslav allies, and within the Yugoslav resistance forces themselves. Not 2 days…
Moscow, Soviet Union • March 5, 1940 In a proposal written on this date in 1940 to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet Politburo, Lavrentiy Beria, who was the unsavory head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, advocated executing all members of the Polish Officer…
Moscow, Soviet Union • November 28, 1942 On this date in 1942, while the Battle of Stalingrad was still being fought, 12 Free French fighter pilots and their ground crews, flying from newly liberated Syria in the Eastern Mediterranean, landed at their Ivanovo training center, 125 miles/201 km northeast of the Soviet capital, Moscow. Earlier in the year,…
Potsdam, Germany • July 21, 1945 The “Big Three” Allies opened their victors’ conference on July 17, 1945, in an undamaged suburb 15 miles/24 kilometers from Berlin, the German capital. Two dramatic unconditional surrenders by the heads of Germany’s armed forces a week after the April 30 suicide of German dictator Adolf Hitler had encouraged the government heads of the…
Bucharest, Romania • June 27, 1940 On this date in 1940 Red Army troops invaded Romania in the wake of Romanian King Carol II’s refusal to cede the eastern territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (see map). These territories, once part of Czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary before 1918, had been assigned to…
Southwest of Stalingrad, Soviet Union • December 23, 1941 On this date in 1942 the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) ended Operation Winter Storm (German, Unternehmen Wintergewitter), the 11‑day attempt by German Army Group Don, a new formation commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to break the Soviet envelopment of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ German Sixth…
Gibraltar Mediterranean Forward Operating Base • November 8, 1942 Within 4 weeks of the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht (German armed forces) easily and quickly advancing on the Soviet capital, Moscow, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on July 19, 1941, and again in September pressed Great Britain and…