Berlin, Germany · May 1, 1945 At 4 a.m. on this date in 1945 in Berlin, the new Chief of German Army General Staff Gen. Hans Krebs was shown into the tactical headquarters of Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army, near Tempelhof airport. Krebs was part of the inner sanctum…
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…
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 Nazis. The Wehrmacht’s last gambit in the west, the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge (mid-December 1944 to…
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 the Germany’s Ruhr district, to advance on an west-east axis through the center of Germany to the Upper Elbe River, 50 miles from 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 two…
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 head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, advocated executing all members of the Polish Officer Corps who…
Washington, D.C. · February 2, 1945 The Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) was the supreme military staff for the western Allies during World War II. CCS members were drawn from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and typically met in Washington, D.C. On occasion Soviet military officers attended….
Casablanca, Morocco, North Africa · January 14, 1943 This date in 1943 saw the start of the ten-day Casablanca Conference at a seaside resort in Morocco between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been invited to the summit but reportedly…
When August 1 to October 2, 1944 Where Warsaw, capital of German-occupied Poland Who More than 40,000 Polish irregulars in the pro-Western Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) under Gen. Antoni Chrusciel (1895–1960) versus (initially) 11,000 German troops under the overall command of Lt. Gen. Reiner Stahel (1892–1955). Also, more than 5,000 SS personnel, including Waffen-SS,…
When June 22 to December 5, 1941 Where The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, plus present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Western Russia. By July 1941, after Finland had joined the German onslaught to the north of Leningrad, the Eastern Front would eventually stretch from the Baltic Sea in the north to the…
