Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile/724 kilometer front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources), an area of operations roughly half the size of California. Sabotage of rail networks…
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 2 conspirator…
Rheine Airfield, Lower Saxony, Germany • June 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 the world’s first jet-powered bomber, the Arado Ar 234 Blitz (English, Lightning), made its appearance in the skies over Northwestern Germany. The flight of this all-metal, single-seat, twin-jet prototype came 11 months after the first flight test of a fully configured Messerschmitt Me 262…
Berlin, Germany • May 28, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler informed his senior military commanders of his plans to march into neighboring Czechoslovakia and erase that country from the map. No serious objections were raised by those who heard the German dictator ring the death knell for Czechoslovakia and for the European…
Muerwik, near Flensburg, Northern Germany • May 23, 1945 Twenty-three days after German dictator Adolf Hitler had committed suicide under the rubble of his Reich capital, and sixteen days after military emissaries from Reich President Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s government agreed to the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces, a telephone call reached the admiral’s…
Berlin, Germany • May 22, 1939 On this date in 1939 Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed the “Pact of Steel” (German, Stahlpakt; Italian, Patto d’Acciaio). The pack, known formally as the “Pact of Friendship and Alliance,” tied the 2 dictatorships in a 10‑year military and political alliance and stipulated, among other things, that neither…
Crete, Eastern Mediterranean • May 20, 1941 With the start of marathon German operations against the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a month away, Adolf Hitler needed to ensure that his oil supplies in and around Ploiești, Romania, where he had sent a German “military mission,” would not come under Allied bomber attack from stationary…
Reykjavik, Iceland • May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the 2 West European Allies, at war with Germany for 3½ months now, were hell-bent on disrupting the…
London, England • May 16, 1943 At least since 1937, 2 years before the outbreak of European hostilities, British intelligence had looked into developing alternative ways to destroy German factories in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. One suggestion was to attack dams in the Ruhr region. The idea was to blow up the dams or…
London, England • May 13, 1940 As Adolf Hitler’s armies raced across Europe, seemingly unstoppable, gobbling up country after country for Nazi Germany, and (God forbid) perhaps Britain herself, Winston Churchill succeeded a war-weary Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister on May 10, 1940. Chamberlain had appointed Churchill to be First Lord of the Admiralty, a…
