Gibraltar Mediterranean Forward Operating Base • November 8, 1942 Within four 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…
Lisbon, Portugal • July 21, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Lisbon, delegates of Italian King Victor Emmanuel III met with the head of neutral Portugal to explore strategies for extracting Italy from the war. The Crown had begun searching for an exit as early as late 1942. After Allied landings in Axis-occupied North Africa…
Aboard HMS Duke of York • December 12, 1941 On this date in 1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the immediate impact of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval and air bases at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” posture, boarded the British battleship HMS Duke of York,…
Aboard HMS Duke of York · December 12, 1941 On this date in 1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the immediate impact of Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” posture, boarded the battleship HMS Duke of York for an Atlantic…
Toulon Harbor, French Mediterranean · November 27, 1942 Between November 10 and 12, 1942, Germany and Italy engaged in a joint operation (German, Unternehmen Anton, or Case Anton) to occupy Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy France, the French Riviera, and the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. These three areas comprised the so-called “Free Zone,” which was…
Stalingrad, Soviet Union · November 19, 1942 On this date in 1942 the Soviets kicked off Operation Uranus, Phase I of the Red Army’s encirclement of Gen. Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army (the single-largest German troop formation), as well as the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Third and Fourth Romanian armies at Stalingrad (today’s Volgograd)….
Munich, Germany · November 10, 1942 On this date in 1942, just 2 days after Allied landings in Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch), Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent his son-in-law, foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, to Munich in his stead to speak with Adolf Hitler. Mussolini had wanted to meet the Fuehrer in Salzburg, in the…
Tunis, Tunisia · November 9, 1942 On this date in 1942, one day after the largest amphibious invasion force in history to that time landed Allied troops on the Algerian and Moroccan coasts, German troops, tanks, and aircraft started pouring into neighboring Tunisia from bases in Italy. Operation Torch, under the command of Gen. Dwight…
El Alamein, Egypt · November 2, 1942 On this date in 1942 in Northern Egypt, Gen. Erwin Rommel (aka “Desert Fox”), brilliant commander of the German Afrika Korps, signaled to Adolf Hitler that he and his men would have to retreat after the British Eight Army, led by Lt. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, decisively bested them…
Cairo, Egypt · September 13, 1940 On this date in 1940, 250,000 soldiers of the Italian Tenth Army under the command of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani crossed from the Italian colony of Libya into Egypt (see map), where British troops were protecting the Suez Canal, the vital waterway to the Middle Eastern oilfields and beyond that…