Berlin, Germany • January 18, 1942 On this date in 1942 Axis partners Germany, Italy, and Japan renewed their military and economic alliance just one and a half years into their 10‑year convention. The Tripartite Pact had come into being on September 27, 1940, when the foreign ministers of the 3 nations met in Berlin. Originally a…
Berlin, Germany • December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, addressed a toothless Reichstag (German parliament), its members eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after air and naval units of the Imperial Japanese Navy had ambushed the…
Rome, Italy • October 8, 1941 Two months before Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on Japan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used this date in 1941 to blast the Japanese for not carrying their weight in the Tripartite (Axis) Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan had…
German 12th Army HQ, Larissa, Greece • April 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 representatives of the Greek government, leaderless after Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide three days earlier, signed a document of capitulation at the headquarters of the German 12th Army at Larissa in Central Greece. Fourteen Greek divisions laid down their…
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,”…
Berlin, Germany • September 27, 1940 On January 6, 1939, Japan was approached by Germany with a proposal to reshape the Anti-Comintern Pact. The anti-communist pact, which Japan had signed with Nazi Germany in 1936 and Fascist Italy in 1937, largely targeted the Soviet Union, Tokyo’s decades-long adversary on the Asian continent. The January proposal…
Berlin, Germany · December 11, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, addressed a toothless Reichstag (German parliament), its members eager to hear him declare war on America. Hitler did this four days after the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,…
Tokyo, Japan · December 9, 1940 On September 27, 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, or Axis Pact as it was also known. The Pact was an outgrowth of the “Rome-Berlin Axis” celebrated by the Italo-German “Pact of Steel,” which Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Benito…
Chicago, Illinois · December 4, 1941 Early in July 1941, four months after the U.S. Congress had enacted the Lend-Lease Program that began assisting Great Britain and China in their defense against the aggressor states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his Secretaries of War and the Navy…
Bucharest, Romania · November 23, 1940 In September 1940 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being sent to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” Early the next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…