Milan, Italy · October 27, 1922 On this date in 1922 in Italy, riots instigated by Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) erupted in several Italian towns. The Fascists called on the government to resign. The next day four columns of Mussolini’s paramilitary Blackshirts (Camicie nere, or squadristi) began a march from the…
Tokyo, Japan · October 13, 1940 On this date in 1940 Japan’s foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who had grown up in Oregon and California (1893–1902), invited the United States and other nonaligned nations to join the Tripartite Pact, which Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan had initialed in Berlin the previous month (September 27). The Pact…
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 Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan had signed…
Washington, D.C. · October 7, 1940 In the 1930s Japan’s statesmen and military leaders in China were acutely aware that their economy and armed forces were dependent on imports from the United States and its colonial friends who had holdings in the Asia Pacific region: the Americans in the Philippines, the British in Malaya (now…
Rome, Italy · October 3, 1935 On this date in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded the Northeast African Kingdom of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) without a declaration of war, and for doing so the League of Nations instructed its member states to impose limited economic sanctions on Italy. (Neither the U.S. nor Germany were members of…
Berlin, Germany · September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The next month German troops entered the country ostensibly to train and rebuild…
Bucharest, Romania · September 5, 1940 In the wake of Romania’s swift territorial concessions of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, the northwestern part of Transylvania to Hungary, and the southern part of Dobruja to Bulgaria (see map below), 47‑year‑old King Carol II abdicated in favor of his 19‑year‑old son, Michael (Mihai), but not…
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 had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence in a secret protocol…
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,”…