Southwest Pacific Area HQ, Brisbane, Australia • September 13, 1942 On May 14, 1942, after a voyage of 23 days and 9,000 miles, 12,000 men and equipment of the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division arrived in Australia for the purpose of bulking up the understrength defenses of that country. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Allied Supreme Commander of all…
Falaise, Northern France • August 18, 1944 Two and a half months had passed since the initial landings of U.S., British, and Canadian forces in Northern France (Operation Overlord). On the British flank the Canadian First Army, Second Division, II Corps entered Falaise on August 16, 1944 (see map below) and engaged the Germans in bitter street…
Côte d’Azur on the French Mediterranean • August 15, 1944 The Allied assault on German-occupied Southern France originally was to have kicked off simultaneously with the Allies’ June 6, 1944, invasion of Northwestern France (Operation Overlord)—the intent being that the Germans would think twice before sending reinforcements from Southern France to the Normandy beachheads and that, with…
New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands • June 21, 1943 On this date in 1943, the U.S. kicked off Operation Toenails, as the New Georgia campaign was called, with unopposed landings by the elite 4th Marine Raider Battalion followed the next day by the Army’s 43rd Infantry Division. The year before, in October, the Japanese had reconnoitered…
Normandy, Liberated Northwestern France • June 7, 1944 On this date in 1944 soldiers of the U.S. First Army’s 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion succeeded in permanently raising the first of a slew of 35‑ft./11.6‑m‑long hydrogen-filled, low-floating barrage balloons that would bob in the skies over Omaha and Utah invasion beaches. The morning before, hundreds of trained…
Normandy, Liberated France • June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy and chilly late spring day, D-Day, arguably the least ordinary day of the 20th century. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, stalked relentlessly by Anglo-American air forces, had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel. Sadly for him, the Luftwaffe chief had just 327 aircraft to oppose the Allied…
Washington, D.C. • May 14, 1942 Early in 1941 Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts informed Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall that she intended to introduce a bill in the U.S. Congress to establish a volunteer women’s Army corps, separate and distinct from the existing Army Nurse Corps. After long debate—and after…
Attu, Aleutian Islands, Alaska • May 11, 1943 The Japanese assault on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands began with a carrier-based aerial attack on June 3 and 4, 1942, that targeted U.S. Navy and Army facilities at Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island (see map below), the most populous island in the Alaskan archipelago. The carrier strike force was…
Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945 On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/16 kilometers north of Munich, Bavaria’s capital, U.S. soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Rainbow Division,” the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, and the 27th Tank Battalion were overwhelmed by the horror they saw as they closed in on Dachau concentration…
Rhine Meadow Camps, German Rhineland • April 17, 1945 By this date in 1945 and over the next 2 months, American, British, and French armies established 19 Rhine Meadow camps (German, Rheinwiesenlager) principally on the west bank of the Rhine River in the German states of North-Rhine Westphalia and Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate) (see map below). The Rhineland camps were…