Off the Coast of Okinawa, Japan • April 6–7, 1945 For centuries the concept of individual suicide was accepted within Japanese society. Among the warrior, or Samurai, class especially, suicide was seen as the way to, among other things, atone for one’s failure, attenuate shame, and restore honor for oneself or for one’s family or…
Aboard Admiral Spruance’s Flagship USS Indianapolis • April 1, 1945 For weeks the largest Allied fleet since Operation Overlord 10 months earlier—nearly 1,500 U.S. and British vessels—fired 2.3 million shells onto Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago and a little more than 300 miles/483 kilometers from Kyūshū and Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese Home Islands. (Tokyo was 550 miles/855 kilometers away.)…
Washington, D.C. • March 15, 1942 On this date in 1942 the U.S. War Department established the second of 3 tank battalions in what became the Fifth Armored Group, a predominately African American armored formation that served with distinction in World War II. The 3 black tank battalions were the 758th, activated in January 1941; the 761st, activated…
Remagen, Germany • March 7, 1945 By March 1945 the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) was reeling from horrendous personnel and equipment losses incurred during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944, to January 25, 1945) in the Ardennes Forest, which lay mostly in Belgium and Luxembourg. The military momentum now clearly favored the Western Allies as…
Dachau, Germany • July 16, 1946 On this date in 1946, at the former Nazi concentration camp in Dachau about 20 miles northwest of the Bavarian capital of Munich, a U.S. military tribunal convicted all 73 men on trial in the Malmedy Massacre case; 43 were sentenced to death by hanging and the rest were given long…
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France • June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the stolid citizens of Sainte-Mère-Église, located near the center of the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, retired to their beds on the eve of the largest air- and seaborne invasion in history—Operation Overlord. As early as 1942, U.S. military planners had been eyeing…
Washington, D.C. • April 9, 1983 On this date in 1983, National POW/MIA Recognition Day, 31 of the 67 Army and Navy nurses who had been captured by the Japanese in 1942 and interned at the Santo Tomas and Los Baños internment camps in the Philippines were honored at a White House ceremony by President Ronald…
Adlerhorst Forward HQ, Central Hessen, Germany • December 16, 1944 “It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain,” Adolf Hitler told his generals on December 12, 1944, at his rural Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) headquarters near Bad Nauheim, Germany, the camouflaged western command outpost Architect of the Reich Albert Speer (pronounced “spare”)…
Port Moresby, New Guinea • November 2, 1942 After failing in the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942) to take the Australian administrative capital of Port Moresby on the island of New Guinea (see map), 4,400 Japanese troops landed on the island’s northeastern shore on the night of July 21/22, 1942, and established beachheads at…
Cape Torokina, Bougainville, Northern Solomon Islands • November 1, 1943 Guadalcanal, the largest island in the southern Solomon Islands, was the site where the string of Japanese conquests, starting in Janunary 1942, finally ran its course. The bloody fight for Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942 to February 9, 1943) was a recognized turning point in the Pacific War. That…