Honolulu, Hawaii · October 11, 1943 On this date in 1943 the USS Wahoo, a Gato-class (early World War II) submarine under Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, was sunk in the La Pérouse (Soya) Strait, the channel that separates the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō and the Japanese-held southern half of Sakhalin Island (today’s Sakhalin Oblast in Russia’s…
Washington, D.C. · October 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Japanese news agency Domei acknowledged that the 8,000‑ton Konron Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the west coast of the Japanese home island of Honshū, with the loss of 544 lives. The troopship was sunk by the USS Wahoo using the new,…
Washington, D.C. · October 2, 1939 On January 31, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a closed-door meeting with the Senate Military Affairs Committee at the White House. Reportedly FDR made the comment that “the frontier of the United States is the Rhine,” meaning France’s eastern border with Nazi Germany. When the statement was leaked…
Washington, D.C. · September 8, 1939 On this date in 1939, eight days after Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Poland and triggered World War II in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency.” The underfunded and undermanned U.S. military forces were strengthened, and the next year Congress provided major military budget increases, which…
London, England · August 4, 1944 The British had begun deploying the first of several bunker-buster bombs (Tallboy and its successor Grand Slam) in 1944 while the Americans had nothing similar to deploy. On this date in 1944 the U.S. Eighth Air Force kicked off Operation Aphrodite, a program developed in total secrecy and designed…
U.S. Seventh Fleet HQ · July 30, 1943 During the Pacific War U.S. submarines fired some 11,000 torpedoes, sinking hundreds of Japanese warships and well over one thousand merchant ships. The number of lives lost in the latter engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions. In mid-March 1942…
Aboard the USS Shangri-La · July 28, 1945 The Imperial Japanese Navy had the second most powerful navy in the Pacific Theater in World War II and the third largest navy in the world after the U.S. and Royal navies. During the first years of the war the Japanese Combined Fleet, the IJN’s main ocean-going component,…
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La · July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits, aptly named Operation Starvation, Navy air groups destroyed over…
Washington, D.C. · July 7, 1941 Long before the U.S. entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began unraveling Congressional legislation that had hindered his aiding Great Britain and other Western democracies in their armed conflict with Nazi tyranny. Four successive Neutrality Acts from the 1930s were undone with “help” from two German U‑boat…
Mariana Islands, Central Pacific · June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 a huge gale hit the two gigantic artificial harbors known as Mulberry harbors that the British had built in England, floated across the English Channel, and deposited on Normandy’s beaches several days after the Allies’ June 6 invasion of German-occupied France. The…
