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…
Leipheim Air Base, Bavaria, Germany · July 18, 1942 In mid-April 1941 test flights began of what would become the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe, or “Swallow.” The test was really of the airframe, because the BMW turbojets—primitive and temperamental—were nowhere close to being ready for fitting. On this date, July 18,…
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…
London, England · July 8, 1941 On this date in 1941, five months before the United States was drawn into World War II, the Boeing B‑17 Flying Fortress was flown in combat for the first time, this by the Royal Air Force in an attack on the North German port of Wilhelmshaven. The first production model,…
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B‑29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southernmost Japanese Home Island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland…
Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio · April 22, 1945 During the war Allied countries were keen to gain access to the products of German research and development. A British commando raid on a German radar installation on February 27–28, 1942, in occupied France convinced British scientists who analyzed the radar array that it was impervious to jamming…
Tinian, Mariana Islands · March 27, 1945 An island nation, Japan was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food and strategic materials. On this date in 1945 the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy, hoping to put the final nail in the enemy’s coffin, kicked off Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japanese…
Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois • March 19, 1941 Pressed on one side by Black news media and civil rights groups demanding that pilot training be opened up to African Americans and on the other by an upcoming re-election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 authorized the creation of a segregated flight school and an all-Black…
Tokyo, Japan · March 9, 1945 Apart from Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 raid on the Japanese capital, Tokyo, early air raids on Japan focused on military and industrial targets with disappointing results. So U.S. Army Air Forces Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, a veteran of the horrific air campaign over Nazi Germany, filled each…
Berlin, Germany · March 3, 1945 Round-the-clock bombing operations against Germany began on March 3, 1944, with a U.S. 800‑plane daylight raid that dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin. On this date in 1945 American bombers mounted a daylight raid on Berlin that left 3,000 people dead and 100,000 homeless. Luftwaffe bombers retaliated, attacking Britain…