Washington, D.C. • September 11, 1941 Eight months before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on U.S. assets at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Nazi Germany’s navy began mounting a series of U‑boat attacks on cargo ships crossing the North Atlantic from North America to Great Britain, a nation at war with Germany since September 3, 1939. The…
Reykjavik, Iceland • May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the 2 West European Allies, at war with Germany for 3½ months now, were hell-bent on disrupting the…
Washington, D.C. • September 11, 1941 Starting on September 1, 1941, 2 years into the Battle of the Atlantic, U.S. warships began escorting convoys of eastbound merchantmen from the North American coast. Convoys departed from Newfoundland, Canada, and ended in the mid-Atlantic at the Danish dependency of Iceland, the halfway point to ports in the British…
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…
Reykjavik, Iceland · May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the two West European Allies, at war with Germany for three and a half months now, were…