Tokyo, Japan • December 9, 1940 On September 27, 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, or Axis Pact as it was also known. The Pact was an outgrowth of the “Rome-Berlin Axis” celebrated by the Italo-German “Pact of Steel,” which Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Benito…
Vichy, France • September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to Vichy French authorities for permission to station troops in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and for their warships to take up naval stations off Northern Indochinese ports in…
Paris, Occupied France • August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris, well over a year after the hardstepping German Wehrmacht (armed forces) and Gestapo (Germany’s sinister secret police) had entered the French capital and settled in, a 22‑year-old Communist member of the French Resistance named Pierre Georges (noms de guerre, Frédo and Colonel…
Dieppe, German-Occupied France • August 19, 1942 Ever since the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had launched its surprise Blitzkrieg on the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) the Allies had been sensitive to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s increasingly desperate appeals to Western leaders to open a “second front now” in Northwestern Europe. British Prime Minister…
Paris, France • July 23, 1945 Following the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany in June 1940, World War I hero Maréchal (Marshal) Philippe Pétain proclaimed a new French government on July 10, 1940. Pétain held the title of “President of the Council” instead of President of France. His government, which accorded him extraordinary powers, was…
Toulon Harbor, French Mediterranean • November 27, 1942 Between November 10 and 12, 1942, Germany and Italy engaged in a joint operation (German, Unternehmen Anton, or Case Anton) to occupy Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy France, the French Riviera, and the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. These 3 areas comprised the so-called “Free Zone,” which was an…
Gibraltar Mediterranean Forward Operating Base • November 8, 1942 Within 4 weeks of the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht (German armed forces) easily and quickly advancing on the Soviet capital, Moscow, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on July 19, 1941, and again in September pressed Great Britain and…
Paris, Occupied France • August 10, 1944 On August 1, 1944, almost two months after the initial D-Day landings in Normandy, France, more than 14,000 personnel and equipment from 41-year-old Gen. Philippe Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armored Division began landing on Utah Beach. Leclerc (1902–1947) juggled three roles: He was a subordinate divisional commander in an…
Gibraltar Mediterranean Forward Operating Base • November 8, 1942 Within four weeks of the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht (German armed forces) easily and quickly advancing on the Soviet capital, Moscow, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on July 19, 1941, and again in September pressed Great Britain…
Vichy, France • September 4, 1942 Because so many young German men were needed on Germany’s Eastern Front to engage the Soviet Army, Adolf Hitler, toward the end of spring 1942, insisted that the French collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain, whose capital was in the central France town of Vichy, assign some 350,000 French workers…