Paris, Occupied France · August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris a 22‑year-old Communist member of the French Resistance named Pierre Georges (noms de guerre, Frédo and Colonel Fabien) fired two bullets into the back of Alfons Moser, a young German naval officer, at the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station. These were the opening shots…
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 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 American…
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), French Indochina · July 25, 1941 On September 21, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the capital of China, Nanking, shortly after igniting the Second Sino-Japanese War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed the shock of “every civilized man and woman” over “the ruthless bombing” of Chinese civilians. Generally, however, U.S. and European…
Paris, France · July 23, 1945 Following the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany in June 1940, World War I hero 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 officially…
Paris, Occupied France · July 16, 1942 On June 22, 1940, representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, premier of the French Third Republic, signed a ceasefire with Germany, 44 days after the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) had invaded France. Early in October Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government—named after the resort community in which his administration had settled—approved…
Washington, D.C. · December 24, 1941 On this grim date, Christmas Eve 1941, a tiny piece of Vichy France—the Atlantic islets of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, whose granite outcroppings lay just 12 miles off the Newfoundland coast adjacent to Canada—fell to the forces of Free France. It was the first French territory to be liberated in…
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…
Toulon Harbor, French Mediterranean · November 27, 1942 Between November 10 and 12, 1942, Germany and Italy engaged in a joint operation (Unternehmen Anton, or Case Anton) to occupy Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy France, the French Riviera, and the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. These three areas comprised the so-called “Free Zone,” which was an…
Vichy, France · September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to 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. On this…
Paris, Occupied France · August 10, 1944 Beginning on August 2, 1944, almost two months after the initial D-Day landings in Normandy, France, more than 14,000 personnel and equipment from Gen. Philippe Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armored Division landed on Utah Beach. Leclerc juggled three roles: He was a subordinate divisional commander in an American army, he…