London, England • March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, 2 weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed by the French a few days later, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. “If any action clearly threatened…
Paris, Occupied France • March 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of 84‑year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named president of the…
Auburn, Massachusetts • March 16, 1926 On this date in 1926 in Auburn, Massachusetts, Dr. Robert Goddard (1882–1945) conducted his first successful rocket flight. His liquid-propellant rocket rose 41 ft/12.5 m, traveled 184 ft/56 m, and burned no more than 3 seconds, but it proved the concept of rocket flight worked. Goddard, who received limited support for his research and…
Moscow, Soviet Union • March 5, 1940 In a proposal written on this date in 1940 to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet Politburo, Lavrentiy Beria, who was the unsavory head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, advocated executing all members of the Polish Officer…
Berlin, Germany • March 1, 1935 On this date in 1935 Adolf Hitler appointed World War I air ace Hermann Goering, last commander of the famous “Red Baron” Richthofen Fighter Squadron, to the position of Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief. Goering held the post until the final days of the Third Reich. A faithful Nazi from the earliest days…
London, England • November 25, 1944 On this date in 1944 a German ballistic missile slammed into a crowded Woolworths store in London, England, killing 160 civilians and seriously injuring 108 more. The 42‑ft./12.8‑meter-tall, 12‑ton V‑2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Retribution [or Vengeance] Weapon 2”) rocket with its 1‑ton payload of high explosives was truly a weapon of mass destruction….
Dachau, Germany • July 16, 1946 On this date in 1946, at the former Nazi concentration camp in Dachau about 20 miles northwest of the Bavarian capital of Munich, a U.S. military tribunal convicted all 73 men on trial in the Malmedy Massacre case; 43 were sentenced to death by hanging and the rest were given long…
Manila, Occupied Philippines • May 6, 1942 On Monday, December 8, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the Philippines, a largely self-governing U.S. possession, formally known as the Commonwealth of the Philippines. (December 8, Manila and Japanese time, was Sunday, December 7, east of the International Date Line, the day Japanese carrier-based planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a…
Kaohsiung, Japanese-Occupied Taiwan • January 9, 1945 World War II in Asia began with Japan’s conquest of Northeast China in 1931. Rogue elements of the Kuantung Army (Japan’s army in China) created an incident on a Japanese-owned railline near Mukden (now Shenyang) and used it as an excuse for military operations in the rest of Manchuria….
Berlin, Germany • December 1, 1939 On this date, December 1, 1939, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer (senior group leader) Gottlob Berger opened the first Waffen‑SS Recruiting Office within the SS Main Office, which he had headed since 1938. The SS (short for Schutzstaffel, meaning protection squad) was the Nazi Party’s private paramilitary organization, originally a small squad of…