The Hague, Netherlands · May 15, 1940 Following the Dutch surrender on this date in 1940, Adolf Hitler appointed fellow Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart to be Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands. Previously, long-time Nazi Party member Seyss-Inquart had served as Reichsstatthalter (governor) of the new German province of Ostmark, which had once been the independent country…
Manila, Occupied Philippines · May 6, 1942 On December 8, 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, a largely self-governing U.S. possession. (December 8, Manila and Japanese time, was the same date Japanese carrier-based planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a set of interlocked assaults on U.S. military assets in the Pacific region.) The combined U.S.-Filipino…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland · April 19, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. The largest of the ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw…
London, England · March 31, 1939 On this date in 1939, two weeks after German troops entered Prague and all of Czechoslovakia fell under the German boot, the British government, followed a few days later by the French, pledged to guarantee the independence (though interestingly not the territorial integrity) of Poland. A week later the…
Japanese Naval Base, Truk Lagoon, South Pacific · March 20, 1943 Although Japanese submarines attacked far fewer ships than the Allies or Germany did, they were involved in a dozen or so documented atrocities against crew survivors. On this date in 1943 Rear Admiral Takero Kouta, commander of the First Submarine Group at the large…
U-852 in Mid-Atlantic Ocean · March 13, 1944 On this date in 1944 German U‑boat 852, skippered by 28‑year‑old Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, torpedoed the British-chartered Greek freighter SS Peleus as it steamed west across the Atlantic from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. After the Peleus sank, U‑852 patrolled the large debris field for five…
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 head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, advocated executing all members of the Polish Officer Corps…
Hsinking (Changchun), Manchukuo · February 18, 1932 The Meiji Restoration of Imperial rule in 1868 resulted in the downfall of Japan’s powerful military commanders, the shoguns, and the Japanese samurai warrior class. Partly as a concession to the samurai, the Japanese government embarked on an aggressive foreign policy in Manchuria in Northeastern China and on…
Budapest, Hungary · February 14, 1945 On December 29, 1944, Soviet and Romanian troops (Romania was now a Soviet ally) began laying siege to Budapest, the capital of Adolf Hitler’s vassal state of Hungary. Budapest, split in two by the River Danube, was a city of over 800,000 residents and refugees, including well over 100,000…
Singapore Island, British Malaya · February 8, 1942 On this night and the next day in 1942 in British Malaya (today’s Malaysia) Japanese forces surged over and soon pushed the British-led defenders back to the edges of the 220‑sq-mile/566‑sq-kilometer island of Singapore (the “Gibraltar of the East”), nearly 600 miles/966 kilometers from the initial Japanese landing sites….
